The AI visibility tool market has a pricing floor of $24/month and a ceiling of $295/month. There are at least 15 paid products tracking how brands appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Most of them do something useful. None of them do what an open-source site audit does, and none of them have published a calibration study.
Here is what each paid tool costs, what it does well, and where open source covers the same ground for free.
The paid landscape
I checked the pricing pages of the main tools in October 2026. These are the entry prices for plans that include AI answer tracking:
| Tool | Entry price | What it tracks | Engines at entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prefer | $24/mo, 30 prompts | Citations, share of voice, sources | 5 |
| Otterly | $29/mo, 15 prompts | Brand mentions, citations, GEO audit | 4 |
| LLM Pulse | EUR 49/mo, 50 prompts | Citations per URL per prompt per model | 5 |
| Peec AI | $95/mo, 50 prompts | Mentions, sources, gap reports | 3 |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99/mo per domain, 25 prompts | Mentions, sources, competitor analysis | 4 |
| Scrunch | $250/mo, 125 prompts | Citations, sources, sentiment, site audit | 4 |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo | Citations, sources, brand integrity | 9+ |
All of these track citations or mentions over time. That is their core value: they run your prompts across AI engines on a schedule, store the results, and show you trends. None of them audit your site for AI crawlability. Scrunch includes a site audit, but it is a lighter check than a dedicated audit tool.
What open source does for free
GEO Optimizer (MIT licensed, 1,137 stars) does a deterministic site audit. It checks:
- 27 AI crawlers in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, and 23 more)
- llms.txt presence, validity, and content quality
- 7 schema types (JSON-LD: Organization, WebSite, Article, FAQ, Product, HowTo, Review)
- Content structure: headings, answer blocks, quotable passages, statistics
- Metadata: title, description, canonical, Open Graph, dates, byline
- Brand entity clarity and Knowledge Graph signals
- Google AI readiness: 8 signals (index, canonical, dates, byline, links, viewport, sitemap, snippets)
- Negative signals: JS-only content, prompt injection surfaces, CDN/WAF blocking
The audit produces a 0-to-100 score across 9 categories, a list of fixes ranked by priority, and a JSON output for programmatic use. It runs as a CLI, a Python library, an MCP server, a GitHub Action, or a free web audit on geoready.dev with no signup.
This is the foundation layer. It tells you whether AI crawlers can reach and understand your page. The paid tools tell you whether you appear in AI answers. These are different questions.
The honest gap
Open source does not do citation tracking. If you want to know whether ChatGPT cited your domain this week, or how your share of voice changed since last month, the open-source tool does not do that. The paid tools do.
This is by design. Citation tracking requires running prompts through AI APIs on a schedule, storing the results, and computing share of voice against competitors. That costs API fees and infrastructure. An open-source CLI that you run locally cannot do that without you supplying API keys and building a scheduling layer.
The monitoring layer on geoready.dev fills this gap. It runs audits on a schedule, tracks score history, and alerts when signals change. But it does not yet do citation tracking across ChatGPT and Perplexity. That is on the roadmap.
What you actually need
Most sites need two things, in this order:
Audit first. Before you track whether AI engines cite you, check whether they can read you. If GPTBot is blocked in your robots.txt, or your content is rendered client-side and invisible to crawlers, no amount of citation tracking will help. The audit finds these problems. The paid tracking tools do not.
Track second. Once the foundation is in place, track whether you appear in AI answers. This is where the paid tools add value. If you can afford $29/month, Otterly is a reasonable entry point. If you want enterprise depth, Profound or AthenaHQ. If you already have Semrush, their AI Visibility add-on is the path of least resistance.
If you cannot afford either, run manual prompt tests. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google the same question about your category and see if you appear. It does not scale, but it is free and it works for a small site.
The calibration question
None of the 15 paid tools has published a calibration study. None of them has tested whether their scores, visibility metrics, or share-of-voice numbers predict anything real. They sell numbers. They do not show whether the numbers are valid.
I published a calibration study for GEO Optimizer. The result was null: the GEO score does not predict whether Perplexity cites a page (odds ratio 0.9625, p = 0.7172). That is an uncomfortable result, but it is an honest one. If you are paying $95/month for a visibility score, you should ask the vendor to do the same test. If they will not or cannot, you are paying for a number, not a metric.
The comparison
| Capability | Open source (GEO Optimizer) | Paid tools ($24-$295/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Site audit (crawlability) | Yes, 47 checks, 27 crawlers | Limited (Scrunch only) |
| Scoring (0-100) | Yes, 9 categories, rubric v2 | Varies by tool |
| Citation tracking | No | Yes, core feature |
| Share of voice | No | Yes, most tools |
| Competitor benchmarking | No | Yes, most tools |
| Historical trends | On geoready.dev (SaaS) | Yes, core feature |
| Fix recommendations | Yes, ranked by priority | Varies |
| MCP server | Yes (12 tools) | No |
| GitHub Action | Yes | No |
| Calibration study | Yes (null result) | None published |
| Cost | Free | $24-$295/mo |
If you want to start with the free audit, it is on geoready.dev. No signup, no account. Paste a URL, get a score and a fix list. The CLI is on GitHub, MIT licensed, 2,000+ tests.
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