Best AI SEO Tools in 2026, by Job: Prices Read Off the Vendors' Pages

The best AI SEO tools are not one category. The phrase covers five jobs: finding what is broken on your site, knowing what AI search says about you, researching keywords, writing and optimising content, and tracking rankings in results that now include AI Overviews. A tool built for one of those jobs rarely does another, and "AI" means something different in each. What is AI SEO? explains the two meanings behind the phrase; this list sorts the tools by which one they serve.

Every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 19 October 2026, with the currency and billing term the page showed. Three vendors publish no price, and they are listed that way rather than estimated. Prices change; the source links are at the end so you can check today's.

The list at a glance

Job	Tool	Price as displayed	Free tier
Find what is broken	Screaming Frog SEO Spider	£199 per licence per year	Yes, up to 500 URLs
Find what is broken	99Visibility site-health scan	Included on every plan	Yes
Find what is broken, research keywords, track rankings	Ahrefs	Starter $29/mo; Lite $129/mo; Standard $249/mo; Advanced $449/mo; Enterprise $1,499/mo	Ahrefs Free, for your own site
Find what is broken, research keywords, track rankings	Semrush	SEO $139/mo, or $117.33/mo billed annually; Starter $199 or $165.17; Pro+ $299 or $248.17; Advanced custom	Yes, $0/mo
Know what AI says about you	99Visibility	Starter $49/mo; Growth $99/mo; Pro $149/mo	Yes: 1 brand, 1 audit a month, ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews
Know what AI says about you	Ahrefs Brand Radar AI	From $199/mo; custom prompt packages $50, $100 or $250/mo	No
Know what AI says about you	Profound	No public price: Trial free, Enterprise custom	Trial
Know what AI says about you	Peec AI	No price shown on the page today; $95/mo Starter when we read it on 16 October	No
Research keywords	Keywords Everywhere	Bronze $84 billed annually, 100,000 credits a year	No credit plan
Write and optimise content	Surfer	Discovery $49, Standard $99, Pro $182, Peace of Mind $299, AI Search Analytics $82, each per month billed yearly; Enterprise custom	No
Write and optimise content	Clearscope	Essentials $129/mo; Business $399/mo; Enterprise custom	No
Write and optimise content	Frase	Starter $49/mo, or $39 billed yearly; Professional $129 or $103; Scale $299 or $239; Enterprise custom	No
Write and optimise content	Jasper	Pro $69 per seat per month, or $59 billed yearly; Business custom	No
Write and optimise content	MarketMuse	No public price: every plan is "Book a demo"	A free tier is listed, unpriced
Track rankings, AI results included	SE Ranking	Core $129/mo, or $103.20 billed annually; Growth $279 or $223.20; AI Search add-on $89/mo, or $71.20 annually; Enterprise custom	No

Job 1: find what is broken on your site

AI search inherits the SEO basics. Google's requirement for AI Overviews and AI Mode is that "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet", with "no additional requirements" beyond that (AI features and your website, last updated 10 December 2025). So the first job is the oldest one.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider: the crawler

Free up to 500 URLs, £199 per licence per year beyond that. The AI in it is literal: both the free and paid feature lists include "Crawl with OpenAI & Gemini". It is a desktop crawler, so it finds broken links, redirect chains, missing titles and noindex tags at the scale of your whole site. It does not tell you what any AI platform says about you.

Semrush and Ahrefs site audits

Both bundle a cloud site audit into their SEO plans: Semrush from $139 a month ($117.33 billed annually), Ahrefs from the $29 Starter. Ahrefs Free gives you audit data for a site you own. For most teams one of the two is already paid for, and that decides it.

99Visibility site-health scan: the AI-search half, free

Our site-health scan checks status, redirects, HTTPS, title, description, canonical, H1, Open Graph, robots.txt, sitemap and indexing signals, and it runs on every plan including Free. The part the general crawlers do not do: it requests your page as each AI crawler and reads your robots.txt bot by bot, so it shows where robots.txt says yes and your firewall says no. That gap is invisible from a browser and it is the one that keeps a page out of ChatGPT search; OpenAI's own documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI crawler documentation).

Job 2: know what AI search says about you

This is the job that did not exist three years ago, and the one most "AI SEO" marketing is really about. No crawler or writing tool does it; you need something that asks the platforms and records the answers. We compared this category in depth, with per-answer costs, in the best AI visibility tools in 2026; here is where it stands on 19 October.

99Visibility

Free for one brand, one audit a month, on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Starter is $49 a month for 25 prompts, 15 audits a month and all six platforms (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude); Growth $99; Pro $149. Each audit records what every platform answered, checks each answer against the facts you supply, and runs the crawler-access check above in the same pass. It is ours, so weigh this paragraph accordingly; the pricing page has every limit.

Ahrefs Brand Radar AI

From $199 a month on the pricing page, with custom prompt packages at $50, $100 and $250 a month. Its strength is an index you search rather than prompts you set up, which makes it the fastest way to look at a category you do not yet track; the trade-off is that it measures Ahrefs' prompts, not yours.

Profound, Peec AI and the others

Profound's pricing page shows a free trial and a custom Enterprise plan and no number. Peec AI's pricing page showed plan names with no prices when we read it on 19 October; three days earlier it listed Starter at $95 a month. Semrush's pricing page now folds AI search into its SEO plans under one "SEO + AI Search" tab, with no separately priced toolkit shown; on 16 October its AI Visibility Toolkit page listed $99 a month per domain. Otterly.AI's Lite plan was $29 a month on 16 October. Where a price is more than a day old, it says so, and the GEO tools comparison carries the 16 October readings in full.

Job 3: research keywords

Semrush and Ahrefs own this job and their plans are above. The AI in both is assistance: intent labels, clustering, suggested topics. The data underneath is the same Google Ads and clickstream data it was before.

Keywords Everywhere: the cheap entry

Credit-based: "1 Credit = 1 Keyword. Credits expire after one year." Bronze is $84 billed annually for 100,000 credits. A credit covers volume, CPC, competition and twelve months of trend for one keyword, though widgets that show related keywords spend a credit on each one shown, so a single search can consume many. We used it for the AI visibility long tail in our own keyword research; its numbers are Google Keyword Planner data, which is not directly comparable with other vendors' estimates, and we say so wherever we quote them.

Job 4: write and optimise content with AI

This is the first meaning of AI SEO: tools that make the writing and optimising faster. One caution before the list. Google's spam policies name "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users" as an example of scaled content abuse (spam policies, last updated 28 August 2026). Every tool here can draft; none of them makes a page worth indexing.

Surfer

Discovery $49, Standard $99, Pro $182 and Peace of Mind $299 a month, each shown billed yearly, plus a separate AI Search Analytics plan at $82 a month billed yearly; Enterprise is custom. The page shows no month-to-month price. Content scoring against the pages that rank, with an AI writing assistant inside the editor.

Clearscope

Essentials $129 a month, Business $399, Enterprise custom; no annual price shown. Term-coverage reports and content grading for writers who already know what to write.

Frase

Starter $49 a month, or $39 billed yearly; Professional $129 or $103; Scale $299 or $239; Enterprise custom. Briefs, drafts and SERP summaries; the cheapest full workflow in this group.

Jasper

Pro $69 per seat per month, or $59 billed yearly; Business is custom. A writing platform with brand voice controls rather than an SEO tool, which is the honest way to use it.

MarketMuse

Four plans, Free, Optimize, Research and Strategy, and no public price for any of them: every plan is "Book a demo". Topic modelling and content inventories for larger sites.

Job 5: track rankings, AI results included

SE Ranking

Core $129 a month, or $103.20 billed annually; Growth $279 or $223.20; Enterprise custom. The reason it is in an AI SEO list is the add-on: "AI Search" at $89 a month, or $71.20 billed annually, described on the page as an "AI Results Tracker: AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, ChatGPT", with 100 prompts tracked daily on Core and 250 on Growth. If you want one dashboard with classic rankings and AI results side by side, this is the plainest option in the list.

Semrush and Ahrefs track rankings inside the plans above.

How to choose

• Start with what is free. Google Search Console, Ahrefs Free on your own site, Screaming Frog's 500 URLs, and a free 99Visibility audit cover the first two jobs for a small site at no cost. Pay when you hit a limit, not before.
• Ask which meaning of "AI" you are buying. Surfer, Clearscope, Frase, Jasper and MarketMuse use AI to help you write. 99Visibility, Brand Radar, Profound and Peec tell you what AI search says. SE Ranking's add-on tracks where you appear in AI results. They do not substitute for each other.
• Read the billing term. Half the prices on this page are "per month, billed yearly". Surfer shows no monthly-billing price at all; Frase and SE Ranking show both, and the gap is 20% or more.
• Treat "no public price" as information. Profound, MarketMuse and, today, Peec sell through a demo. That usually means a contract and a sales cycle, which is fine for an enterprise and a poor fit for a team that wants to start this week.

Sources

All pricing pages opened 19 October 2026 unless noted: Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, Profound, Peec AI, Keywords Everywhere, Surfer, Clearscope, Frase, Jasper, SE Ranking, MarketMuse. The 16 October readings for Peec AI, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit and Otterly.AI are in our GEO tools comparison. 99Visibility's prices are from our pricing page. Platform requirements: Google, OpenAI.

FAQ

What is the best AI SEO tool?

There is no single one, because the phrase covers five jobs. For a site audit, Screaming Frog or the audit inside Semrush or Ahrefs. For what AI search says about you, a tool that asks the platforms: 99Visibility, Brand Radar, Profound or Peec. For writing, Surfer, Clearscope or Frase. For tracking AI results beside rankings, SE Ranking's add-on.

Are there free AI SEO tools?

Yes, for the first two jobs: Google Search Console, Ahrefs Free for a site you own, Screaming Frog up to 500 URLs, and 99Visibility's free plan with one audit a month on two platforms plus the site-health scan. The writing tools in this list have trials at most.

Do AI SEO tools improve AI visibility?

A tool shows you what to fix; the fix is what changes the result, and the documented fixes are access, indexing and correct facts. No tool in this list, ours included, changes what a platform chooses to cite by itself, and we do not claim otherwise.

Start with the free job. Run a free AI visibility audit, crawler-access check included: no credit card.