If your team has fewer than five buyer meetings a week and no one has yet said “the AI told me about a company that isn’t you,” you probably don’t need any of these tools this quarter. The reason to run an AI search visibility tracker is that it’s already started happening: prospects are showing up on discovery calls with a shortlist that came out of ChatGPT or Perplexity, and you can’t see what’s on it.
Who this is for
This guide is for the marketing lead or founder at a small B2B business (roughly 5 to 30 employees, one or two flagship domains) who has to make a decision this month: is AI search visibility worth a line item in the marketing budget, and if so, which tool. It isn’t written for Fortune 500 buyers or agencies running twenty client accounts; the specialist enterprise platforms in this category are legitimately powerful, but they’re priced and packaged for a different customer. If you’re weighing whether AI-cited coverage even matters for your category, start with the free Grader described below and skip the paid tools until it earns the spend.
Our pick: HubSpot AEO
The reason HubSpot AEO wins here’s boring and specific: the plan structure matches the shape of a small B2B marketing team’s actual problem.
HubSpot lists AEO at $50/mo ($45 when paid yearly), with no additional HubSpot subscription required, and the plan includes prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, brand visibility and citation analysis, competitor share of voice, and prioritized recommendations for what to do next.
There’s also a free trial covering 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini with no credit card required, and after the trial you continue at $50/month for the same 25 prompts and same three engines with no interruption to your data.
Two things make it the right start for a small B2B team specifically. First, HubSpot puts a genuinely free one-time Grader in front of the paid product.
AI Search Grader is a free one-time diagnostic that scores your brand and returns a snapshot of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini currently represent you, while HubSpot AEO is an ongoing monitoring tool that tracks visibility across specific prompts, compares competitors, and delivers prioritized recommendations at $50/month.
That two-step ladder, free diagnostic followed by a cheap continuous tracker, is what a small B2B founder needs to justify the spend to themselves.
Second, HubSpot is explicit that the tool works regardless of your stack.
AEO tracks how your brand appears in AI answers regardless of where your website is hosted.
A small B2B on Webflow or WordPress gets the same product a HubSpot customer does.
The honest limits: coverage stops at three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini), which is fine for most US B2B buyers today but leaves Google AI Overviews, Copilot, and Claude out of the picture. And 25 prompts is a starter budget, not a long-term one.
Most teams expand their prompt set over time to track more of the prompts that matter to their business, and you can purchase additional prompts at any time with no limit to how many you can add.
The runner-up: Peec AI
Peec AI is the tool to pick if you want multi-engine coverage and unlimited team access from day one.
The Starter plan includes 50 prompts across three AI models of your choice (from a menu that includes ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Naver AI), unlimited users, daily tracking frequency, and one project, with prompt suggestions, GEO recommendations, and CSV exports.
The under-appreciated feature for a small team is MCP access.
Peec AI MCP is available on all paid plans today with no additional cost and no enterprise tier required; most tools that offer this kind of data connectivity gate it behind expensive API plans, and Peec doesn’t.
That means a two-person marketing team can wire visibility data through MCP into their existing tooling and get an automated Monday brief without paying for a dedicated integrations engineer.
Peec also publishes agency pricing separately, so if your small B2B is one of several brands a partner agency is tracking, the packaging is designed for that from the start rather than bolted on as an enterprise concession.
If your marketing team already pays for Semrush, adding the AI Visibility Toolkit as a $99/month module is the lowest-friction way to get AI-answer tracking into a workflow that already exists.
The toolkit does Prompt Tracking to monitor your visibility for specific, high-value prompts on platforms like Google AI Mode and ChatGPT, and an AI Search Site Audit with an AI Search Health widget that flags potential blockers so you can ensure your site is fully accessible.
The price is $99 per month, and there’s no free trial.
The reason it isn’t higher on this list is math.
In a corporate account with multiple users, access to the AI Visibility Toolkit can be shared across your team by adding another license ($99) for each subuser on the account, and additional domains or locations for Brand Performance can be purchased for $99 each.
Semrush positions the AI Toolkit as a premium add-on at $99 per month per domain, and for multi-brand teams the cost compounds quickly because each domain needs its own subscription; adding a teammate to a Semrush One plan starts at $45 per user, and giving that teammate access to the AI Toolkit features costs an additional $99 per user.
For a lean B2B team with two domains and two teammates, you’re at HubSpot AEO’s price times six before you’ve tracked a single extra prompt.
Semrush One bundles the SEO and AI Visibility toolkits into three subscription plans (Starter, Pro+, and Advanced), which automatically increase your prompt tracking limits, and can make more sense than the standalone add-on if you don’t already have a Semrush subscription, since it folds classic SEO in.
The cheapest published paid entry: Otterly.ai
Otterly is the tool to consider if the question is genuinely “does AI search matter for us at all?” and you want to answer it for less than lunch.
Otterly.ai prices its three plans by prompt volume and audit limits, and the four base engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot) and unlimited team members are included in every plan; Lite is $29/month for 15 tracked prompts and 1,000 GEO Audits a month, Standard is $189/month for 100 prompts with Agent Analytics, API and MCP access, and 5,000 GEO URL Audits a month, and Premium is $489/month for 400 prompts.
The $29 plan is a real plan, not a decoy. But the ceiling arrives fast.
Otterly.AI’s Lite plan at $29/mo gives you 15 prompts and 1 workspace, and the next tier up, Standard, is $189/mo for 100 prompts, a 6x price jump for any team that needs more than a handful of prompts tracked.
The other detail worth flagging is engine coverage.
Four engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot) are included by default; adding Claude, Gemini, or Google AI Mode costs $9 to $439 a month per engine, depending on tier.
If Gemini is one of the engines your buyers use, factor the add-on into the real monthly bill.
How to choose between them
The decision tree is short. If AI search is a brand-new line item and you want to validate it before spending anything, run the free HubSpot AI Search Grader once, decide, and stop there if the report is fine. If you decide to pay, start with HubSpot AEO at $50 a month unless one of two things is true: you need more than three engines side by side (in which case pick Peec AI), or your team already runs on Semrush and would rather have one login (in which case add the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit). Otterly’s $29 tier is the right answer only for a solo operator tracking a handful of prompts as a diagnostic.
Whatever you pick, treat the dashboard as a to-do list, not a scoreboard. Every one of these tools tells you where you stand; none of them writes the content, earns the third-party citation, or fixes the schema that would change the answer. If your week is already full, and for most small B2B founders it’s, that gap is where the work actually happens. Reviewing tracker data next to your monthly customer-getting rhythm (the same rhythm you’d use to plan a podcast guest push, a corporate gifting campaign for target accounts, or a prospecting outbound cycle) is what turns a visibility score into pipeline.
