Best AI SEO tools in 2026, priced by the job you need doing

The five jobs people mean by “AI SEO”

Work out which of these you are buying before comparing anything, because no product on this page does all five well and two of them do only one.

1. Research data. Keywords, backlinks, rankings, competitors. Owned indexes: Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz.
2. Technical auditing. Crawling a site and finding what breaks - increasingly including what an AI crawler can read.
3. Content optimisation. Scoring a draft against what already ranks, and against what gets cited.
4. AI-answer visibility. Whether assistants mention or cite you, tracked over time.
5. Production and publishing automation. Doing the work that follows, at volume.

The two halves of this category price completely differently. The platforms sell seats. The AI-visibility tools mostly sell prompts and do not count people at all. That single difference decides more purchases than any feature comparison, and it is why the cost table above and the prompt table below disagree about which tool is cheapest.

The cheapest published route to tracking your own prompts

This is the table the rubric is built on. For each product it shows the cheapest tier where the vendor publishes both a price and a tracked-prompt count, read on 18 August 2026.

Tool	Cheapest tier that publishes both	Prompts	Platforms
Otterly.ai	Lite, $29	15	4
Frase	Starter, $49	50	2
Peec AI	Starter, $80 billed yearly	50	3 of 6
Moz Pro	Standard, $99	50, weekly	2
Surfer	Standard, $99 billed yearly	25, weekly	1
Profound	Starter, $99 billed yearly	50	1
Clearscope	Essentials, $129	50	2
Ahrefs	Lite plus Custom prompts Basic, $179	80 daily	1
Semrush	Starter, $199	50 daily	4
Scrunch	Core, $250	125	4
AirOps	Solo, no price published	100	1

What you can do with the data varies as sharply as the price. At those tiers, Otterly.ai, Peec AI and Clearscope include unlimited users; Surfer includes three seats and Scrunch five; Frase, Moz Pro, Profound, Ahrefs, Semrush and AirOps include one. Frase is the only one including an API at its entry tier and Semrush the only one including MCP access. On exports there is a distinction worth keeping: Profound’s own comparison table states “None” for Starter, while Surfer, Scrunch and Peec AI simply do not say either way at those tiers - so we scored them as absent and are telling you which of those two things we found.

Three things fall out of it. Frase at $49 a month is the cheapest 50 prompts anywhere, and it arrives with a content toolset attached. Profound at $99 billed yearly buys one engine, one seat and no exports, which is the weakest tier here relative to price. And Ahrefs, whose AI coverage is the broadest in the category at seven platforms, is the most expensive route to tracking one.

What real coverage costs, at around 100 prompts

Fifteen or fifty prompts answers “does anyone get cited”. A hundred starts to answer “are we winning this question and losing that one”. Here is what that costs, same reading date:

Tool	Tier	Monthly cost as published	Prompts	Platforms
Frase	Professional	$129, or $103 billed yearly	200	3
Surfer	AI Search Analytics	$158, billed yearly	100 daily	5
Moz Pro	Medium	$179, or $143 billed yearly	100, weekly refresh	3
Otterly.ai	Standard	$189, or $160 billed yearly	100	4
Peec AI	Pro	$205, billed yearly	150	3 of 6
Ahrefs	Lite plus Custom prompts Growth	$229	~100 daily on two platforms	7 available
Scrunch	Core	$250	125	4
Semrush	Pro+	$299, or $248.17 billed yearly	100 daily	4
Clearscope	Business	$399	300	2
Profound	Growth	$399, billed yearly	100	3

The spread is more than three to one for the same nominal job, and the order changes from the previous table: Surfer’s standalone tracker is competitive here in a way its bundled tiers are not, and Clearscope’s jump from $129 to $399 a month buys 300 prompts on two engines when $205 at Peec AI buys 150 on three.

Credits and caps are the real price list

The monthly figure is the smallest part of what you are buying on a platform. Read from the Ahrefs plan comparison on 18 August 2026:

What is metered	Lite $129	Standard $249	Advanced $449
Projects	5	20	50
Historical data	6 months	2 years	5 years
Tracked keywords	750	2,000	5,000
Tracked AI prompts	5	10	20
Crawl credits	100,000	500,000	1,500,000
Report credits	1,000 per user	Unlimited	Unlimited

Three of those rows decide more upgrades than any feature does:

• Report credits on Lite. One thousand per user sounds generous until a competitive analysis spends a hundred in an afternoon. This single line is why Lite users upgrade, and it is the reason to budget for your heaviest research month rather than your average one.
• Historical data. Six months on Lite means you cannot see last year’s seasonal peak. If your business has a season, you are buying Standard whether or not you wanted to.
• Tracked AI prompts. Five, ten and twenty are demonstration allowances. Prompt tracking on Ahrefs is a separate purchase, and pricing the plan without pricing the add-on will be wrong by $50 to $199 a month.

An agency running twelve client sites is not choosing between $129 and $249 - it is choosing between Standard and Advanced, and should price the decision that way from the start.

The seat crossover, and which side of it you are on

At one seat Ahrefs is $10 a month cheaper than Semrush. At five seats it is $170 a month more expensive. The cost table above shows the crossover; it lands between the third and fourth user, because Ahrefs’ fourth seat is not a seat at all - it forces the move from Lite to Standard.

Two things changed since the last version of this guide. Moz Pro is now the cheapest platform at five seats, at $295 a month against $319 for Semrush and $489 for Ahrefs. And the AI-visibility tools have made the question partly obsolete: Clearscope, Peec AI and Otterly.ai charge the same for one person as for twenty.

The practical test is not how many people you have. It is how many need to run their own research. Most teams over-count this. A content writer who needs a keyword list once a fortnight does not need a seat; they need someone to export one. Before buying seats, ask who has opened the tool in the last thirty days and what they did in it. Teams that do this honestly usually buy one or two fewer seats than they were about to.

Tools you still need alongside these

None of these three is an AI SEO tool, and all three belong in the stack. They are described here rather than ranked above because scoring a free measurement tool against a $250-a-month tracker produces a number that means nothing.

• Google Search Console - free, unlimited users, and the only first-party measurement of your own performance in Google that exists. Sixteen months of retention and no competitor data. Every credible workflow starts here, and it is where you check whether a paid tool’s estimates resemble reality.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider - free to 500 URLs, then $279 per user a year, dropping to $265 each from five licences, $249 from ten and $235 at twenty. No AI is required to find a redirect chain. Sitebulb explains its findings better if the output is going to a client.
• Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude - the cheapest way to see the mechanics of AI citation directly. Ask the questions your buyers ask and read what gets cited. It is qualitative research, not measurement: no assistant will tell you what changed since last month.

Tracking AI visibility before you pay for it

Before committing to any of the trackers above, run the manual version for a month. It costs an hour and it tells you whether the tooling has anything to measure.

1. Write down the fifteen questions a buyer asks before they know your product exists. Not your brand name - the problem statements.
2. Ask all fifteen in two assistants, in a logged-out session, on the first of the month.
3. Record two things per question: whether you appear, and which page gets cited when a competitor appears instead.
4. Repeat on the first of the next month.

If citations are volatile and nobody holds a position, tooling will not fix that yet. If a competitor holds five of your fifteen questions, you now know what to write and you have a reason to pay for tracking. Note the ceilings either way: fifteen questions already exceeds Ahrefs Lite’s five prompts and Otterly’s fifteen, and sits inside Frase’s fifty at $49 a month.

What we can say about generated content, and what we cannot

Two claims get made about AI and content, and only one of them is safe to make.

The unsafe one is that anybody knows what assistants reward. We have not measured it, and nor has anyone publishing a list like this one - so if a guide tells you what AI search prefers, ask for the dataset: the prompts, the dates, the captures. Without those it is a hypothesis wearing the typography of a finding.

The safe claim is structural, and it is about what a model cannot do rather than what it likes. A current price with its billing basis, a named seat minimum, a verified date, a limit read off a vendor’s own page: none of that exists in a model’s parameters, so none of it can be generated. Somebody has to go and read it. A 3,000-word article written from a prompt contains none of those facts; a 900-word page with a price table and a last-checked date contains twenty.

This site is built on that premise - structured, source-linked and dated, and designed so a machine can extract a fact without mangling it. That is a design goal rather than a measured outcome, and we publish no figures about who quotes us because we collect none. What is safe to say is the useful part anyway: original facts are cheap for you to produce and impossible for a model to invent, and no tool on this page changes that.

What changed in this version

The previous version of this guide compared five tools: Ahrefs, Semrush, Search Console, Screaming Frog and Perplexity. Three of the five were not AI SEO tools, and the page said so about one of them in its own entry. It also scored a “data quality” dimension at 10 out of 10 for two products without publishing any measurement behind it, which is precisely the kind of number our methodology says not to print.

This version fixes both. Eleven products that publish an AI-search capability are ranked; the three complements moved into the stack section above; and every rubric dimension is now a count with a published rule, which is why the order moved. What is still missing is stated rather than implied: we have not benchmarked accuracy, index depth or output quality, and Conductor is a real competitor we have not priced. Both are on the list.