How much does AI brand monitoring cost in 2026? Entry tiers run from $25 to $295 a month, most teams land between $29 and $199, and the legacy enterprise suites do not publish prices at all. We verified every number in this guide against each vendor's public pricing page on 13 July 2026. The comparison is messier than the headline prices suggest, because the tools meter usage in incompatible units: tracked prompts, AI responses, credits, even individual products. 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: two vendors display annual-billed rates as their headline 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 ($25 annual) | Both shown | 15 prompts | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | Free trial |
| Athena | $25 Essential, $295 Starter | Monthly | Credits: 300 or 3,600 AI responses | 5 models, 9 on Starter | Free 10-minute audit |
| Sight | $49 | Monthly | 10 prompts, 1,500 AI credits | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok | 7-day trial |
| LLM Pulse | €49 | Monthly | 50 prompts | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini | 14-day trial, card required |
| Dageno | $79 | Monthly | 50 prompts | 3 platforms | Free trial |
| Siftly | $79 | Monthly | 1 shopping prompt, 1 SKU | ChatGPT, Google AI Mode | 14-day trial |
| Writesonic | $79 | Annual-billed rate | 50 prompts, tracked daily | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | Free trial, no card |
| Profound | $99 | Annual-billed rate | 50 prompts, 1,500 responses | ChatGPT only | Trial on Growth tier |
| Semrush | $199 Starter | Monthly ($165 annual) | Prompt tracking, counts not stated | Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and more | 7-day trial |
| SE Ranking | €79 add-on plus a €109 base plan | Monthly | Counts not stated | AI platforms via its SE Visible dashboard | 14-day trial |
| Peec | Not published in page source | n/a | Tiers by project and country | 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
Two of those headline prices are not what a monthly subscriber pays. Profound's $99 Starter is billed yearly, and Writesonic's $79 carries a save-per-year badge whose maths implies a higher monthly-billed rate that the pricing page does not display. SE Ranking's AI tracking is an add-on, so the real entry cost is the add-on plus a base plan, roughly €188 a month billed monthly. If you compare tools on headline price alone, the annual-billed vendors look about 20 per cent cheaper than they are month to month.
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 Siftly because it meters products rather than prompts.
| Tool | Entry price | Tracked prompts | Cost per prompt per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dageno | $79 | 50 | $1.58 |
| Writesonic | $79, annual-billed | 50 | $1.58 |
| Otterly | $29 | 15 | $1.93 |
| Profound | $99, annual-billed | 50 | $1.98 |
| Honeyb (ours) | $29 | 10, scanned daily | $2.90 |
| Sight | $49 | 10 | $4.90 |
The per-prompt column still hides two variables. The first is engine coverage: a Profound entry prompt runs against ChatGPT only, an Otterly prompt runs against four engines, so the effective price per engine-answer differs by a factor of four at a similar per-prompt cost. The second is refresh cadence. Where vendors state response volumes you can price the individual AI answer: Profound's 1,500 responses at $99 work out to 6.6 cents per response, Athena's 3,600 credits at $295 to 8.2 cents, and Honeyb's 10 prompts scanned daily produce roughly 300 responses at $29, or 9.7 cents. The spread across the market 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
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Four levers explain nearly all of the variation. Prompt volume is the primary meter almost everywhere, and tier jumps are steep: Sight goes from 10 prompts at $49 to 50 at $129, Dageno from 50 at $79 to 150 at $199, Otterly from 15 at $29 to 100 at $189. Engine coverage is the second lever, and the entry tiers differ sharply: Profound starts single-engine, Otterly covers four, LLM Pulse five, while Honeyb prices engines directly, 1 model at $29, 3 at $79, all 8 at $249. 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, Sight at $49, LLM Pulse at €49, or Athena's 300-credit Essential at $25. These tiers suit a single brand with a focused prompt set. The $50 to $100 band (Dageno, Siftly, Writesonic, Profound) mostly buys more prompts rather than more engines. The $100 to $300 band buys either scale or breadth: 100-plus prompts, multi-engine coverage, API access on some tools, and Semrush bundling AI visibility into its wider suite at $199. 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 the same AI query already changes its answer roughly 70 per cent of the time (SparkToro), so narrow sampling compounds the noise. Third, unpublished prices: Peec's tiers render only in a browser session, 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 $25 and $295 a month at entry, the meters are incompatible, and two of the displayed prices are annual-billed rates. Normalised per tracked prompt, the market clusters between $1.58 and $4.90, 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.
