Day one: What “free” gets you

Read the pricing pages and “free” turns out to mean three different things:

• Free with no time limit: Contentstack Canoe, AthenaHQ and Palmata.
• Seven-day free trials: Otterly.ai, Scrunch AI and Profound.
• Paid from the start: Peec AI, with no free plan and no advertised trial.

The first group looks like a three-way tie until you check what happens next. Contentstack Canoe’s free subscription re-runs your report every month. AthenaHQ’s 300 free credits and Palmata’s advanced report are one-time allotments.

How Contentstack Canoe approaches it

Contentstack Canoe is built for the long game. $0 forever with no credit card needed. After you sign up, you’ll get your first report in about two minutes.

• Free: one brand, 20 prompts a month on ChatGPT and Gemini, a site audit, your top two recommendations and a report that re-runs itself every month. Growth adds daily or weekly runs.
• Growth: $279 a month or $2,790 a year at a limited-time launch price. That buys five brands, four leading engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude), 2,000 prompts a month, up to 100 questions per monitor and API and MCP access.
• Add-ons: one-time purchases at $119 per 400-prompt pack and $59 per extra brand.

Give Contentstack Canoe your URL, and it drafts your products, buyer personas and competitors from your own site. You can edit any of it before a run. Each question is tagged with awareness, consideration or decision, so you can see the exact stage where a competitor takes the answer. The site audit, included on every plan, also checks whether AI crawlers can reach your site at all.

You could ask ChatGPT about your brand yourself, once. Doing it across four engines, 20 questions and 10 competitors every week, scored the same way each time, is a job that your team likely doesn’t have the resources for.

Conor Egan, SVP of Product at Contentstack, describes how each run ends: “Every Contentstack Canoe report ends with a ranked list of fixes and the sources worth going after, so teams know exactly where to start.”

How the competition approaches it

AthenaHQ has a free Essential tier with 300 credits, five AI models, competitor insights and content recommendations. The 300 credits do not renew, so you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan to get more. The Starter plan costs $295 a month for 3,600 credits and 11 models, and the Enterprise plan with custom credits includes API access and a recommendation engine.

Palmata is Contentful’s AI visibility tool, and Contentful is now officially part of Salesforce. Palmata’s free plan “never expires” and includes a one-time Advanced report, 450 analyzed prompts, ChatGPT and an MCP server. Beyond the free report, the only plan on the pricing page is Enterprise, at custom pricing, which covers ChatGPT and Gemini. Credits cost $10 each, and an Advanced report uses 60 of them.

Otterly.ai skips the free plan and offers a seven-day trial instead. When the trial ends, their Lite tier costs $29 a month for 15 prompts tracked daily, the lowest published paid price on this list. That base plan covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode cost extra. Their other tiers include Standard at $189 a month, Premium at $489 a month and Enterprise at custom pricing. API access begins at the Standard tier.

Scrunch AI skips the free plan too, offering a seven-day trial of its Core plan. When the trial ends, the Core tier costs $250 a month for five users, 125 unique prompts and 5,000 responses. Their Enterprise plan tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Meta, Copilot and Grok. API access is Enterprise-only. Scrunch also has a new owner, as Sitecore announced the acquisition on June 3, 2026.

Profound’s has two plans: Free and Enterprise. The Free plan is a trial, and it lets you explore Profound with limited AI Marketer credits, 50 prompts run daily for seven days, and visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The Enterprise plan tracks up to nine answer engines, includes API integrations and unlimited AI recommendations. Profound's pricing page lists no published self-serve price, so you can't compare costs without a sales conversation.

Peec AI skips the free step entirely. Starter costs $95 a month for 50 prompts and three models, and every tier includes unlimited users. API access and SSO sit on Enterprise. Extra models are an add-on, and the pricing page says "Price reflects one additional model based on the prompts included in this plan": $30, $70 or $140 a month on Starter, Pro and Advanced, billed annually. Claude isn't on that add-on list.

How Contentstack Canoe helps you act on the results

A ranked list of fixes tells you what to do on Monday. The next question is who does the work. Contentstack Canoe answers it in the same product:

• Agent OS blueprint: import one JSON file into Contentstack Agent OS to get the AEO Content Optimizer agent. It reads your latest Contentstack Canoe report over MCP, checks your content types and existing entries, creates draft entries for gaps and posts one Slack digest. The agent never publishes and your team approves every change.
• MCP server: the MCP server connects Contentstack Canoe to Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf and other MCP clients.
• Eight agent skills: weekly visibility brief, competitor gap analysis, citation target list, content briefs from lost questions, fix it in Contentstack, re-measure after a change, visibility alerts and leadership summary. The skills work over MCP or from an exported report file.

All of it comes with Contentstack Canoe’s Growth tier. On Peec and Scrunch, API access doesn't start until Enterprise. You don't need Contentstack's CMS for the reports, the MCP server or the skills. The Agent OS blueprint is for teams already on Contentstack.

Then comes day 31 again. Ship the fix, run the monitor (or let the re-measure skill do it) and see what moved. When the number moves, you know the answers changed, not the scoring. As our launch post explains, “The scoring is built to be trusted, too. Mentions, position and citations are counted in code, so runs compare cleanly over time.” 

Each AI visibility tool at a glance

Prices as listed on each vendor’s pricing page, October 2026.

What this means for your team

Every tool on this list can show you a score. Before you commit to one, ask each vendor the same three questions:

• What’s still running on day 31 if we don’t pay?

• Where do the questions come from, and can we edit them?

• Who turns the findings into a fix, and does a person approve it before it goes live?

The free plan answers the first and shows where every question comes from. Growth lets you edit them and adds the agent that drafts the fix. Run your first AI visibility report free, then check back on day 31.