Key takeaways
- Promptwatch is the strongest all-around pick if you want monitoring plus actual execution: crawler logs, content gap analysis, and Content Agents that publish straight to your CMS, starting at $95/mo.
- AthenaHQ now has a genuinely usable free tier (300 credits/mo across 5 models) and is worth a look if you want to test the waters before committing budget.
- Otterly.AI and Peec AI are the cheapest credible options if all you need is prompt tracking and citation reporting without the content-generation layer.
- Profound has moved to a two-tier model (free trial or custom enterprise) after retiring its old $99-$399 tiers, so it's now mostly an enterprise conversation, not a self-serve one.
- Semrush, Brandwatch, and Meltwater make sense only if you already live inside those suites for SEO or PR and want AI visibility bundled in rather than as a dedicated tool.
Hoverboard AI positions itself as an answer-engine visibility tracker built by someone who actually ran an agency (the founder previously built and sold iLawyer Marketing). It covers ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and Grok, plus white-label PDF reporting and content article generation, at plans starting around $199/mo. That's a fair product. But the category moved fast in 2026, and a few things push people to look elsewhere: the pricing page still lists odd legacy tiers that don't match the current $199/$399/$599 structure, the platform only covers 3-4 answer engines at each tier (competitors now track 8-13), and there's no crawler log analysis, which is the piece that tells you why your visibility moved instead of just that it did. If you've hit any of those walls, here's what else is out there.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ rebuilt its pricing since it first launched, and the current structure is more approachable than you'd expect from an enterprise-leaning AEO platform. Essential is now free: $25 in credits, 300 credits/mo, covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot, with unlimited team members and basic content recommendations. Starter jumps to $295/mo and expands to 11 models (adding AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral), plus an on/off-page action recommendation engine. Enterprise adds Athena's newer Citation Engine (ACE), a predictive citation model, and claim-review tooling.
Compared to Hoverboard, Athena covers more than double the answer engines at a similar or lower entry price, and the free tier means you can actually test it before paying. Where it's weaker: content generation is a recommendation engine rather than a full drafting-and-publishing workflow, and the jump from free to $295/mo is steep with nothing in between.
Best for: teams that want to validate AI visibility data before spending anything, and brands with ecommerce or Shopify integrations Athena has built out specifically.
Promptwatch
Promptwatch is the platform that treats AI visibility as something you fix, not just something you watch. That distinction matters because most of this category, including Hoverboard, stops at telling you your visibility score dropped. Promptwatch pairs prompt tracking on real ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity interfaces (not just API calls, which behave differently) with server-side crawler log analysis, so you can see which AI bots actually visited your pages, what they read, and where they hit errors. That log data has been running since mid-2025, which matters because a crawler connector that shipped last month hasn't accumulated enough history to spot a pattern.
On top of that, Promptwatch's content gap analysis maps your own site against what AI models are actually citing, and its Content Agents draft and publish the fix directly into Webflow, Framer, or WordPress rather than handing you a brief and walking away. Unified Actions turns all of this into a prioritized to-do list instead of a dashboard you have to interpret yourself. It also tracks Reddit and YouTube citations specifically, plus ChatGPT Shopping placements and an Ads Radar for sponsored AI results, none of which Hoverboard offers.
Pricing starts at $95/mo (Essential: 50 prompts, all LLM tracking, 5 AEO articles), $245/mo for Professional (adds crawler logs, city-level tracking, automated content), and $579/mo for Business (5 sites, 100M crawler logs, 30 articles). All tiers include every tracked model at no extra charge, which isn't true of most competitors that gate specific LLMs behind higher plans. The company has 1,840+ customers including Duolingo and Yelp, and a 4.7/5 rating on G2. One caveat from independent reviews: some users on Reddit and Capterra note the interface feels less polished than newer entrants and daily (not real-time) refresh cycles won't suit teams chasing minute-by-minute changes.
Best for: anyone who wants monitoring and remediation in one subscription instead of stitching a tracker together with a separate content tool.
Otterly.AI
Otterly is the budget option that still feels credible. Lite starts at $29/mo for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot (Claude, AI Mode, and Gemini cost extra as add-ons). Standard is $189/mo for 100 prompts with API/MCP access and agent analytics, and Premium runs $489/mo for 400 prompts. Annual billing knocks about 15% off each tier.
Against Hoverboard, Otterly is cheaper at every comparable tier and includes a Looker Studio connector on Standard and up, which Hoverboard doesn't offer. What Otterly lacks is content generation beyond briefs, and no Prompt Volumes or shopping-visibility module, so if the goal is turning gaps into published content, you'll need a second tool.
Best for: teams that just need reliable, low-cost citation tracking and already have a content workflow elsewhere.
Peec AI
Peec's current live pricing is Starter at $95/mo (50 prompts, 3 models, 1 project), Pro at $245/mo (150 prompts, 2 projects), and Advanced at $495/mo (350 prompts, 5 projects, multi-country tracking, Looker Studio). Enterprise is custom and can track up to 13 models with SSO.
Peec's standout feature is its Shopping module with SKU-level tracking via Shopify, CSV, or Google Merchant Center imports, plus a crawlability audit across 40+ bots. That's a level of ecommerce-specific tooling Hoverboard doesn't touch. The trade-off is that content optimization on Peec is recommendations-only, no actual drafting or CMS publishing, and technical optimization tops out at basic robots.txt checks.
Best for: ecommerce brands that want product-level AI shopping visibility without paying enterprise prices.
Profound
Profound's pricing structure changed significantly in 2026. The old $99 Starter / $399 Growth tiers are gone. What's live now is a free trial (10 prompts, one-time run, ChatGPT only, no history or API) and a custom Enterprise tier that covers up to 9 answer engines with unlimited AI Marketer credits, SSO/SAML, and SOC 2 compliance. There's effectively nothing in between anymore.
Profound was named a Representative Vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools, and it recently integrated with Noble's Mention Refresh to automate correcting inaccurate AI brand mentions, which is a genuinely useful feature Hoverboard doesn't have. It also raised a $180M Series D, so the roadmap isn't slowing down. But the collapse of its self-serve middle tier means smaller teams that used to be able to buy Profound directly now have to go through a sales call, and independent reviews on G2 and Slashdot consistently mention data overload, a steep learning curve, and slow support response times (around a week).
Best for: enterprise teams with a real budget and a dedicated AEO owner who can handle a data-dense platform.
Semrush
Semrush folded AI visibility into its core suite rather than building a standalone product. Current pricing: the SEO plan is $117.33/mo with only a basic AI-search teaser, Starter (SEO + AI Search) is $165.17/mo with 50 tracked prompts/day and one domain for AI brand performance, and Pro+ is $248.17/mo with historical data and multi-location tracking. AI content generation and technical AI optimization sit behind a separate $60/mo add-on rather than being bundled. Adobe completed its $1.9B acquisition of Semrush in mid-2026, which signals this is now a consolidation play rather than a GEO-first roadmap.
Compared to Hoverboard, Semrush wins if you already pay for Semrush's core SEO tools and want one invoice. It loses on AI-specific depth: no dedicated crawler log product, no Shopping tracking, and AI features feel like an add-on bolted onto a much bigger platform rather than something built for this specific job.
Best for: teams that are Semrush customers already and want AI visibility as a bonus, not a primary tool.
Scrunch AI
Scrunch's Core plan is $250/mo for 125 unique prompts, one country/persona, 5 competitors, and one page optimization per month. Enterprise is custom and unlocks Scrunch's Agent Experience Platform (AXP), which is aimed at reducing how often AI models hallucinate about your brand or misrepresent your content. Scrunch is upfront that it's positioning itself as an