AI Visibility Monitoring: Free vs Paid. What $75/mo Actually Gets You

By Yasser Drif, Founder @ QuerySignal

You've heard the pitch by now. AI search is eating into your organic traffic. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are answering your customers' questions, and they may or may not be recommending your brand.

So you do what any smart marketer does: you open ChatGPT, type in a few prompts, and check if your brand shows up. Maybe you screenshot the results and drop them in a Slack channel. "Hey, look, we got mentioned."

That's free monitoring. And honestly? For a quick gut check, it works.

But here's the question nobody asks early enough: when do you outgrow the free approach? And what does paying for a tool actually get you that manual checking doesn't?

I'll break this down honestly. I'm building QuerySignal, so I obviously have skin in the game. But I'd rather you stay on the free approach and come back later than sign up before you actually need it.

What "Free" AI Visibility Monitoring Looks Like

Let's be real about what most people do today:

1. The manual prompt test. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity. Type something like "best CRM for small businesses" or "top SEO agencies in London." Scan for your brand. Repeat with 3-5 variations.

2. The spreadsheet tracker. Some teams go a step further. They have someone run 10-20 prompts weekly, log whether the brand appeared, and track it in a Google Sheet.

3. The vibes approach. Someone on the team occasionally checks and reports back: "Yeah, we're showing up" or "Nope, still not mentioned."

All of these are valid starting points. If you've never checked your AI visibility before, doing it manually once is the right first step. You learn what prompts matter, how different models respond, and whether you even have a problem worth solving.

The issue isn't that free monitoring is bad. It's that it hits a ceiling fast.

Three Things You Can't Do Without a Tool

After talking to hundreds of SEO managers and agency owners, the same three gaps come up every time.

1. You can't track trends over time.

AI responses change constantly. ChatGPT might recommend you today and drop you tomorrow. If you're checking manually, you only see snapshots. You'll never know if that mention you saw last Tuesday was a one-off or part of a pattern.

For agencies, this is even worse. Try telling a client their AI visibility "went up" when your only proof is two screenshots from different weeks.

2. You can't benchmark against competitors.

Manual checking tells you whether you show up. It doesn't tell you how often your competitors show up for the same queries. And in AI search, the recommendations are relative. If a competitor gets mentioned in 8 out of 10 relevant prompts and you get mentioned in 2, that context changes everything.

You'd need to run every prompt for every competitor, log the results, and compare. That's hours of work per week for a single category.

3. You can't compare across AI models.

Here's something most people don't realize: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity give very different answers to the same question. Your brand might be ChatGPT's top pick and completely absent from Perplexity.

Checking manually means opening three different tools, running the same prompts in each, and somehow tracking which model said what. Most teams give up after a week and just check ChatGPT.

What $75/mo Actually Gets You

QuerySignal's Starter plan runs at $75/mo. Here's what that covers, no fluff.

Automated daily monitoring. You set up the prompts that matter for your business ("best project management tool," "top agencies for SaaS SEO," etc.), and QuerySignal runs them across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity every day. You wake up to data, not to-do items.

Historical tracking. Every result is stored. You can see exactly when your brand started appearing, when it dropped off, and correlate that with content changes you made. After 30 days, you have a dataset that would've taken someone 50+ hours to build manually.

Competitor tracking. Add your competitors and see how they stack up across the same prompts. No extra work. The data runs in parallel and you get a clear picture of who's winning the AI recommendation game in your category.

Sentiment and citation tracking. QuerySignal doesn't just track mentions. It tracks how AI models talk about you. Are they recommending you enthusiastically or mentioning you as an afterthought? Are they citing your blog, your homepage, or a third-party review? That distinction matters when you're trying to improve your positioning.

For agencies, multiply all of this across clients. One dashboard, all your clients' AI visibility data, exportable reports your clients actually understand.

Who Should Stay Free (For Now)

I'm not going to pretend everyone needs to pay right now. Here's when the free approach still makes sense:

• You're exploring. You haven't decided if AI visibility matters for your business yet. Run some manual checks first. If AI models aren't relevant to your buyers' journey, don't spend money on it.

• You're tracking fewer than 5 prompts. If your monitoring needs are small enough to handle in 15 minutes a week, a spreadsheet works.

• You're a solo operator. No team to report to, no clients asking for data, no need for historical trends. Quick manual checks are fine.

When paying makes sense:

• You're tracking 10+ prompts across multiple AI models

• You need to compare yourself against competitors

• You report AI visibility data to stakeholders or clients

• You're making content/SEO decisions based on AI visibility and need reliable trend data

• You're an agency and AI visibility is (or should be) part of your service offering

The honest math: if someone on your team spends 2+ hours a week on manual AI monitoring, the $75/mo pays for itself immediately. If you're an agency, even one client engagement that includes AI visibility reporting covers the cost.

The Bottom Line

Free monitoring tells you if you show up. Paid monitoring tells you how often, how well, compared to whom, and whether that's improving or getting worse.

The gap between those two answers is where real decisions get made.

If you're still in the exploration phase, keep checking manually. Build your intuition. Figure out which prompts matter.

But the moment you need to act on AI visibility data, report it, or use it to win clients, the manual approach falls apart. That's when a purpose-built tool earns its keep.

Start your free trial at querysignal.ai and see the difference in your first week.