We built one of these tools, so treat our opinion on which is best accordingly. What you can check is the data: every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page between 15 July 2026 and 23 September 2026, every tool has verified strengths listed rather than only weaknesses, and anything we could not confirm is marked unverified rather than guessed.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Researching this table refuted several claims repeated across the existing roundups in this category — that one tool has a free starter plan, that another starts at $300 a month. Those articles copy each other. If you only take one thing from this page, take the habit of opening the vendor's pricing page yourself.
How to read a table like this
Four columns decide most of it, and three of the four are routinely misrepresented across this category.
Entry price is not what the entry plan costs you
The headline figure usually buys a fraction of the product. Read the what it really includes column rather than the number: a $29 plan tracking a handful of prompts on one engine and a $99 plan tracking fifty across six are not comparable, and the cheaper one is frequently the more expensive way to get an answer you can act on.
Engine counts are inflated
Some tools count ChatGPT, GPT-4 and “OpenAI” as three engines. Some count a model and a product separately. What matters is distinct surfaces a buyer actually uses — and whether the list includes the ones that browse the live web, because those behave completely differently from the ones answering from training. That distinction is covered in the GEO guide.
“Free” usually means a trial
In this category a free tier is most often fourteen days with a card up front. A few offer a grader — a one-off score for a domain, with no tracking. A plan that stays free is rare, and the column above says which is which.
Nobody can measure AI traffic, including everyone here
If a tool shows you clicks, sessions or revenue from AI answers, it modelled them. No API exposes that data, Search Console folds those clicks into ordinary organic, and analytics receives them as plain Google traffic. This is the single most common overstatement in the category and it is worth testing every vendor against — ask where the number comes from. The detail is here.
Who each kind of tool is actually for
Rather than ranking nine products against each other, it is more useful to say which shape of tool fits which situation — including where that is not us.
- You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Their AI visibility modules are the cheapest thing to try first, because the marginal cost is small and the data sits beside your existing rank tracking. They cover fewer surfaces; if one surface answers your question, that is fine.
- You need one number for a board deck. The simplest, cheapest tracker will do. You are buying a chart, and most of these produce one.
- You manage many clients. Seats, brands and white-labelling matter more than engine count. Check the per-brand limits before the feature list — several of these become expensive quickly at agency scale.
- You want to know whether you hold a position or got lucky. That needs a tool that reports a rate across weeks rather than a mention, and keeps the answers so you can check them. That is the thing we built, and here is how it works.
Where we fit, plainly
CoreCited starts at $69 a month and tracks all 6 surfaces on every paid plan, with no engine add-ons. The free plan is a one-time grant rather than a trial, and four of the tools on this site need no account at all.
What we do that the others do not is report how consistently a brand is named rather than whether it was. What we do not do is tell you how much traffic AI sent you, or why an engine picked a source — we say so on the features pages, because a limit you find out about after paying is a refund.
And the honest version of a recommendation: if you are already inside Semrush and one surface answers your question, start there. If you want to know whether you are in the part of the answer that stays, check it here for free before paying anyone, including us.
Questions people ask
Why should I trust a roundup written by one of the tools in it?+
You should not trust it on the question of which tool is best — we are not a neutral party and saying otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on the page. What you can check is the data: every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page on a stated date, with a link, and every tool has verified strengths listed rather than only weaknesses. Check three of them against the vendor sites. If the figures hold, the rest probably does too.
Why do the prices differ from other comparison articles?+
Because most of those articles copy each other rather than the vendor. Researching this table refuted several widely repeated claims — that one tool has a free starter plan, that another starts at $300. Anything we could not confirm on a vendor page is marked unverified rather than filled in with a plausible number.
How many engines do I actually need?+
More than one, and the number matters less than which. A brand can be durable on Perplexity and absent from ChatGPT, so a tool covering one surface tells you about one surface. What to watch for is a tool that counts ChatGPT, GPT-4 and 'OpenAI' as three engines — the count in a marketing table is not always a count of distinct surfaces.
Is there a genuinely free option?+
Several offer a trial, one offers a free grader that scores a domain without tracking it, and most offer nothing. Read the free-tier column carefully: 'free' in this category usually means a time-limited trial that needs a card, which is a different thing from a free plan.
What is the cheapest way to find out where I stand?+
Ask the engines yourself. Open ChatGPT and Perplexity, ask the question a buyer would ask, and write down who gets named. It costs nothing and it is the same measurement every tool here performs — what you are paying any of them for is doing it repeatedly, at scale, and keeping the history.
How often is this page updated?+
Each price carries the date it was read — this table was read between 15 July 2026 and 23 September 2026 — and those dates are moved by hand when a row is re-checked, never automatically. A comparison page whose date refreshes itself while the data goes stale is worse than one with no date at all.
