The Shortlist/In-house SEO
The 6 best AI Search tools for in-house SEO teams
Published Sep 14, 2026
In-house SEO teams come to this question from a different place than anyone else. You already have a stack. You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs, you already have Search Console, and someone has already asked you in a meeting what ChatGPT says about the company.
So the question is not which AI visibility tool is best. It is whether to add one at all, and if so, what it needs to do that your existing tools cannot.
Six tools, priced as an addition to a stack you already own.
At a glance
The shortlist, ranked
| # | Tool | Best for | Base | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peec AI | SEO teams who want to work out whether an AI Search gap is a ranking problem or a coverage problem | Berlin, with a New York office since 2026 | From $95/mo (Starter, 50 prompts). Pro $245 for 150 prompts |
| 2 | Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Teams already on Semrush who want a defensible answer without a new vendor | Boston, with offices worldwide | $99/mo per domain. Semrush One, bundling SEO and AI visibility, from $199/mo |
| 3 | Rankscale | Technical SEO teams who want maximum engine coverage and a site audit alongside it | Europe, remote | From $20/mo (Essentials). Pro $99, Growth $385, Enterprise $780 |
| 4 | AthenaHQ | Small SEO teams with no content resource who need the tool to draft the work | United States | Free Essential tier (300 credits). Starter $295/mo, Enterprise custom |
| 5 | Omnia | Teams who want to test whether this matters before asking for budget | Madrid | From €79/mo (Growth, 25 prompts). Pro €279, Enterprise from €499 |
| 6 | Profound | In-house teams at large companies where security review and vendor stability decide the purchase | New York | From $99/mo (Starter, ChatGPT only). Growth $399, Enterprise custom |
Pricing re-checked against every vendor's own page on Sep 14, 2026
What it really costs
The same workload, priced across every tool
Entry prices are not comparable, because they buy different things. So we priced one identical workload across all of them: 150 prompts tracked daily against six engines, on one seat, for twelve months, as an addition to the classic SEO suite you already pay for.
| Tool | Plan this forces | Per month | 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99 base plus 125 extra prompts, added to your existing plan | About $279, for four engines | About $3,348 |
| Rankscale | Growth, $385/mo (Pro caps at 4,800 answers) | $385 | $4,620 |
| Peec AI | Pro, $245/mo (150 prompts, six engines included) | $245 | $2,940 |
| Omnia | Enterprise, from €499/mo (Pro caps at 100 prompts) | From €499 | From €5,988 |
| AthenaHQ | Enterprise (Starter includes 3,600 of the 27,000 credits needed) | Not published | Not published |
| Profound | Enterprise (Growth caps at 100 prompts and three engines) | Not published | Not published |
Semrush looks cheapest on paper and is not comparable, because it reaches four engines rather than six and reports Google as one combined surface. If you are already on Semrush the honest figure is that AI visibility costs you roughly $180 a month on top, for a narrower picture. Profound and AthenaHQ both require a quote at this workload. Annual billing takes 15% to 20% off most of these.
Methodology
How this was put together
The buyer is an in-house SEO team of one to five people who already pay for a classic SEO suite and need to answer questions about AI Search without adding a headcount. That shapes the ranking in two ways: the tool has to produce something the existing stack cannot, and it has to fit a workflow built around crawling, logs and rankings rather than around dashboards.
We priced 150 prompts tracked daily across six engines for twelve months, treating it as an addition to a classic SEO subscription you already hold. The arithmetic is below. Where a vendor cannot serve that workload at a published price, the table says so.
Everything comes from public sources: each vendor's own pricing page and documentation, checked on 14 September 2026. Each entry states its engine coverage, data access, traffic reporting and recommendations in the same four lines, so you can compare them without reading the prose.
We re-check every price against the vendor's own page and stamp the date at the top. Anything that moves goes in the changelog, including changes that make an entry look worse.
The order is our judgement about fit for that team. Every entry says where the tool is the stronger pick and where it is not, including the one at the top. We also make the case for buying nothing, in the section below, because for some teams that is genuinely the right call this year.
The tools
Every entry in detail
#1
Peec AI
- Best for
- SEO teams who want to work out whether an AI Search gap is a ranking problem or a coverage problem
- Base
- Berlin, with a New York office since 2026
- Entry price
- From $95/mo (Starter, 50 prompts). Pro $245 for 150 prompts
- Terms
- Monthly or annual, around 15% off annual. No free tier
Fits an SEO workflow better than anything else here, because it produces the two things an SEO team already knows how to act on. The first is source data: every answer broken into the URLs the model read, classified as editorial, corporate, UGC, reference or your own site. That tells you whether you are absent because your pages are weak or because nobody else writes about you, which are different budgets. The second is server logs. Eight integration methods, covering Cloudflare, Vercel, CloudFront, Akamai and WordPress, so you can see AI crawlers hitting your site in the same way you already read logs for Googlebot. No other tool in this price band does log analysis at all, and for a team that already thinks in crawl budget and render paths it is the piece that makes the rest legible.
Where it is stronger
- Server-log crawl data, which nothing else in this price band offers and which SEO teams already know how to read
- Source classification, so the output maps onto work you can actually brief
- Six engines at $245, against four from Semrush at roughly $279
- GA4-joined referral data rather than a modelled traffic estimate
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode separated, which matters because only one of them responds to classic SEO
Where it is not
- Another vendor, another login and another invoice next to a stack you already run
- No keyword, backlink or technical SEO data, so it never replaces the suite you have
- 50 prompts at Starter, so most teams land on Pro at $245
- No free tier, so the cheapest look costs $95
- Founded in 2025, so the track record is short next to the suite vendors
- 18 G2 reviews is a thin base to judge from, however good the average
What it does
- Engines included on every plan, as of 14 September 2026: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot
- Data access: CSV and Looker Studio on all plans, REST API and an MCP server on the higher tiers
- AI-referred traffic: AI Referrals joins measured GA4 sessions rather than estimating them
- Recommendations: Peec Actions produces prioritised actions from the source gaps it finds
- Source and citation analysis with five classifications, plus a gap report
- Crawlability checks across 40+ AI bots from 20+ vendors
- Crawl insights from server logs, via eight named integration methods
- Brand perception and fact-checking against facts you supply
Published proof
- Publishes eight named server-log integration methods, including Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS CloudFront and Akamai
- States crawlability checks across 40+ AI bots from 20+ vendors
- Publishes prompt caps per tier: 50 on Starter, 150 on Pro, 350 on Advanced
- Raised roughly $29M in total: a seed round led by 20VC in July 2025 and a $21M Series A led by Singular in November 2025
- Names Zalando, Squarespace, Hugo Boss, Brevo, TUI, Wix, n8n, Fielmann and Attio as customers
- 4.8 out of 5 on G2 across 18 reviews
#2
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
- Best for
- Teams already on Semrush who want a defensible answer without a new vendor
- Base
- Boston, with offices worldwide
- Entry price
- $99/mo per domain. Semrush One, bundling SEO and AI visibility, from $199/mo
- Terms
- Per domain and per seat. Extra prompts and extra seats are billed separately
For a lot of in-house teams this is the correct answer and the ranking above is beside the point. If Semrush is already your stack, adding the AI toolkit costs about $180 a month on top for 150 prompts, needs no procurement, no new login and no training, and puts the AI data next to the rankings and backlinks that explain it. That adjacency is worth real money for an SEO team specifically, because AI Overviews correlates with classic ranking more than any other surface and you already have the tools to move it. The reason it is not first is coverage: four engines, and Google reported as one combined number, so it cannot tell you whether an AI Mode problem exists.
Where it is stronger
- No new vendor, no procurement, no training and no extra login
- AI data next to the ranking and backlink data that explains it
- The cheapest genuine addition if you are already on Semrush
- The strongest tool here for the classic SEO work that AI Overviews still rewards
- The largest research and support organisation of anything on this list
Where it is not
- Four engines, with no Copilot and no Google AI Mode as a separate surface
- Google reported as one combined figure, averaging two surfaces that answer differently
- 25 prompts per domain included, so a real prompt set costs roughly $180 more
- Extra seats are $99 each, which adds up on a team of four
- No server-log or crawler analytics in the AI toolkit
What it does
- Engines included, as of 14 September 2026: ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, with Google reported as one combined surface
- Data access: exports and reporting within the Semrush platform
- AI-referred traffic: available through the wider Semrush analytics suite rather than the AI toolkit
- Recommendations: a site audit scoring AI readiness
- Prompt tracking with daily AI rankings, 25 prompts included per domain
- AI competitor analysis and prompt research
- Sits alongside rank tracking, backlinks, technical audit and the rest of the suite
Published proof
- Publishes the $99 per domain price and the 25-prompt allowance
- Publishes add-on pricing: roughly $60 for 50 extra prompts, $99 per extra domain, $99 per extra seat
- Semrush One bundles SEO and AI visibility from $199/mo
- Part of a long-established public company with a large published research output
- Publishes its own AI visibility research, which is itself among the most cited sources in this category
#3
Rankscale
- Best for
- Technical SEO teams who want maximum engine coverage and a site audit alongside it
- Base
- Europe, remote
- Entry price
- From $20/mo (Essentials). Pro $99, Growth $385, Enterprise $780
- Terms
- Monthly or annual, 15% off annual. Unused credits roll over to a per-tier cap
The best engine coverage per dollar here, and the site audit is the part that appeals to a technical team: 94 or more checkpoints scoring how readable your pages are to AI crawlers, which is recognisably the same shape of work as a technical SEO audit. Ten engines on every plan, including both Google surfaces, with more than 17 supported in total. Scheduling from hourly to monthly. The reservation for an in-house team is organisational rather than technical: it is bootstrapped, run by two founders, and publishes no compliance posture, which is a conversation you will have with your own security team rather than with the vendor.
Where it is stronger
- Ten engines on every plan, the widest coverage here with no tier gating
- A technical site audit that maps onto how SEO teams already work
- A $20 tier, so you can pilot it out of a personal card before asking for budget
- Hourly scheduling, useful for the surfaces that move fastest
- Credit rollover, so a quiet month funds a busy one
Where it is not
- $385 for this workload, well above Peec AI at $245
- A two-founder bootstrapped team, which your security review will ask about
- No published SOC 2, SSO or compliance posture
- Traffic analytics were still in beta at the time of writing
- No server-log analysis, so crawler behaviour is inferred rather than observed
What it does
- Engines included on every plan, as of 14 September 2026: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek and Mistral, with 17+ supported in total
- Data access: REST API, Looker Studio connector and an MCP server
- AI-referred traffic: Search Console and GA4 analytics, in beta at the time of writing
- Recommendations: GEO site audits with 94+ technical checkpoints
- Credit-based usage at roughly 0.25 credits per engine per prompt
- Scheduling from hourly to monthly
- Citation analysis showing which sources each engine cited
Published proof
- Publishes credit allowances and answer counts for every tier
- Publishes the consumption rate at roughly 0.25 credits per engine per prompt
- States 94+ technical checkpoints in its page audits
- Founders named publicly: Mathias Ptacek and Patrick Schmid
- Bootstrapped, with no outside funding announced
#4
AthenaHQ
- Best for
- Small SEO teams with no content resource who need the tool to draft the work
- Base
- United States
- Entry price
- Free Essential tier (300 credits). Starter $295/mo, Enterprise custom
- Terms
- Monthly or annual, 17% off annual. One credit is one AI response
The pick when the constraint is people rather than data. Most in-house SEO teams do not lack analysis, they lack anyone to write the pages the analysis points at, and the optimisation agent here drafts on-page and off-page recommendations rather than handing you another chart to interpret. The free tier at 300 credits is enough to answer the question your CMO asked without a purchase order. Built by two former Google Search and DeepMind engineers, which shows in the product's instincts about retrieval. The limit is scale: one credit is one AI response, and 3,600 credits does not cover a 150-prompt daily set across six engines.
Where it is stronger
- A genuine free tier, enough to answer the question without a purchase order
- Drafts the work rather than describing the problem, which suits a team with no writer
- Every engine on every tier, including Meta AI and Amazon Rufus
- Both Google surfaces separated, on every plan
- Founding team with real search engineering background
Where it is not
- 3,600 credits covers a fraction of this workload, so the real cost is an Enterprise quote
- Credit add-on pricing is on request rather than published
- API access on Starter costs extra, which complicates any reporting pipeline
- No server-log or crawler analytics
- $2.2M raised is the smallest funding base here
What it does
- Engines included on every tier, as of 14 September 2026: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok, plus DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral
- Data access: API access on Starter is a paid add-on, priced on request
- AI-referred traffic: not offered
- Recommendations: an advanced content optimisation agent producing on-page and off-page actions
- A free Essential tier at 300 credits
- The Athena Citation Engine on Starter and above
- SSO and audit logs on Enterprise
Published proof
- Y Combinator backed, with $2.2M raised
- Founders named publicly: Andrew Yan and Alan Yao, formerly of Google Search and DeepMind
- Publishes its credit definition plainly: one credit is one AI response
- Publishes the Starter price, the annual discount and the credit allowance
- Every tracked model is available on every tier, including the free one
#5
Omnia
- Best for
- Teams who want to test whether this matters before asking for budget
- Base
- Madrid
- Entry price
- From €79/mo (Growth, 25 prompts). Pro €279, Enterprise from €499
- Terms
- Monthly or annual, 20% off annual. 14-day free trial, no card required
The cleanest way to find out whether AI Search is a real problem for your category before you ask anyone for money. A 14-day trial with no card, then €79 for 25 prompts, which is enough to see whether you are absent from the questions that matter. The prompt discovery is the genuinely useful part for an SEO team, because it surfaces the questions people ask AI about your category, and those are not the same as your keyword list. Where it stops is scale: 150 prompts means the Enterprise tier at €499 or more, which is the most expensive way to do this workload in the guide.
Where it is stronger
- A no-card trial, which is the cheapest possible way to build a business case
- Prompt discovery that shows the gap between your keyword list and what people ask AI
- Both Google surfaces in the default four engines
- Credits that never expire
- Simple enough that a stakeholder can read it without you in the room
Where it is not
- The most expensive option here at this workload, from €499
- Four engines by default is the narrowest coverage in this guide
- 25 prompts on the entry tier, which is a pilot rather than a programme
- No AI-referred traffic reporting and no crawler data
- Priced in euros, which adds a line to a US finance conversation
What it does
- Engines included by default, as of 14 September 2026: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, with up to seven available
- Data access: API access and data exports on paid plans
- AI-referred traffic: not offered
- Recommendations: Omnio surfaces the questions buyers ask about your category
- Citation tracking in any language or region
- Competitive intelligence and share of voice
- Insight credits that never expire
Published proof
- Raised a €3.5M pre-seed in October 2025, led by Visionaries Club with Kfund and Baobab Ventures
- Founder named publicly: Daniel Espejo, previously at Klarna
- Publishes full pricing for all three tiers
- Offers a 14-day trial with no card required
- States that monthly and purchased credits combine and never expire
#6
Profound
- Best for
- In-house teams at large companies where security review and vendor stability decide the purchase
- Base
- New York
- Entry price
- From $99/mo (Starter, ChatGPT only). Growth $399, Enterprise custom
- Terms
- Prices shown are billed yearly. No free tier
If your purchase has to clear an information security review, this is the shortest path on the list, and that is not a small thing. It is the only tool here with published SOC 2, SSO and SAML, the best funded by a wide margin at $58.5M, and the only one with a review base large enough to be statistically meaningful at 140 or more. It also has agent analytics covering AI crawler and referral behaviour, which is the kind of data in-house teams actually use. It sits last because of what a small in-house team can buy without a sales process: $99 gets ChatGPT only, $399 gets three engines, and six engines means Enterprise at a price you have to ask for.
Where it is stronger
- The only published compliance posture here, which is often the deciding factor in-house
- Agent analytics covering crawler and referral behaviour
- The largest funding base, which answers the vendor-stability question for you
- The largest independent review base of anything on this list
- The most recognised brand, which shortens the internal conversation
Where it is not
- Six engines requires Enterprise, and Enterprise pricing is not published
- The $99 tier tracks ChatGPT only
- Growth at $399 covers 100 prompts, below the 150 this workload assumes
- No free tier, so evaluating it needs a budget conversation first
- The most expensive route to full coverage for a team of this size
What it does
- Engines by tier, as of 14 September 2026: ChatGPT at Starter; ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews at Growth; up to nine including Google AI Mode at Enterprise
- Data access: API and integrations on Enterprise
- AI-referred traffic: agent analytics covering AI crawler and referral behaviour
- Recommendations: Agents credits, from 100 a month at Starter
- Multiple company tracking on Enterprise
- SSO, SAML and SOC 2 compliance on Enterprise
- Dedicated Slack support on Enterprise
Published proof
- Raised $58.5M in total, including a $35M Series B led by Sequoia
- States SOC 2 compliance and SSO/SAML availability on Enterprise
- Publishes Starter and Growth pricing, and the engine count at each tier
- More than 140 G2 reviews at 4.6 out of 5, the largest review base in this category
- Publishes widely cited original research on AI Search
The case for buying nothing this year
Worth saying plainly, because no vendor will. There are in-house teams for whom the right move in 2026 is to run the questions manually once a quarter and spend the budget elsewhere.
You are probably one of them if three things are true. Your category has low AI Search volume, which you can sanity-check by asking whether your buyers are the kind of people who ask a model before they ask a colleague. Your organic traffic is stable and not showing the flat-clicks-rising-impressions pattern that usually precedes an AI problem. And you have no capacity to act on what a tool would tell you, because the fix is usually content and digital PR, and a dashboard does not produce either.
The manual version takes an afternoon. Write down thirty questions a buyer would ask, run them through ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and record who gets named and which URLs are cited underneath. Do it again in three months. If the answer is stable and you are in it, you have saved yourself $3,000 a year. If you are absent, you now have the evidence to ask for the budget, and a prompt list to start from.
What your existing stack already tells you
Before adding anything, two signals in tools you already pay for are worth reading.
The first is Search Console. Impressions rising while clicks stay flat, on queries where you still rank well, is the clearest early sign that AI answers are absorbing your traffic. It does not tell you whether you are named in those answers, which is the gap, but it tells you the surface is active in your category.
The second is your server logs, which most in-house teams already have and few read for this. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended leave records. If they are crawling you heavily, your content is reaching the retrieval layer and the problem is likely to be how quotable it is. If they are barely visiting, you have an access problem, and that is usually cheaper to fix than a content one.
Neither answers the question a tool answers, which is whether a model names you when someone asks. They do tell you whether it is urgent, and that is often enough to decide whether to spend this quarter or next.
What we left out, and why
We left out the classic SEO suites' AI features other than Semrush's. Most are a presence flag against a keyword list, which tells you an AI answer appeared and not whether it named you. That is a different question and the less useful one.
We left out content optimisation tools that report AI visibility as a side feature. Several are good at what they were built for, and none is a measurement tool. Buying one instead of a tracker leaves you optimising against numbers nobody is checking.
We left out anything without published pricing at any tier. In-house teams have to build a business case before they buy, and a tool you cannot price is a business case you cannot write.
FAQ
Questions buyers actually ask
- Do we need a separate AI Search tool if we already pay for Semrush?
- Only if you need more than four engines or need to separate Google AI Overviews from AI Mode. Semrush's AI toolkit adds about $180 a month for a 150-prompt set and puts the data next to your rankings, which is genuinely the lowest-friction option. The reason teams add a specialist tool anyway is source-level data: knowing which URLs a model read before answering, which is what tells you whether the fix is content or coverage.
- How do we build the business case internally?
- Run it manually first. Thirty questions, three engines, an afternoon, and record who gets named. A slide showing your three main competitors named in answers where you are absent does more than any vendor demo, and it costs nothing. Then price the tool against the traffic you can show is at risk in Search Console, not against a category-level statistic.
- Does our existing SEO work help in AI Search?
- Partly, and unevenly. AI Overviews leans on pages that already rank and on domains Google has trusted for years, so your existing work carries over well there. ChatGPT and AI Mode lean far more on third-party sources: review sites, Reddit, YouTube and comparison posts. That half is closer to digital PR than to SEO, which is usually the uncomfortable part of the conversation internally.
- How many prompts should an in-house team track?
- Between 100 and 150 for a single brand in a real category. Start with the questions your sales and support teams hear, the comparisons buyers make between you and two named competitors, and the category questions where you would want to be one of three names. Below thirty you are reading noise. Above two hundred you are usually tracking rephrasings and paying for them.
- Who owns this internally?
- SEO owns the measurement in almost every team we see, and that works. What breaks is the fix, because a large share of it is getting mentioned on sites you do not control, which sits with PR, comms or partnerships and is nobody's KPI. Agree that split before you buy the tool, or you will spend a year reporting a number you have no mandate to move.
- How long before the numbers move?
- One to two quarters for a change you can defend. Retrieval indexes refresh on their own schedules, earned coverage takes time to land and longer to be picked up, and review profiles build slowly. Fix your prompt set at the start and do not change it, because changing it changes the number without changing reality, and someone will eventually ask.
Changelog
What has changed since we published
- Sep 14, 2026
- First published. All prices and engine lists checked against each vendor's own pages on the same day.
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