How much does an AI visibility audit cost?
By Miles Burke, founder of CitableReport.
Published .
An AI visibility audit costs anything from nothing, if you do it yourself, to tens of thousands of dollars for an enterprise agency project. For most businesses the realistic choice is between an automated audit at a few dollars and a specialist agency audit at roughly $1,500 to $5,000.
There is no standard price, because "AI visibility audit" means different things to different providers. This guide sets out what each kind of audit costs, using prices providers publish, what drives the cost, and what to ask before you pay.
Key takeaways
- An AI visibility audit costs anything from nothing, if you do it yourself, to tens of thousands of dollars for an enterprise agency project.
- Specialist agencies publish one-off audit prices of roughly $1,500 to $5,000 (£2,000 to £5,000 in the UK), with larger projects above that.
- AI visibility tracking tools are a monthly cost, from about $29 to $500 a month, and track mentions rather than audit your site.
- The price is driven by how many questions and AI assistants are tested, how many pages are read, competitor comparisons, and whether fixes are done for you.
- Whatever you pay, ask for evidence behind every finding, fixes in order of impact, and a way to re-test.
What are the options, and what does each cost?
There are six ways to get an AI visibility audit, from free to expensive:
| Option | Typical cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Free, plus your time | An afternoon for a small site, using a browser and free tools from Google and Bing. |
| Automated audit tool | Free to a few hundred dollars, once | Reads your site and reports what to fix. Ours is free for the score and US$9 for the full report. |
| AI visibility tracking tool | About $29 to $500 a month | Asks AI assistants your questions on a schedule and counts mentions. Tracks, rather than audits. |
| Freelancer or generalist | About £500 to £1,500, once | A check by one person, usually covering fewer AI assistants and no competitor comparison. |
| Specialist agency | About $1,500 to $5,000, once | A full audit across several assistants with competitors and a written plan. £2,000 to £5,000 in the UK. |
| Enterprise project | $5,000 to $15,000 and more | Several brands, markets or languages, often leading into a monthly retainer. |
Sources: the prices come from the providers' own pages: Young Company, NBound and LLMReach for agencies, and Otterly.AI and Semrush for tools, all checked in October 2026.
One thing to be open about: CitableReport is one of these options, the automated one. We have tried to describe the others fairly, so you can check every price for yourself.
What do agencies charge for an AI visibility audit?
Agencies that publish prices cluster around $1,500 to $5,000 for a one-off audit. Young Company, a US agency, lists its AI visibility audit at $1,500 to $5,000. NBound, a UK specialist, prices its audit from £2,500 for 50 or more questions across five AI platforms, delivered in 14 working days.
NBound's own survey of the market puts freelancer checks at £500 to £1,500 and specialist audits at £2,000 to £5,000, with enterprise work above £5,000. At the higher end, LLMReach, an AI visibility agency, says one-time audits typically run $3,000 to $15,000.
Bear in mind that each of these figures comes from a firm that sells audits, so treat them as a guide to the market rather than an independent survey. Many agencies also sell a retainer afterwards. A retainer is a fixed monthly fee for ongoing work, here making the fixes and tracking the results.
What do AI visibility tools cost?
AI visibility tools charge monthly, and most of them track mentions rather than audit your site. They ask AI assistants a set of questions on a schedule and report how often you appear. Otterly.AI, for example, starts at $29 a month for 15 questions, rising to $189 for 100 and $489 for 400.
Semrush's AI Toolkit costs $99 a month per domain, with each extra user and each extra domain charged at the same again. Over a year, the cheapest plan comes to about $350, and a mid-range plan to more than many specialist audits.
That is fine if you need ongoing tracking; our guide to tracking brand mentions in AI shows how to do it by hand first.
What makes an AI visibility audit cost more?
Five things drive the price, whoever you buy from:
- How many questions are tested. Ten questions and a hundred are very different amounts of work, and the answers change between runs, so each one needs asking several times.
- How many AI assistants are covered. ChatGPT alone, or ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews.
- How many pages are read. A ten-page site and a ten-thousand-page shop are not the same audit.
- Competitor comparisons. Measuring your rivals as well as you can double the work.
- Who makes the fixes. A report you act on yourself costs far less than an agency rewriting your pages for you.
Can you get an AI visibility audit for under $500?
Yes. Doing it yourself costs nothing but time: our step-by-step guide has every check, and a small site takes about an afternoon. Automated audit tools cost from nothing to a few hundred dollars for a one-off report.
What you give up at this price is someone else's judgement and labour. An automated audit tells you what is wrong and how to fix it, but it does not rewrite your pages or speak to your developer.
What should a small business spend?
Most small businesses should start cheaply and only spend more when they know what they are paying for. A sensible order is: run a free check, then a low-cost or do-it-yourself audit, and fix what it finds. Access problems such as a firewall blocking AI crawlers are often a few minutes' work.
Pay an agency when the problems are bigger than you can fix yourself, or when your competitors appear in AI answers and you cannot work out why. Monthly tracking is worth it once AI assistants are sending you visits worth measuring.
What should you ask before you pay for an audit?
Whatever the price, the same questions separate a useful audit from an expensive opinion:
- Does every finding come with the evidence behind it, so you can check it yourself?
- Are the fixes in order of impact, with an example of each?
- Which AI assistants, how many questions and how many pages does it cover?
- Are the checks fixed rules, so a re-test after your fixes shows real change, or the auditor's judgement each time?
- Is a re-test included, and when?
For what a good audit should contain, see our guide to what an AI visibility audit is.