Research reportgeo
Who Publishes a Price? 68 AI-Visibility Tools vs 11 Managed Services
Four of the 68 AI-visibility software tools in our index sell only on a custom quote. Among managed GEO services, 6 of 11 do: the clearest split in the category.
Before you shortlist anything in this category, there is a cheaper question than “what does it cost”: can you find out what it costs at all, or does finding out require a sales call and two weeks? That question has a countable answer, because our index records each listing’s pricing tiers as the vendor publishes them.
Of the 68 AI-visibility software tools in our index where we could read a pricing page on 2026-08-13, 64 let you learn the cost without contacting anyone. 59 publish at least one price in currency, and 5 more are free or open-source. Four sell only on a custom quote. Of the 11 managed GEO and citation services where we could read a pricing page, 6 sell only on a custom quote.
That is the split worth knowing. Self-serve software in this category is priced in public almost without exception. Managed services are roughly a coin flip.
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 are transcribed from the vendor’s own live pricing page when we research or re-verify a listing. They are not inferred and not negotiated.
For this census we classified each listing by what its tiers actually show:
- Publishes a price. At least one tier states a figure in currency.
from $46.70/monthcounts, and so does$99/mo (10 Addlly Credits). - Free or open-source. No currency figure anywhere, because the readable tiers are free. The price is knowable; it is zero.
- Quote only. No tier states a figure and none is free. Every plan reads
Custom,Custom pricing, orContact sales.
We read only the price field, never the feature bullets. 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 our 87 published listings, 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.
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. They are unresearched by us, 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.
The 68 software tools
| What the pricing page shows | Count | Share of the 68 |
|---|---|---|
| At least one price in currency | 59 | 87% |
| Free or open-source, no paid figure | 5 | 7% |
| Quote only | 4 | 6% |
The five free ones are worth separating from the four quote-only ones, because lumping them together would be wrong in the direction that matters. Archytas AISpy, GEOrank, RankLens and Syntropic publish no paid price because there is no paid plan to price. They are free or self-hosted. Canonry is free and open-source at the core with two custom-quoted layers above it, so a buyer who wants the managed version does face a quote, but the software itself is priced at zero in public. None of these five is withholding a number.
The four that sell only on a quote
| Tool | What our index records, as of 2026-08-13 |
|---|---|
| Adobe Brand Visibility | One tier, custom, contact sales. No standalone price; sold inside an Adobe CX Enterprise contract, no self-serve signup. |
| 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. |
All four are established enterprise marketing platforms that added AI-visibility measurement to an existing suite, rather than startups built for it. Three of the four require a base-platform contract before the AI-visibility component is reachable at all. That is a structural reason for the quote rather than a pricing strategy choice: what you are buying is a suite seat, and the AI-visibility feature is a line item inside it.
These four names are not new to this site. Our billing-model census flagged the same four while counting a different thing, namely that four of the five tools we classify as usage-based publish no rate card. That was a note about the usage-based bucket, out of 5. This is a count across the whole software corpus, out of 68. The two happen to name the same vendors, and neither number is derived from the other.
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% |
AEOEngine, Digital Elevator, GetCito, Omniscient Digital and Percepture publish retainer figures. First Page Sage, Go Fish Digital, Minuttia, Omnius, RankZero and Siege Media scope and quote instead. Eleven is a small denominator and we would not build a market-wide claim on it, but the direction is unambiguous and it matches how agency work is normally sold, since the deliverable is defined per client rather than per plan.
What this actually tells a buyer
The practical read is about which shortlist you are building, not which tool is better.
If you are evaluating self-serve software, published pricing is the norm and not a differentiator. 59 of 68 give you a number on the page, so a tool that will not is the exception and worth asking about directly. If you are evaluating the enterprise suites, expect a quote: all four quote-only tools are suites, and three of them require you to buy the platform first, so the real question is what the base contract costs before the AI-visibility feature enters the conversation. And if you are weighing software against a managed service, budget for a scoping call on roughly half the services you approach.
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 tools in the CitedIndex index where a pricing page could be read” and “of the 11 managed services where a pricing page could be read”, 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 are unknown to us rather than evidence of anything, 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.