Most "AI SEO tool" lists are affiliate pages. This one groups the tools by the job they do, lists the starting price and free tier as published on each vendor site in October 2026, and names the categories that are not worth paying for.
The best AI SEO tools in 2026 are not one product. They are one tool for each of four jobs:
If you only read the table, read the "Free tier" column first. Two of the four jobs can be done for nothing; paid tools are worth buying once a specific step is the bottleneck. The method is in the AI SEO guide; the AI-visibility side is on the generative engine optimization guide.
Prices are the entry-level paid plan as published on each vendor's pricing page on 23 October 2026. "Billed yearly" means the vendor shows only the annual-commitment rate.
| Tool | Best for | Starts at | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surfer | On-page optimisation plus AI visibility tracking | $49/mo (Discovery, billed yearly) | No free plan; "Start for Free" trial, length not stated |
| Frase | Briefs and AI-assisted drafts for small teams | $49/mo ($39/mo billed yearly) | No free plan; 7-day trial, no card |
| Jasper | Brand-voice content at scale | $69/seat/mo ($59 billed yearly) | No free plan; 7-day trial |
| Semrush | All-in-one keyword data with AI search tracking | $139/mo (SEO plan, $117.33 billed yearly) | Free plan: 1 project, 10 reports/day |
| Ahrefs | Backlink and keyword data, Brand Radar | $29/mo (Starter) | Ahrefs Free (your own site's data) |
| Google Keyword Planner | Real search volume and CPC estimates | Free with a Google Ads account | Yes |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Technical crawls, OpenAI and Gemini crawl integration | £199/year | Free up to 500 URLs |
| Sitebulb | Visual technical audits for consultants and teams | Desktop prices shown per currency on site; Cloud from £95/mo | 14-day trial, no card |
| Google Search Console | Indexing, queries, rich-result and security issues | Free | Yes |
| Profound | Enterprise AI answer-engine monitoring | Enterprise, custom pricing | 7-day trial: 50 prompts/day, 3 engines |
| Peec AI | Mid-market AI visibility tracking | Pricing on request (not shown on pricing page) | Not stated on pricing page |
| Otterly.AI | Budget AI visibility tracking | $29/mo (Lite, 15 prompts) | Free trial, length not stated |
| Striveloom LLM Recall | A free read on what AI models say about your brand | Free | Yes, no signup |
These tools help you plan, draft and score pages. None replaces a writer who knows the subject; all cut the time spent on structure and comparison with the pages already ranking.
Surfer started as a content-scoring editor and now sells AI visibility tracking alongside it. Plans are shown billed yearly: Discovery at $49/mo (120 documents, tracks 10 pages, no AI prompts), Standard at $99/mo (360 documents, 25 prompts refreshed weekly) and Pro at $182/mo (50 prompts refreshed daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini). A separate AI Search Analytics plan at $82/mo covers tracking only. There is no free plan; every tier has a "Start for Free" button without a stated trial length.
Best for: teams that publish weekly and want a score to argue against. The score is a proxy for "looks like the pages already ranking": useful for structure, dangerous for originality.
Frase is a lighter brief-and-draft tool. Starter is $49/mo ($39 billed yearly) for 1 seat, 1 site, 10 articles and 50 audit pages per month, and it already includes AI Visibility checks on ChatGPT and Google AI. Professional is $129/mo ($103 yearly) with 3 seats, 5 sites and 40 articles; Scale is $299/mo ($239 yearly) with 100 articles and Claude and Gemini added to visibility tracking. Each plan has a 7-day free trial with no card, capped at 5 articles and 25 AI prompts.
Best for: a one-person marketing team that needs briefs fast and a draft to edit. The article caps are real limits, so count your monthly output before choosing a tier.
Jasper is a brand-voice writing platform rather than an SEO tool, but it is on every AI SEO list, so here is what it costs. Pro is $69 per seat per month ($59 billed yearly on a 12-month commitment) with 2 Brand Voices, 5 Knowledge assets and 3 Audiences. Business is custom priced on a 12-month commitment and adds agents for GEO, translations and deep research, plus API access. There is a 7-day free trial on Pro and no free plan.
Best for: brands producing a high volume of on-voice copy across channels. For SEO briefs and scoring, Surfer or Frase do the job for less.
The AI in keyword tools is mostly a layer on top of the same datasets: clustering, intent labels, "ask AI" summaries. Buy these for the data, not the AI label. If the data is what you need, the free options are good enough to start.
Semrush restructured its plans around "SEO + AI Search". The SEO plan is $139/mo ($117.33 billed yearly) and already includes tracking performance in AI search, AI sentiment monitoring, AI visibility reports for any domain and custom prompt monitoring. Starter is $199/mo ($165.17 yearly) with 50 prompts tracked daily, AI brand performance for 1 domain and an "AI-ready" Site Audit. Pro+ is $299/mo ($248.17 yearly) with 100 prompts daily; Advanced is custom. The Free plan is $0 with 1 demo project and 10 reports per day, and paid plans have a seven-day free trial.
Best for: a team that wants keyword data, rank tracking, site audit and AI visibility in one login and will actually use the prompts quota.
Ahrefs publishes monthly rates only: Starter $29/mo, Lite $129/mo, Standard $249/mo, Advanced $449/mo and Enterprise $1,499/mo on an annual commitment. Brand Radar, the AI-mentions feature, is listed in Lite, Standard and Advanced, with a separate Brand Radar AI add-on from $199/mo and custom prompt packages from $50/mo. "AI suggestions" in Keywords Explorer appear in the Standard plan. The Content Kit add-on with AI Content Helper is listed "from $99/mo" and marked "Soon". Ahrefs Free gives you Ahrefs data on your own site at no cost.
Best for: backlink analysis first, keywords second. The $29 Starter is the cheapest way into a serious dataset if you are disciplined about credits.
Keyword Planner is the source the paid tools are estimating. You get keyword ideas, estimated monthly searches, the average cost of showing ads for a keyword, and forecasts. It requires a Google Ads account with setup completed, including billing information, to unlock "Get ideas for new keywords". It has no AI layer; the workflow in the AI SEO guide is to export Planner data and let a general model cluster it.
Best for: anyone who wants real volume numbers before paying for a suite. It is the data behind the keyword targets in this post.
The AI here is modest and honest: crawlers that can send page content to a model for classification or extraction, and "ask AI" summaries of audit results. The value is still the crawl.
The licence is £199 per year (£189 for 5 to 9 seats, down to £169 for 20 or more). The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. Both free and paid versions list "Crawl with OpenAI & Gemini", which lets you run prompts against crawled pages, plus custom JavaScript. It is a desktop app and it is the standard for a reason: no URL quotas beyond your own machine.
Best for: anyone doing technical SEO more than twice a year. Under 500 URLs, the free version is the whole tool.
Sitebulb is the readable alternative: audits with explanations and priorities instead of a spreadsheet. Desktop plans are Lite (audits capped at 10,000 URLs) and Pro (up to 500,000 URLs per audit); the pricing page shows figures only after you pick a currency, so they are not quoted here. Sitebulb Cloud starts at £95/month per the vendor FAQ, extra Pro users from £7/month. The 14-day free trial is equivalent to Pro desktop, no card required.
Best for: consultants who deliver audits to clients and in-house teams who need the findings explained.
Search Console shows how much traffic you get from Google Search broken down by query, page and country, which pages have errors or are excluded from the index, the index status of any URL, rich-result and structured-data problems, manual actions and security issues. It is free and it is where every crawler's findings should be checked before you act on them.
Best for: everyone. If a paid audit tool and Search Console disagree, Search Console wins.
This is the newest category and the one with the widest price spread. All of these run a set of prompts against AI assistants on a schedule, record whether and how your brand appears, and compare that with competitors. The differences are which engines, how many prompts, how often, and who they are built for.
The LLM Recall check is a free, no-signup read on what AI models currently say about a brand. You enter the brand name, the tool asks Claude and DeepSeek what they know, scores how well the models recognise the brand, flags hedging in the answers, and lists what to publish, which schema to add and which citations to earn. It takes about 30 seconds and the report can be emailed if you want to keep it.
Best for: finding out whether you have an AI visibility problem before paying for a tracker. It is a point-in-time check, not a monitor, so re-run it after each change.
Profound is built for enterprise. The free Trial plan runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews in 1 language and 1 region. Enterprise is custom priced and tracks up to 9 answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, AI Overviews and Exa Search. It also bundles AI Marketer agents for research and writing. An Agency Growth plan is mentioned in the FAQ without a price.
Best for: brands with a procurement process and several markets. If "contact sales" is a blocker, look lower on this list.
Peec AI positions itself between the budget trackers and Profound, with Starter, Pro, Advanced and Enterprise tiers described for content managers, SEO teams, multi-project marketing teams and large organisations respectively. The public pricing page does not display prices or per-plan limits; it describes how the monthly answer quota is calculated (prompts multiplied by active models and frequency) and sends you to the app or sales for numbers. Treat pricing as on request.
Best for: SEO teams that want multi-model tracking with agency-style project separation. Confirm the quota you need before signing up.
Otterly is the budget option. Lite is $29/mo for 15 prompts, Standard $189/mo for 100 and Premium $489/mo for 400; a second price column ($25, $160, $422) appears to be annual billing. All plans track ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons per tier (Claude is $29/mo on Lite, $109 on Standard), and extra prompts are $99/mo per 100 on Standard and Premium. There is a free trial for new users; the length is not stated.
Best for: a small business that wants to watch 15 to 100 prompts without an enterprise contract.
If you already pay for Semrush, Ahrefs, Surfer or Frase, check what AI visibility you already have before buying a tracker: Semrush's SEO plan includes AI search tracking, Ahrefs Lite and above include Brand Radar, Surfer Standard includes 25 prompts weekly, Frase Starter checks ChatGPT and Google AI. A dedicated tool earns its price only when you need more engines, more prompts or daily refreshes.
Some "AI SEO software" exists because the label sells. Three categories are consistently a bad buy:
A fourth, milder warning: an "AI SEO platform" that is a chat window over public data. If a general-purpose model plus your own exports can do the job, you do not need the wrapper.
Solo or under five people. Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, Screaming Frog free, the Striveloom LLM Recall check, and a general-purpose model for clustering and briefs. Total: $0. Add Frase Starter or Surfer Discovery at around $49/mo only when the writing queue is the bottleneck.
Five to fifty people with a marketing function. One data suite (Semrush SEO plan at $139/mo or Ahrefs Lite at $129/mo, whichever fits your backlink-versus-keyword emphasis), one content tool, a paid Screaming Frog licence, and the AI visibility that comes bundled. Add Otterly or Peec AI when you need to track more prompts than the bundle allows. Budget: roughly $250 to $500/mo.
Agencies and enterprise. Sitebulb or Screaming Frog with multi-seat licences, Semrush or Ahrefs at the tier that matches client count, Surfer Pro or Jasper Business for output, and Profound or Peec AI for AI visibility across markets. The deciding factor is reporting: client-ready exports and project separation cost more than the raw features.
Whatever the size, the sequence is the same: fix what Search Console shows, publish answer-first pages with real sources, then measure AI visibility and close the gaps. If you would rather have it done for you, the SEO audit covers the classic and GEO layers together.
It depends on the job. For content and on-page work: Surfer, Frase or Jasper. For keyword data: Semrush, Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner. For technical audits: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb and Google Search Console. For AI visibility (GEO): Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, or the free Striveloom LLM Recall check. Most businesses need one tool per job, not one tool for everything.
Yes. Google Search Console and Keyword Planner are free (Planner needs a Google Ads account with billing set up). Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs. Semrush and Ahrefs both have free plans with limited reports. The Striveloom LLM Recall check at /llm-recall is a free, no-signup read on what AI models say about your brand.
A GEO tool runs a set of prompts against AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on a schedule, records whether and how your brand appears, and compares that with competitors. Examples are Profound, Peec AI and Otterly. Semrush, Ahrefs, Surfer and Frase now bundle a version of this into their plans.
As published in October 2026: Otterly Lite and Ahrefs Starter start at $29/mo, Surfer and Frase at $49/mo, Jasper Pro at $69 per seat, Semrush at $139/mo, Screaming Frog at £199/year. Profound and Peec AI do not publish full price lists. Prices change often, so check the vendor page before buying.
Bulk AI content spinners, "automatic backlink" services and any tool or agency promising guaranteed rankings or guaranteed AI mentions. None of them can control search or AI results, and bulk generic content and purchased links tend to reduce visibility rather than add to it.
Founder & CEO of Striveloom. Software engineer and Harvard graduate student researching software engineering, e-commerce platforms, and customer experience. Builds the agency that ships like software — one team, one pipeline, one platform. Writes on AI agencies, web development, paid advertising, and conversion optimization.
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