How much does AI brand monitoring cost in 2026? Entry tiers run from $29 to $295 a month, most teams land between $29 and $199, and the legacy enterprise suites do not publish prices at all. Every price is in US dollars as the vendor shows it to a US visitor, and every vendor's pricing page was read on 2 October 2026. The comparison is messier than the headline prices suggest, because the tools meter usage in incompatible units: tracked prompts, AI responses and credits.
This guide puts the prices side by side, normalises what can be normalised, and flags the traps. Honeyb is our own tool, so it is disclosed wherever it appears. One piece of context on why we wrote this: in Honeyb's own citation measurements across AI answers in this niche, cost and pricing guides are the most-cited article type, which means buyers increasingly get these numbers from an AI answer rather than a pricing page. These are the numbers that answer should carry.
What AI brand monitoring costs in 2026
The table lists the cheapest paid tier of each tool, what it meters, and which AI engines it covers. Billing basis matters: Writesonic's page opens on its annual-billed rate, so the table shows its monthly price.
| Tool | Entry tier | Billing shown | What it meters | AI engines on entry | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Honeyb (ours) | $29 | Monthly | 10 prompts, scanned daily | 1 model of choice | Free AI visibility check |
| Otterly | $29 | Monthly | 15 prompts | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | Free trial |
| Athena | $295 Starter | Monthly | Credits: 3,600 AI responses | 11 models | Free plan |
| Sight | $99 Pro | Monthly | 5,000 AI credits | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok | 7-day trial, card required |
| LLM Pulse | About $59 | Monthly (about $49 annual) | 50 prompts | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini | 14-day trial, card required |
| Dageno | $49 Starter (shown as a cut from $89) | Monthly | 50 prompts | 9 models, not named on its pricing page | 7-day trial |
| Siftly | $79 Starter | Monthly | 50 prompts, 4,500 responses, daily | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity | Free plan; 7-day trial, no card |
| Writesonic | $99 Starter | Monthly ($79 annual) | 50 prompts, tracked daily | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | Free trial, no card |
| Profound | Pricing on request | Custom Enterprise | Not published | Not published | Free trial |
| Semrush | $199 SEO + AI Search Starter | Monthly ($165.17 annual) | Prompt tracking, counts not stated | Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and more | 7-day trial |
| SE Ranking | $129 Core | Monthly ($103.20 annual) | 100 prompts tracked daily | AI platforms via its SE Visible dashboard | 14-day trial, no card |
| Peec | $95 Starter | Monthly | 50 prompts | 3 models chosen from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini | Not stated |
| Brandwatch, Meltwater, Talkwalker | Demo only | Custom | Custom | Social listening heritage, AI coverage varies | None |
Entry price
Entry-tier price of AI brand monitoring tools
| Item | USD per month |
|---|---|
| Honeyb | 29 $/mo |
| Otterly | 29 $/mo |
| LLM Pulse | 59 $/mo |
| Peec AI | 95 $/mo |
| SE Ranking | 129 $/mo |
| Semrush | 199 $/mo |
| Scrunch | 250 $/mo |
| AthenaHQ | 295 $/mo |
Three entries in that table are not what they first appear. Writesonic's page opens on a $79 annual-billed rate with a save-per-year badge, and the $99 monthly price sits behind the toggle. Dageno shows its $49 Starter as a cut from $89. And Profound publishes no price at all: a free trial, then custom Enterprise terms. SE Ranking now includes 100 daily-tracked prompts in its $129 Core plan, with an AI Search add-on at $89 a month for 200 more. Where a vendor shows both rates, the annual-billed one runs 17 to 20 per cent below the monthly one (SE Ranking $103.20 against $129, Semrush $165.17 against $199, Writesonic $79 against $99), so compare tools on the same billing basis.
Cost per tracked prompt
Where a vendor publishes a prompt count, you can normalise price to the unit that matters: one tracked prompt, monitored for one month. Athena is excluded because it meters credits per response, and Sight because it meters AI credits and states no prompt count.
| Tool | Entry price | Tracked prompts | Cost per prompt per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dageno | $49 | 50, cadence not stated | $0.98 |
| LLM Pulse | About $59 | 50, run weekly | About $1.18 |
| SE Ranking | $129 | 100, tracked daily | $1.29 |
| Siftly | $79 | 50, refreshed daily | $1.58 |
| Peec | $95 | 50, tracked daily | $1.90 |
| Otterly | $29 | 15 | $1.93 |
| Writesonic | $99 | 50, tracked daily | $1.98 |
| Honeyb (ours) | $29 | 10, scanned daily | $2.90 |
The per-prompt column still hides two variables. The first is engine coverage: a Honeyb Minimum prompt runs against one model of your choice, an Otterly prompt runs against four engines, so the effective price per engine-answer differs by a factor of four at the same $29. The second is refresh cadence.
Where vendors state response volumes you can price the individual AI answer: Siftly's Starter states 4,500 responses at $79, or 1.8 cents each, Peec's 50 prompts on three models daily produce about 4,500 answers at $95, or 2.1 cents each, Athena's 3,600 credits at $295 work out to 8.2 cents, and Honeyb's 10 prompts scanned daily produce roughly 300 responses at $29, or 9.7 cents. The spread per answer, about 2 to 10 cents, is narrower than the headline prices suggest; what you are really choosing is how many prompts, engines and refreshes you need.
What actually drives the price
Four levers explain nearly all of the variation. Prompt volume is the primary meter almost everywhere, and tier jumps are steep: Dageno goes from 50 prompts at $49 to 250 at $199, Siftly from 50 at $79 to 100 across two markets at $249, Otterly from 15 at $29 to 100 at $189. Engine coverage is the second lever, and the entry tiers differ sharply: Peec's Starter lets you choose three models, Otterly covers four, LLM Pulse five, Dageno lists nine without naming them, while Honeyb prices engines directly, 1 model at $29, 3 at $79, all 8 at $199.
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Seats and workspaces are the third: agencies pay for structure, and unlimited-seat tiers (Otterly, LLM Pulse, Athena's Starter) are worth noting if several people need access. The fourth is metering style itself; credit systems like Athena's are flexible but harder to budget than fixed prompt counts, because a heavy month simply consumes more credits.
Price bands, and who each fits
Under $50 a month buys a genuine start: Honeyb at $29, Otterly at $29, Dageno at $49, or LLM Pulse at about $49 on annual billing. These tiers suit a single brand with a focused prompt set. The $50 to $100 band (LLM Pulse monthly at about $59, Siftly at $79, Peec at $95, Sight and Writesonic at $99) mostly buys more prompts rather than more engines. The $100 to $300 band buys either scale or breadth: SE Ranking Core at $129 with 100 daily prompts and API credits, Semrush bundling AI visibility into its wider suite at $199, and Athena's Starter at $295 across 11 models.
Above that, pricing goes custom. The social-listening incumbents (Brandwatch, Meltwater, Talkwalker) publish no prices, and Meltwater states 12-month minimum contracts, so budget for a sales cycle rather than a checkout.
Watch for these before you buy
Four things caught us during verification. Annual-billed headline prices, covered above, are the most common. Second, single-engine entry tiers: if buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity about your category, a tool that only watches one of them can report visibility you do not have elsewhere, and SparkToro found less than a 1-in-100 chance that two runs of the same prompt return the same list of brands, so narrow sampling compounds the noise.
Third, unpublished prices: Profound quotes custom Enterprise terms only, and the enterprise suites are demo-gated end to end. Fourth, metering mismatches make like-for-like trials worth running; a free AI visibility check or the trials in the table cost nothing and show you what a tracked prompt actually returns before you commit.
How much should you pay
A solo founder or small team watching one brand across a handful of buyer questions should not need more than $29 to $49 a month to start; the cheapest tiers cover exactly that shape. A marketing team that needs several engines, more prompts and colleagues in the tool lands naturally in the $79 to $199 band. Agencies and enterprises watching multiple brands should price per workspace and per seat rather than per headline tier, which is where unlimited-seat and multi-workspace structures pay off.
Whatever the band, the budgeting logic from our AI visibility software pricing guide holds: pay for the prompts you will actually review, not the biggest number on the tier page.
The takeaway
AI brand monitoring in 2026 costs between $29 and $295 a month at entry, the meters are incompatible, and one vendor publishes no price at all. Normalised per tracked prompt, the market clusters between about $0.98 and $2.90, so the real decision is prompt volume, engine coverage and refresh cadence, not the sticker. Start free before you spend anything: run a free AI visibility check to see where your brand stands in AI answers today, then match a tier to the gap it shows. For the tool-by-tool feature view behind these prices, see the best AI brand monitoring tools and the free tools and trials roundup.
