GEO pricing pages advertise a number. Almost none of them advertise the number you will pay.
The gap is structural, not deceptive. These platforms meter four or five things at once — prompts, engines, seats, credits, responses — and the headline tier fixes only one. Three run a second price list for agencies — one of them on a tab no scraper ever sees. One publishes no prices at all.
Everything below was read at source on 1–2 September 2026 except where the tag says otherwise, and marked: [P] vendor page, [P-JS] the vendor’s shipped price-table JavaScript, [P-doc] vendor docs, [P-PR] press release, [RS] reputable secondary, [ARCH] Internet Archive snapshot of the vendor’s own page, [NP] not published, [MINE] my arithmetic rather than a vendor statement.
That last tag carries a rule. Profound, Athena and Otterly publish annual prices as per-month figures and publish no yearly total anywhere. Any annual total attributed to them is multiplication, not a quote.
The headline prices
Otterly.AI — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: `$29/month` Lite · Billing basis: Monthly. Annual tab shows `$25/month`, with no “billed annually” string on the page · Provenance: [P]
Peec AI — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: `€85` (Europe) or `$95` (elsewhere), Starter · Billing basis: Month-to-month. Annual `€70` / `$80` · Provenance: [P] + [P-JS]
Profound — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: `$99/month` Starter · Billing basis: Month-to-month. “Billed yearly” is a per-card toggle shipping OFF; on, it shows `$82.50/month` · Provenance: [P]
Semrush — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: AI Visibility Toolkit Base `$99/mo per domain`; Semrush One Starter `$199` · Billing basis: Base identical monthly and annual. One is $199 monthly, $165.17 annual-equivalent · Provenance: [P] + [P-JS]
Ahrefs Brand Radar — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: AI Visibility Index `$199/mo` select platforms, `$699/mo` all platforms · Billing basis: Monthly, priced on top of an Ahrefs plan · Provenance: [P]
Scrunch AI (a Sitecore company) — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: Starter `$250 per month (billed annually) or $300 month-to-month` · Billing basis: Both terms published side by side · Provenance: [P]
Athena — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: Essential `Free`, `$25 free credit`; Starter `$295/month` · Billing basis: Monthly default. `$245/month, billed annually` exists only in the JS bundle · Provenance: [P] + [P-JS]
Evertune — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: Pro `$800 / month` · Billing basis: No toggle, no billing-term qualifier, no discount, no checkout — CTA is “Request a demo” · Provenance: [P]
Brandlight — Entry price, as the vendor writes it: Not published · Billing basis: `brandlight.ai/pricing` returns HTTP 404; the homepage carries no figures · Provenance: [P]
The toggle decides which number you see
Profound’s `$99/month` is the month-to-month price. The yearly switch sits beside it unchecked; flipping it shows `$82.50/month`. Growth is the same shape — `$399/month` or `$332.50` yearly, for three engines, 100 prompts, three seats.
Ahrefs matches it: “Pay annually, save up to 17%” is unchecked on load, so `$129`/`$249`/`$449` are monthly, becoming `$108`/`$208`/`$374` when ticked. Enterprise `$1,499/mo` is the exception — “Annual commitment required”, not a monthly option. Peec is the inverse, loading with the annual toggle already on.
Otterly’s annual tab shows `$25`/`$160`/`$422` under a “15% off” badge. The real reductions are 13.8%, 15.3% and 13.7%; 15% off $489 would be $415.65 against $422 shown. The 23 June 2026 snapshot carried those same prices with no badge at all [ARCH].
Where the headline price stops
Engines are priced separately
Profound’s `$99` Starter tracks ChatGPT only. Three engines start at `$399` — a 4× step, not an increment. Nine is Enterprise [NP].
Otterly’s Lite covers four engines. Google AI Mode and Gemini are `$9`/`$59`/`$149` each across Lite, Standard and Premium; Claude is `$29`/`$109`/`$439` — 3.22×, 1.85× and 2.95× the Google engines respectively, so there is no single multiple. Otterly’s annual add-on figures are labelled only “(Annually)”, with no per-month or per-year qualifier anywhere, so this article does not convert them. Above 1,000 prompts, engine pricing is unpublished [NP].
Peec includes exactly three models on every self-serve tier; a fourth is `$35`/`$85`/`$165` monthly. Enterprise reaches 11, five tagged “API” on Peec’s own table. Semrush sells five engines self-serve but its Live Prompt Tracking supports three. Athena covers five free, ten on Starter.
Seats are metered, and one vendor meters them twice
Semrush One includes exactly one user per tier. Extra seats are `$45`/`$80`/`$100`, described in the tooltip as “Cost per extra team member for SEO Classic Toolkit access” — with the note that “AI Visibility needs to be purchased separately for each user.” That second charge has no published number [NP], which makes Semrush the one tool here whose three-seat total cannot be worked out from public information.
Ahrefs adds `+$40`/`$60`/`$80` per seat. Scrunch lists 3 user licences at Starter, 5 at Growth. Peec, Otterly and Athena advertise unlimited members on every tier.
Prompts are metered, and prompt lists grow
Otterly sells 100 extra prompts for `$99/mo` — three and a half times its `$29` Lite headline — unavailable on Lite, and capped at +300 on Standard before a forced move to Premium [P-doc].
Ahrefs is the most misquoted, because its layout invites it. The `$199` Index card carries no feature list; the “83 prompts/day, 2,500 checks/month, $0.020 overage” bundle belongs to the separate `$50/mo` Custom Prompts Basic package. Every paid Ahrefs plan bundles an allowance too — Lite 150 checks and 5 tracked prompts, Standard 300/10, Advanced 600/20, Enterprise “From 2,500”/”From 83” — with the `$50`/`$100`/`$250` packages adding checks on top.
Semrush buys prompts by tier: 25 daily on the standalone Toolkit, then 50, 100 and 200 across Semrush One. One caution on its comparison page — the `$139.95/month` card is the SEO Classic Toolkit Pro plan and includes no AI visibility, its AI bullets rendering with cross icons.
Currency is a function of where you load the page
Peec switches currency client-side against a list of 32 European countries. There is no GBP, so UK and Swiss buyers are quoted euros; everyone else — Canada, Australia, India, all of Latin America — gets USD, the more expensive currency at every tier.
Otterly does something different: an inline script calls a geolocation API and, for 25 European countries, rewrites every price symbol from `$` to `€` while leaving the numerals unchanged — against the page’s own note that “The displayed prices are US Dollar (excluding tax)”.
No GEO price is meaningful without the geography it was captured from. Everything here is a US view.
Credits are a meter, not a price
Athena’s credits are not uniform. Six engines cost 1 credit per response; five — Grok, Claude, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral — cost 5. The vendor states this two ways on two live pages: the `/plans` table reads flatly “1 credit = 1 AI response”, the credit calculator says the heavier five cost five.
The stronger finding is on that calculator. In its untouched default state — 50 prompts, 1 location, 7 engines, 3 days a week, fan-out off — it returns “Credits per month 7,145” against the 3,600 Starter includes, and recommends “~3,545 extra credits per month as a paid add-on billed on top of Starter”. The price of those credits is not published anywhere on the site [NP].
Profound meters agent credits too — 100/month on Starter, 400 on Growth — with a configurable choice between overage billing and a usage pause [P]. That rate is also unpublished [NP].
Profound runs a second price list for agencies
On the same `/pricing` URL, a client-side tab — absent from the server HTML, so scrapers never see it — switches to an agency list. Agency Growth is “$99/month + add-ons” and includes zero client workspaces: what it includes is 10 pitch workspaces a month at 25 prompts each, lasting “7 days with option to extend”. The first real client requires “+1 Client Workspaces for $399/month”.
An agency’s entry price for one client is therefore $498/month — [MINE], addition of two strings Profound publishes. The agencies tab has no billing toggle, so its term is unstated [NP]. Scrunch publishes agency packages on a separate page and Peec runs four agency tiers metered in credits, but I could not recover a price for any Peec agency tier.
Per-prompt cost is not a valid comparison
Below is price divided by prompts on one basis — month-to-month, USD — because mixing billing terms across rows produces a ranking that means nothing.
Scrunch Starter — Month-to-month: $300 · Prompts included: 350 custom · Per prompt [MINE]: $0.86 · Engines covered: 6
Otterly Premium — Month-to-month: $489 · Prompts included: 400 · Per prompt [MINE]: $1.22 · Engines covered: 4
Peec Advanced — Month-to-month: $495 · Prompts included: 350 · Per prompt [MINE]: $1.41 · Engines covered: 3
Otterly Standard — Month-to-month: $189 · Prompts included: 100 · Per prompt [MINE]: $1.89 · Engines covered: 4
Peec Starter — Month-to-month: $95 · Prompts included: 50 · Per prompt [MINE]: $1.90 · Engines covered: 3
Otterly Lite — Month-to-month: $29 · Prompts included: 15 · Per prompt [MINE]: $1.93 · Engines covered: 4
Profound Starter — Month-to-month: $99 · Prompts included: 50 · Per prompt [MINE]: $1.98 · Engines covered: 1
Semrush One Advanced — Month-to-month: $549 · Prompts included: 200 daily · Per prompt [MINE]: $2.75 · Engines covered: 5 (3 live-tracked)
Semrush AI Toolkit Base — Month-to-month: $99 · Prompts included: 25 daily · Per prompt [MINE]: $3.96 · Engines covered: 5 (3 live-tracked)
Semrush One Starter — Month-to-month: $199 · Prompts included: 50 daily · Per prompt [MINE]: $3.98 · Engines covered: 5 (3 live-tracked)
Profound Growth — Month-to-month: $399 · Prompts included: 100 · Per prompt [MINE]: $3.99 · Engines covered: 3
Athena and Evertune are expressible only under assumptions their vendors do not supply — $295 ÷ 3,600 is $0.082 per credit, $800 ÷ 100,000 is $0.008 per “prompt tracked” — but Athena’s credits carry a 5× engine multiplier, and Evertune never says whether 100,000 means distinct questions or total sampled responses. Ahrefs cannot be placed at all: it meters checks (one prompt × one platform × one location). Scrunch’s tier contents come from a summarised read and are the softest figures here.
Including Scrunch Growth at $500 for 700 prompts, the spread runs from $0.71 to $3.99 — and it is not a real spread, because the denominators are not the same object. Profound’s 50 Starter prompts run on one engine; Peec’s 50 run on three. Semrush’s are “daily” prompts against a partly clickstream-derived corpus. Scrunch meters custom prompts and industry prompts and personas and page audits, which one column cannot represent. Per-prompt price works inside one vendor’s ladder and nowhere else. What the unit buys is a question about what each tool measures.
What nobody publishes
Brandlight publishes no pricing at all: `/pricing` returns 404 and the homepage carries no figures. The circulating “~$199/mo” traces to aggregators and to `sat.brandlight.ai`, a vendor-owned but programmatically generated subdomain, not product documentation. Its homepage names six engines and states no total, so the repeated “11 AI systems” has no vendor source either.
Every Enterprise tier here is custom-quoted except one: Otterly reads “Custom — Starting from $1,000/month”. That floor appears only on the Monthly toggle, occurs once in the page source, and did not exist in the 23 June 2026 snapshot [ARCH].
Also unpublished [NP]: Profound’s add-on credit, extra-prompt, extra-engine, extra-seat and region prices; Semrush’s Enterprise AIO price and its per-seat AI-visibility surcharge; Athena’s add-on credit and API rates; Peec’s credit top-ups and entire agency list; Otterly’s engine pricing above 1,000 prompts; Evertune’s overage behaviour at any level.
Prices moved recently, in both directions
Athena roughly tripled. Snapshots from 9 March, 11 April, 17 May and 8 June 2026 all show a paid “Self-Serve” tier at `$95/month` with `$295` struck through, badged “First month 67% off”. By 29 July the current tiers exist and Starter is `$295`. The included credit is unchanged at $300/month, so effective entry went from $95 to $295 for the same allowance [ARCH] — a 3.1× rise [MINE]. Anything still quoting $95 is quoting a lapsed first-month promotion.
Evertune cut its headline 73% and got more expensive. Its 8 March 2026 page had no tiers, just “Pricing… starts at $3,000 per month”; November 2025 advertised “1M+ custom prompts per brand monthly”. Today: `$800 / month` with “100,000 prompts tracked across 11 AI models” [ARCH]. Price fell 73%; volume fell 90%.
Peec tightened its limits, from €89/€199/€499 with “Unlimited countries” on 10 January 2026 to per-project country caps of 1, 3 and 3 by 25 March [ARCH].
Semrush’s annual figures carry their own risk: `$165.17`/`$248.17`/`$455.67` are promotional, flagged as such in the page’s own props [P-JS]. The monthly `$199`/`$299`/`$549` are the durable ones.
Three worked budgets
Arithmetic on the prices above. Illustrative [MINE], not quotes.
Solo founder. Athena Essential is genuinely free — “$25 free credit”, tooltip “Includes 300 credits” — but that line carries no “/month” the way Starter’s does and the comparison table’s “Credits /month” row omits the free tier, so whether it recurs is not stated. Five engines, all 1-credit ones. Add Profound’s free AEO Report and the logged-out checkers Semrush and Ahrefs publish: $0, and more of that layer in what you can try without a sales call.
SMB, 100 prompts, three marketers. Otterly Standard $189 plus AI Mode ($59), Gemini ($59) and Claude ($109) is $416/month for seven engines, unlimited seats. Peec Pro at $245 covers 150 prompts on three models, fourth at $85. Semrush One Starter at $199 looks competitive until the third seat: $45 each and AI visibility bought separately per user at an unpublished rate, so that configuration cannot be priced publicly at all.
Enterprise, or one agency client. Every enterprise option is custom-quoted, and Otterly’s toggle-dependent “$1,000/month” is the only public anchor. For agencies, Profound’s first client workspace is $99 + $399 = $498/month.
Who owns whom
Semrush is an Adobe property. Adobe announced the acquisition on 19 November 2025 at $12.00 per share, roughly $1.9bn all cash, and completed it on 28 April 2026 [P-PR]. Adobe Brand Visibility launched 17 June 2026, merging Adobe LLM Optimizer with Semrush’s AI Optimization.
Scrunch is a Sitecore company, announced 3 June 2026. The acquisition is company-confirmed; the price is not. Sitecore’s release discloses no financial terms, and Bloomberg’s “about $225 million” came from “people familiar with the matter”, with both companies declining to comment on the valuation [RS].
Of the rest: Profound raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation on 24 February 2026 led by Lightspeed, and puts its total at “more than $155 million” [P-PR]. Peec has raised $29M — its own `/pricing` still says “€7m raised” while `/pricing-agencies` says “$29m”. Brandlight has roughly $36M including a $30M Series A led by Pelion, on Calcalist’s reporting, with no vendor release [RS]. Evertune states “$20M in funding” in three places while its disclosed rounds sum to $19M; nobody explains the gap, and this article does not pick one. Athena “launched last month with $2.2 million in funding” per Search Engine Journal [RS]. Ahrefs is bootstrapped; Otterly is an Austrian GmbH publishing no funding information at all.
When a standalone tool becomes a module in a suite, its price stops being set by the GEO market. If you are signing an annual contract with a sales-gated vendor, ask in writing what happens to your rate on renewal after an acquisition.
How this was verified
[P] figures were read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 1–2 September 2026. [P-JS] figures came from the vendor’s shipped price-table JavaScript — how Semrush’s monthly prices, Peec’s component props and Athena’s annual string were confirmed. [ARCH] figures come from Internet Archive snapshots dated in the text.
What changed in this pass. The previous version said Profound’s $99 Starter was billed yearly and totalled $1,188 up front. Both were wrong: $99 is the default-displayed month-to-month price, and Profound publishes no annual total for either term. Every annual total is gone. That version also claimed the market had converged on $1.20–$2.00 per tracked prompt. It has not — on one billing basis the spread is roughly $0.71–$3.99, and the more useful conclusion is that the unit does not survive comparison at all.
Two prices were upgraded from unconfirmed to primary. Peec’s €85/€205/€425 were verified two ways — live render in both toggle states, and the vendor’s own component props — and are month-to-month EUR prices for European visitors; sources labelling them “billed yearly” are describing the €70/€180/€360 column. Semrush’s monthly $199/$299/$549 are static literals in its own price module, also present in the server HTML’s crossed-price screen-reader text. The Ahrefs entry is corrected: the “83 prompts/day, 2,500 checks, $0.020 overage” bundle belongs to the $50 Custom Prompts package, not the $199 Index, and on the rendered page that list sits entirely inside the adjacent column.
Brandlight’s “~$199/mo” and “11 AI systems” are removed, as is the previously cited Athena Enterprise figure — third-party numbers filling vendor gaps. Scrunch’s entry is rebuilt: its pricing page now reads Starter/Growth/Enterprise with both billing terms while its own FAQ still reads “Core ($250 per month) and Enterprise (custom pricing)”, so the FAQ is stale, and the tier contents used here came from a summarised read. Two vendor self-contradictions are reported rather than resolved: Athena’s “1 credit = 1 AI response” against its own calculator’s 5-credit engines, and Evertune’s $20M against $19M of disclosed rounds.
Three of the nine repriced within six months. Re-read the page before you sign, and if you are buying on a visibility number, read the accuracy gap and how to test a tool first.
Sources: Profound pricing · Profound Series C · Semrush AI search pricing · Semrush AI pricing · Adobe completes Semrush acquisition · Ahrefs pricing · Ahrefs Custom Prompts · Ahrefs AI Visibility Index · Peec pricing · Otterly pricing · Athena plans · Athena credit calculator · Evertune pricing · Evertune company overview · Scrunch pricing · Sitecore acquires Scrunch · Bloomberg on the Scrunch price · Brandlight · Calcalist on Brandlight’s Series A