Affordable AI visibility tools for small businesses: what $0 to $100 a month buys in 2026

Disclosure: Promvia wrote this and sells one of these tools

Promvia is one of the tools in the table, marked as ours. Every other figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read on the date in the table and already published in our pricing comparison and buyer's guide; nothing here is taken from someone else's roundup. Prices are monthly list prices in the currency each page showed, never converted, and they move: read the vendor's page again on the day you buy.

Affordable AI visibility tools for small businesses, by entry price

Every self-serve entry plan at $100 a month or less that we could read in full, plus the two free plans. Price per prompt is the monthly price divided by the prompts the plan tracks; it is a starting point, because a prompt checked on four platforms daily and a prompt checked on two platforms weekly are not the same unit.

Left out because the entry plan costs more than $100 a month: Scrunch Core ($250, 7 October), AthenaHQ Starter ($295, 7 October) and Profound, which publishes no price. Rankscale prices in credits, from $99 a month for 1,200 credits (7 October), so its cost per question depends on the engines and schedule you set.

What affordable should mean when the budget is small

• The engines your customers use, included. Otterly.ai Lite is the lowest sticker price, and Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode cost extra on it; Ansvisor's entry plan covers ChatGPT and Copilot only. Price each plan with the engines you would actually turn on.
• Enough questions to read a rate. On 20 tracked questions, a 20% visibility rate has a 95% interval of 8.1% to 41.6%; on 5, one hit in five has an interval of 3.6% to 62.4%. A plan with very few prompts tells you whether you appear at all, not whether you are improving. Our guide to how many prompts to track has the table.
• A cadence that matches how fast your answers move. Daily checks give about 30 answers per engine a month and weekly about 4.3. For a local business whose answers barely change, weekly may be enough; for a crowded category, daily shows the week's shape.
• The cost per answer, not only per prompt. Peec AI's pricing page counts its own monthly answers the same way: "Calculated by multiplying tracked prompts by active models and tracking frequency." Counting engines and cadence, the entry plans we priced on 22 October ran from $3.30 per 1,000 scheduled answers (SE Visible) to $132 (Semrush, on an assumption about its engines). Promvia Starter came out at €78.40, near the expensive end: it checks weekly; the arithmetic is in what one tracked question costs.
• What else the price buys. Analyze AI includes GA4 traffic, Semrush sits inside its SEO suite, and Promvia counts AI visits and orders on every plan. If the number your work is judged on is visits or sales, check that it exists in the product.

Start free: what costs nothing

• A free plan. On 7 October 2026 AthenaHQ's Essential plan and Promvia's Free plan had no end date; most other tools offered a trial of 7 to 14 days where the length was stated. Our guide to free plans lists exactly what each includes.
• A spreadsheet. Ask your ten realest customer questions, without your brand name in them, in the assistants your customers use, once a week, and write down who is named and which pages are cited. How to track AI mentions has the columns. It stops being cheap at about 20 questions on five assistants, which is 100 answers to read a week.
• Your own analytics. Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other assistants are already in your analytics, and Google Analytics 4 has an AI Assistant channel that shows part of them. That tells you what the answers send you, which no answer tracker sees.

Where Promvia fits, and where it does not

Read this as the maker's account. Promvia Free is 1 site and 5 tracked questions on Perplexity, checked automatically once a month. Starter is €49 a month excluding VAT for 1 site and 25 questions, sold to businesses and professionals; Pro is €179 and Agency €499. Paid plans check six default engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode), with Grok as an option. On every plan, Free included, the snippet counts the visits AI assistants send, and Site check, our readiness audit with its consistency check, re-runs automatically: weekly on paid plans, monthly on Free. Paid checkout is not open yet on 25 October 2026; the free plan works today.

• Where it suits a small business: a free plan with no end date, a Starter plan that covers the six default engines on demand with no engine add-ons (Grok optional), AI visits and orders next to the answers (the Shopify app is in Shopify App Store review and not listed yet), and an interface in Turkish as well as English.
• Where it does not: Starter checks weekly, so per scheduled answer it costs more than Otterly.ai, SE Visible or Ansvisor; there is no Microsoft Copilot; and the Free plan covers Perplexity only, so ChatGPT starts on a paid plan.

How to choose on a small budget

• Write down ten questions your customers ask before they buy, in their words and without your brand name.
• Ask them by hand in the two or three assistants your customers use. If no answer names anyone in your category, a tool will only confirm it; if competitors are named, you have something to track.
• Shortlist two plans from the table that include those assistants, priced with any add-ons you would need.
• Run the same ten questions through both, on a free plan or a trial, on the same day, and compare what each one recorded.
• Keep one for a quarter. Switching every month resets the trend, and the trend is the measurement.

Frequently asked questions