Analysis
Self-serve AEO pricing has clustered into three bands
A 17x spread between entry tiers, and a mid-market band where price has stopped predicting capability.
Our July review of published pricing across ten AEO platforms found self-serve rates spanning roughly $20 to $489 per month — a seventeen-fold spread for products that overlap substantially on core measurement.
Three bands are now clearly visible.
Under $100. Otterly.ai Lite at $29 for fifteen prompts, Peec AI from around $29, Geoptie Starter at $49, HubSpot's AEO module around $50, SE Ranking's add-on at $89. The binding constraint here is prompt allowance rather than engine count, and almost nothing in this band measures crawler access — which means it cannot see the most common cause of AEO failure.
$99 to $489. The crowded band. CiteCue Pro at $99, ZipTie at $99 and $159, Otterly Standard at $189, AthenaHQ at $295, and both CiteCue Agency and Profound Growth at $399, with Otterly Premium topping out at $489.
Custom. Profound Enterprise, Scrunch AI, Evertune and the enterprise tiers of CiteCue and AthenaHQ, reported into the thousands per month.
The finding we did not expect: within the mid-market band, price has largely stopped predicting capability. CiteCue Agency and Profound Growth are both $399 and are not the same kind of product — one adds agent task testing, scheduled fix drafting and automatic page variants, the other adds engine breadth and enterprise posture with no documented remediation.
More awkwardly, growing within a cheap vendor's own ladder can cost more than switching bands. Otterly Premium at $489 exceeds CiteCue's $399 Agency tier while providing monitoring only.
One structural observation: only one platform in our set offers a genuine free tier rather than a time-limited trial. The cheapest credible way to see AEO data about your own domain is currently free, and it is not from the vendors positioned as the budget option.
Full synthesis with sources: AEO Platform Pricing in 2026.