Who Published a Price? The 13 August 2026 CitedIndex Study

Before you shortlist anything in this category, ask whether you can learn the advertised price without contacting sales. This dated study measures recorded pricing disclosure, not checkout eligibility, total cost or the time a sales conversation takes.

Editorial clarification — 5 September 2026. The August 13 counts below are retained against the original population, not remeasured using today’s index. They reproduce from warehouse listing/taxonomy collector run 8116, observed at 2026-08-13 03:15:01 UTC, and an explicit manifest of the content-hash versions already observed by that run. This recovers the archived listing records, not the original vendors’ web-page captures or proof that all vendors were checked that day. The classification and archive limitations are stated below; contract eligibility, vendor motives and present-day prices have not been newly verified.

In the archived August 13 corpus, 68 software records and 11 managed-service records contain readable pricing tiers. Of those software records, 59 include a currency price, 5 record a free software offer without a currency price, and 4 use quote-only pricing. Of those service records, 5 include a currency price and 6 use quote-only pricing.

That is the split worth knowing. In this archived corpus, a recorded public price or free offer was more common among readable software records than among readable managed-service records. That is a disclosure finding about the listed population, not a current market rate or evidence of self-serve checkout.

How we counted

Each listing in our index carries a pricingTiers record: the named plans a vendor publishes, each with the price string exactly as that vendor displays it, such as $189/month, Free, or Custom — contact sales. These records are intended to transcribe vendor offers when a listing is researched or re-verified, not negotiated prices. The warehouse preserves our stored transcription; it does not by itself prove that the transcription covered every offer or was correct in every detail.

For this census we classified each listing by what its archived tier price fields show:

• Publishes a price. At least one tier states a figure in currency. from $46.70/month counts, and so does $99/mo (10 Addlly Credits).
• Free software offer recorded. No currency figure in the recorded price fields, and at least one recorded free or open-source offer. This does not establish zero infrastructure or API costs, indefinite hosted use, or that a managed option is free.
• Quote only in the record. No recorded tier states a currency figure and none is free. The recorded plans use custom or contact-sales pricing. This is not a search of every vendor page for a published floor.

The classification reads only the recorded price field, never the feature bullets or all of the vendor’s website. Adobe’s listing, for instance, notes a reported third-party estimate of its entry cost inside its tier description. That is someone else’s reporting rather than Adobe publishing a rate card, so Adobe counts as quote-only here.

The denominator is the 72 AI-visibility and GEO software tools among the 87 listings published in this index on 2026-08-13, kept separate from the 15 managed citation-services agencies, because “does it publish a price” means something different for a product than for a retainer. Both are counted below, separately, and that separation is the point of the article.

That date is part of the finding, not a footnote. This census described recorded pricing for a cohort of 72 software listings on one day; the index has grown since, and every figure below was measured against that 72. Re-pointing these numerators at a larger index would produce numbers that were never counted, so the count stands as taken and a later pass will be a new census rather than a correction to this one.

Four of the 72 software tools carry no readable pricing record at all and sit outside every software figure here: Auto-GEO, Big Leads, Brandlight and CiteMentor. Their pricing records are missing in this snapshot, not confirmed as secretive, which is why the counts are quoted out of 68 and not out of 72. The same applies on the services side. 5W PR, BrightEdge, GrowLeads and iPullRank have no readable pricing record, so the services counts are quoted out of 11 and not out of 15.

1. The 68 software tools

What the pricing page shows	Count	Share of the 68
At least one price in currency	59	87%
Free software offer recorded, no currency figure	5	7%
Quote only	4	6%

The five records with a free software offer are Archytas AISpy, GEOrank, RankLens, Syntropic and Canonry. In the archived records, these offers explain why no paid currency figure was present; they must not be conflated with a missing record. Canonry’s record included a free self-hosted core and custom-quoted managed layers. That does not establish a free hosted service, a particular open-source licence or zero operating costs. These are historical record classifications, not current plan assurances.

2. The four software records with quote-only pricing

Tool	What our index records, as of 2026-08-13
Adobe Brand Visibility	Recorded custom/contact-sales pricing; no currency figure in the archived price field.
Cision AI Visibility Dashboard	One custom tier, and it is the CisionOne base platform, required before the AI-visibility dashboard is available.
Conductor	Three named tiers (Essentials, Growth, Enterprise), each quoted as a custom annual contract.
Meltwater GenAI Lens	Two custom tiers: the Meltwater base platform, plus GenAI Lens as an add-on.

These records describe suite or platform offers, so a buyer should ask whether a base contract is required and whether the AI component is included or added separately. This price-field census does not independently establish every eligibility condition or the vendor’s reason for using a quote. The linked vendor pages are current destinations, not frozen evidence of their August wording.

Our billing-model walkthrough explains a separate question: how an offer bills. A custom quote is not evidence of usage-based billing. The older cross-reference to a five-tool usage-based bucket was misleading and has been withdrawn; this article’s disclosure counts do not depend on it.

3. The 11 managed services

What the pricing page shows	Count	Share of the 11
At least one price in currency	5	45%
Quote only	6	55%

The archived records for AEOEngine, Digital Elevator, GetCito, Omniscient Digital and Percepture include currency figures. Those for First Page Sage, Go Fish Digital, Minuttia, Omnius, RankZero and Siege Media use quote pricing. This does not establish that no floor appeared elsewhere on those vendors’ sites. Eleven is a small, selected denominator. It describes these recorded offers, not the probability that a service chosen elsewhere will require a quote or the reasons an agency prices this way.

What this actually tells a buyer

The practical read is about which shortlist you are building, not which tool is better.

Use a public price to make an initial budget comparison, then check billing term, allowances, add-ons, taxes and eligibility. A published number does not prove self-serve signup: a vendor may still require a demo or a base-platform contract. With a managed service, ask what deliverables the stated floor includes and what remains scoped separately. Do not turn the historical service percentage into a forecast of how many calls your own shortlist will require.

None of this measures value. A published price is not a good price, and several of the quote-only platforms may well be worth their contract. It measures how much work it takes to build a comparison, which is a real cost when you are early in a search and trying to rule things out cheaply.

Citing these numbers

If you quote these figures, please quote them against their denominators: “of the 68 AI-visibility software records in the CitedIndex archive with readable pricing tiers” and “of the 11 managed-service records with readable pricing tiers”, both as of 2026-08-13. We index this category; we have not surveyed it, and a count of our corpus is not a percentage of the market. The eight listings with no readable pricing record were unknown in this snapshot rather than evidence of vendor secrecy, and the software and services figures answer the same question about two different kinds of seller, so they should not be added together into a single rate.

Reproducing the dated records

The population and category memberships are fixed to warehouse collector run 8116, not a moving date filter. Pricing is joined to explicit listing-id/content-hash pairs from versions first observed no later than that run. The historical recovery on 5 September 2026 reproduced the published category totals; it did not fetch August vendor pages or rerun today’s listings as if they were the old cohort. Current listing pages can have different categories and prices. Big Leads, for example, remains in the software denominator used by this dated study rather than being retrospectively moved to services.

The registered reproduction queries classify only priceDisplay: a currency-prefixed number (or number followed by USD, EUR or GBP) takes precedence, then a free/open-source label, then a quote label; an absent or empty tier record is unknown. The explicit content hashes keep the reconstructed input fixed rather than selecting a newer version on each run. The table percentages are rounded from these counts. A dollar-zero tier can satisfy the price-field test, so a currency-price record is not a claim that the vendor charges for every offer.

Recorded totals for this edition (all as of 13 August 2026):

72 software listings form the historical software cohort.

15 managed-service listings form the historical service cohort.

68 software records contain readable pricing tiers.

59 software records include a currency price.

5 software records contain a free offer without a currency price.

4 software records use quote-only pricing.

4 software records have no readable pricing tiers.

11 managed-service records contain readable pricing tiers.

5 managed-service records include a currency price.

6 managed-service records use quote-only pricing.

4 managed-service records have no readable pricing tiers.