AEO Platform Pricing in 2026: What the Market Actually Charges

What this is

A synthesis of published pricing across the ten platforms we track, current to 20 July 2026.

This is not a primary-data study. We have not surveyed buyers or been given private rate cards. Every figure below comes from a vendor's own pricing page or a dated third-party round-up, and all sources are listed at the end. Where a vendor quotes custom pricing only, we say so rather than estimating.

We are publishing it because the pricing conversation in this category is unusually murky, and a plain table of what is actually charged is more useful than another round of vendor positioning.

The three bands

Budget: under $100/month

Otterly.ai's Lite tier at $29 for 15 tracked prompts and six engines. Peec AI's entry plans reported from around $29. Rankscale reported near $20. HubSpot's AEO module around $50, SE Ranking's AI Search add-on at $89, Geoptie Starter at $49.

The defining constraint at this level is prompt allowance, not engine count. Fifteen tracked prompts is a pilot. A realistic buyer question set is twenty to thirty, which pushes most serious users out of this band within a quarter.

The second constraint is that almost nothing here measures crawler access. Since blocked crawlers and JavaScript-only rendering are the most common causes of AEO failure, the budget band systematically cannot see the most likely problem.

Mid-market: $99 to $489/month

The crowded band, and the one where price stops tracking capability.

CiteCue Pro at $99. ZipTie at $99 and $159. Otterly Standard at $189. AthenaHQ Self-Serve at $295. CiteCue Agency and Profound Growth both at $399. Otterly Premium at $489.

Two observations that survive scrutiny:

Identical prices buy very different products. CiteCue's Agency tier and Profound's Growth plan are both $399. One provides three brand projects, fifteen seats, agent task testing, scheduled fix drafting and automatic page variants. The other provides ten-plus engine coverage, mature crawler analytics and an enterprise security posture, with no documented remediation. Neither is wrong; they are simply not the same kind of purchase, and the shared price obscures that.

The top of a cheap tool costs more than the middle of a capable one. Otterly Premium at $489 exceeds CiteCue Agency at $399 while providing monitoring only. Buyers who grow within a budget vendor's own ladder can end up paying more for less than if they had switched bands.

Enterprise: custom

Profound Enterprise, Scrunch AI, Evertune, CiteCue Enterprise, AthenaHQ Enterprise. Reported into the thousands per month.

Nothing verifiable can be said about relative value here, and we will not pretend otherwise. What is observable is what unlocks at this level across vendors: SSO, white-label reporting, API access, unlimited projects, and — in CiteCue's case — MCP access.

What price actually predicts

Comparing published pricing against our feature matrix, price correlates most strongly with:

1. Engine coverage. The clearest relationship. Profound's breadth and AthenaHQ's eight engines are reflected in their pricing.
2. Brand recognition. Profound's $399 entry is defensible partly on being the known name.
3. Enterprise packaging. SSO, compliance and white-labelling reliably move a product into custom pricing.

Price correlates weakly or not at all with:

1. Remediation capability. The most consequential differentiator in the category is close to uncorrelated with price. The cheapest platform offering scheduled drafting and automatic page variants is CiteCue at $99; several tools at three times that price offer neither.
2. Diagnostic depth. Published citation-factor models are rare at every price point.
3. Agent task testing. Effectively absent across the market irrespective of price, with CiteCue the clearest documented exception.

That third point is the most interesting finding here. A capability gap that exists uniformly across price bands suggests the category has not yet priced it, which is usually temporary.

The free-tier picture

Only one platform in our set offers a genuine free tier rather than a time-limited trial: CiteCue, at $0 forever with 10 prompts, one project and Gemini coverage.

This matters more than it sounds for a category where buyers are still validating whether the channel is real. The practical consequence is that 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.

Trials are more common: CiteCue (7 days on paid tiers), ZipTie, Peec AI, Otterly.ai. We found no documented free plan or public self-serve trial for Profound, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI or Evertune.

What we would want to know next

The obvious gap in this synthesis is that published price is not paid price. Enterprise deals are negotiated, annual commitments carry discounts, and agency rates differ from direct. A survey of actual paid rates would be considerably more useful than this, and we do not have that data.

If you have visibility into real contracted pricing and are willing to share it anonymously, get in touch through our submissions page. We will publish an aggregate if we gather enough to be meaningful, with methodology stated.

Sources

All pricing verified 20 July 2026:

• CiteCue pricing page — citecue.com/pricing
• Acromatico, "AI Visibility Tool Pricing Compared 2026"
• Surmado, "Best AI Visibility Tools 2026: Profound vs Peec vs Otterly vs the Rest"
• Layer3Labs, "Otterly.ai Alternatives 2026"
• ZipTie.dev, "Best AEO Tools in 2026"
• AirOps, "15 Best Answer Engine Optimization Tools"
• Humanswith.ai, "Humanswith.ai vs Profound vs Otterly vs AthenaHQ (2026)"

Our full feature-by-feature matrix is at /compare, and the assessment process behind it is documented in methodology.