When someone asks ChatGPT what a tool costs, the answer can only be as good as what the engine was able to read. In December 2024 Vercel and MERJ reported that none of the major AI crawlers render JavaScript. The bots from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity read the HTML a server sends and stop there. Google's Gemini is the exception, because it uses Googlebot's rendering.
So we read the pricing pages of nine AI visibility vendors the same way. On 22 September 2026 we fetched each page's HTML once, ran no JavaScript, and then went to the vendor's own feature and documentation pages wherever the pricing page left a gap.
The result
| Vendor | One readable entry price? | What the crawler gets |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Yes | Lite at $29/mo, or $25/mo billed annually |
| Cituna | Yes | Starter at $39/mo |
| Scrunch AI | Yes | Starter at $250/mo billed annually, $300 month to month |
| AthenaHQ | Yes | Starter at $295/mo |
| SE Ranking | Split | Two products: SE Visible at $99/mo, or Core at $129/mo plus an $89/mo AI Search add-on |
| Semrush | Split | A $99/mo AI Visibility plan per domain, billed annually, with MCP only in other Semrush plans |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Split | Three starting figures: $50/mo prompt packs, $199/mo standalone, or inside Lite at $129/mo |
| Peec AI | No | Plan names, but the prices arrive by JavaScript |
| Profound | No | A free trial and "Custom" Enterprise pricing, with no number |
Four of the nine publish one entry price that a crawler can read in a single fetch. Three publish prices but split them across products or paths, which leaves the engine to choose. Two give a crawler no number at all.
Peec AI: the price is there, for people
Peec's pricing page names its plans in the HTML: Starter, Pro, Advanced and Enterprise. The dollar figures are loaded afterwards by JavaScript. We fetched the page three times and the digits were never in the server's response.
A person in a browser sees the prices. Going by Vercel and MERJ's findings, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot see plan names without numbers.
Profound: no number to read
In the HTML a crawler receives, Profound's pricing page shows two tiers: a free trial, and Enterprise priced as "Custom". A per-client agency price appears only after a visitor switches the page to its agency view, and that figure is not in the server HTML either (checked again on 23 September 2026). Custom pricing is a legitimate way to sell. It also means an engine asked "how much does Profound cost" has nothing from Profound to repeat, and will repeat whoever else wrote a figure down.
Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking: a number, but which one
Each of these sells AI tracking through more than one door.
- Ahrefs shows $50, $199 or $129 a month, depending on whether you buy prompt packs, the standalone Brand Radar AI product, or the Lite plan that bundles it.
- Semrush sells its AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain, billed annually, and says MCP access "is included in Semrush One and SEO Classic plans".
- SE Ranking sells a separate product, SE Visible, at $99 a month, and also an $89 add-on to its $129 Core plan.
None of these pages is wrong. Each leaves the engine to decide which figure answers the question.
Why this matters
In our study of 3,531 answers from seven engines, roundups took 52.5 percent of the citations to the most-cited sites. When a vendor's own page offers no readable price, the price an engine repeats comes from someone else's roundup, as of whenever that roundup was written.
Check your own pricing page
- Fetch it the way a crawler does. Run
curl -s https://example.com/pricing, replacing the address with your own, and search the output for your price. If it is not there, most AI crawlers cannot see it either. - Publish one entry price per product, as text. Not in an image, and not only in a script.
- If you sell AI tracking in more than one way, say which one starts cheapest, on one page.
- Let the search crawlers in. OpenAI states that sites opted out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers".
Method
Each pricing page was fetched as server HTML on 22 September 2026, with no JavaScript run. Where the pricing page left a question open, the vendor's feature and documentation pages were fetched the same way. Every figure was recorded in the vendor's own words, with its address. No roundups, review sites or third-party blogs were used as a source for any figure. "One readable entry price" means the lowest paid plan's price appears as text in that HTML, for a single product.