AI Visibility Tracking Cost: Our $1.89 Weekly Tracker vs SE Ranking and Ahrefs
26 October 2026
Our AI visibility tracker checked 93 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI answers last week. The bill was 44 cents.
SE Ranking’s AI Search add-on cost us $89 a month, and it needs a paid plan underneath. We cancelled it in October 2026 and built our own tracker inside SEO IQ, our in-house SEO dashboard.
We still use SE Ranking and Ahrefs every day. We only dropped the AI add-on.
Here is the real invoice, plus two catches most “I saved money” stories skip:
- We check weekly. SE Ranking checks daily.
- The 44 cents leaves out our own time and the systems around the tracker.
Raw data: download our DataForSEO call log (779 calls, no prompt text) and the cost comparison behind every number below.
What we track, and why
More customers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI answers which business to pick. Being named in those answers is now part of SEO.
So we track it, for our clients and for ourselves.
Here is the setup:
- 93 prompts, checked every week.
- 4 projects: 3 clients and One Search Pro.
- Real customer questions, such as “best seo agency in malaysia”.
- 4 engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews.
For each answer, the tracker records one of three results:
- Cited: the AI linked to the brand’s site.
- Mentioned: the AI named the brand without a link.
- Absent: the AI left the brand out.
It also saves the competitors the AI named instead.
How our tracker works. Image: One Search Pro, own work.
What SE Ranking and Ahrefs charge
SE Ranking sells AI tracking as an add-on to a paid plan:
- AI Search add-on: $89 a month on monthly billing, or $71.20 a month billed annually1, for 200 prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews.
- Core plan underneath: $129 a month on monthly billing, or $103.20 a month billed annually1.
- Real monthly total: about $218 ($129 + $89), or $174.40 on annual billing.
- Frequency: the pricing page lists the allowance as prompts to track daily.
SE Ranking’s pricing page also lists 100 prompts a day inside Core itself. We did not test how that allowance compares with the add-on.
Ahrefs charges per check. One check is one prompt on one platform, in one location, for one update2. Paid plans include 150 to 600 checks a month, and add-ons buy more:
| Ahrefs custom prompts add-on | Price a month | Extra checks a month | Overage per check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $50 | 2,500 | $0.020 |
| Growth | $100 | 7,000 | $0.015 |
| Scale | $250 | 25,000 | $0.010 |
Source: Ahrefs custom prompts pricing2, checked 24 October 2026.
Two more things to know about Ahrefs:
- Its pricing page lists daily updates, but you can track custom prompts daily, weekly or monthly2. Fewer updates use fewer checks.
- The add-ons sit on top of a paid Ahrefs plan, which this post does not price.
What DataForSEO charges per check
DataForSEO is a pay-as-you-go data API. There is no monthly plan for these endpoints; you pay per request.
| What we check | DataForSEO endpoint | Standard queue | Live (instant) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT and Gemini answers | LLM Scraper3 | $0.0012 | $0.004 |
| Google AI Mode | Google AI Mode SERP4 | $0.0012 | $0.004 |
| Google AI Overviews | Google Organic SERP5 with the AI Overview block loaded | $0.0012 | $0.004 |
DataForSEO’s base price for a Google Organic SERP is $0.0006 on the standard queue and $0.002 in live mode. Loading the AI Overview adds one more base price. That gives the $0.0012 and $0.004 above.
The standard queue is slower: LLM Scraper tasks can take up to 45 minutes3.
For a weekly report, that wait does not matter. So we use it for every check.
Our real bill
We pulled every task from our DataForSEO account for the 30 days to 26 October 2026, then picked out the tracker’s calls.
Its last full weekly run, on 20 to 21 October, looked like this:
| Engine | Calls | Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 93 | $0.1116 |
| Gemini | 93 | $0.1116 |
| Google AI Mode | 93 | $0.1116 |
| Google AI Overviews | 92 | $0.1020 |
| One weekly run | 371 | $0.4368 |
The AI Overviews row works out to about $0.0011 a call, not $0.0012:
- 78 of those 92 calls were billed $0.0012.
- 14 were billed $0.0006, DataForSEO’s base price without the extra AI Overview charge.
We did not dig into why those 14 were billed lower.
What that adds up to:
- Per month: at 4.33 runs a month, about $1.89 in API fees.
- Since setup on 10 October: $1.00 in total across 779 calls, including a few live test calls.
- Share of our account: our whole DataForSEO account spent $42.86 in those 30 days, so the tracker was about 2% of it.
Same volume, three prices
Our weekly volume is about 1,610 checks a month. Here is what that costs on each option:
| Option | How often it checks | Cost per check | Add-on or API cost a month | Total a month with required plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking AI Search add-on (200 prompts) | Daily | Flat fee | $89.00 | about $218 with Core ($129) on monthly billing |
| Ahrefs custom prompts, Basic add-on | Daily, weekly or monthly | about $0.031 at 1,610 checks ($0.020 overage rate) | $50.00 | $50 plus a paid Ahrefs plan (not priced here) |
| Our tracker on DataForSEO | Weekly | about $0.0012 | $1.89 | $1.89 plus the costs in the next section |
SE Ranking’s add-on covers up to 200 prompts, more than our 93, so its price buys more capacity than we use. Its total is Core at $129 plus the add-on at $89, on monthly billing. On annual billing it is $103.20 plus $71.20, or $174.40.
Monthly cost at our volume, including the plan SE Ranking requires. Chart: One Search Pro, own work, from the figures above.
The Ahrefs per-check figure depends on which rate you use:
- Overage rate: the $0.020 in the Basic add-on table.
- Effective rate at our volume: you pay the flat $50 for 2,500 checks, so it is $50 / 1,610, about $0.031 per check.
Against DataForSEO’s $0.0012 standard queue rate:
- Ahrefs Basic at the $0.020 overage rate costs about 17 times more per check.
- Ahrefs Basic at our volume, at the effective $0.031 rate, costs about 26 times more per check.
- Ahrefs Scale at its $0.010 overage rate costs about 8 times more per check.
Price of one check. Chart: One Search Pro, own work, from the figures above.
The honest part: cadence and speed
The gap is real, but it is not all about the tool. Two choices drive most of our low bill.
1. We check weekly, not daily.
- Copying SE Ranking’s setup (200 prompts on 3 engines, checked daily) is about 18,000 checks a month.
- On DataForSEO’s standard queue, that is $21.60 a month.
- That is still about 4 times cheaper than $89, but nowhere near the 47 times that $89 against $1.89 suggests.
2. We use the standard queue, not live mode.
- Live results cost about 3.3 times more.
- The same 18,000 daily checks in live mode would cost $72 a month, close to SE Ranking’s price.
| Scenario | Checks a month | Standard queue | Live mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our setup: 93 prompts x 4 engines, weekly | about 1,610 | $1.89 (measured) | about $6.44 |
| 200 prompts x 3 engines, weekly | about 2,600 | $3.12 | $10.40 |
| 200 prompts x 3 engines, daily | 18,000 | $21.60 | $72.00 |
Our own row is the measured bill. Multiplying 1,610 checks by $0.0012 would give $1.93. The measured figure is lower because 14 AI Overviews calls were billed at $0.0006. The other rows are checks multiplied by $0.0012 or $0.004.
How check frequency and live mode change the bill. Chart: One Search Pro, own work, from the figures above.
The $1.89 is not our total cost. It is the DataForSEO API fees for the tracker and nothing else. It leaves out:
- Our time. Someone built the tracker and has to fix it when an API changes. We have not tracked those hours, so we are not putting a number on them.
- The systems around it. The tracker stores answers in a database and shows them in SEO IQ. We run those anyway, but they are not free.
- DataForSEO’s minimum top-up. There is no monthly plan, but its pricing page lists a $50 minimum top-up6. That is prepaid balance, not a fee, and it does not expire.
Count any of those, and the real cost of DIY is higher than $1.89. Whether it beats a paid tool depends on what your time is worth.
Why weekly is enough for us:
- Our work to get a brand cited (new pages, better sources, mentions on other sites) takes weeks to show up.
- A daily reading mostly shows noise.
Want to know whether ChatGPT and Google’s AI recommend your business? Request a free SEO check and we will include your AI visibility.
Why we built it, and why we still use SE Ranking and Ahrefs
This tracker is not a replacement for SE Ranking or Ahrefs. We still use both every day for rank tracking, backlinks, audits and research.
We built the AI tracker for one reason: to control the cost of AI tracking, so we can offer it to more clients.
“Building our own tracker was never about replacing SE Ranking or Ahrefs. SE Ranking is still a very good all-in-one tracking tool that we use daily, and the same goes for Ahrefs. We built this to control costs, so we can bring LLM tracking to more of our clients.”
Eric Ang, founder of One Search Pro
Paying per check instead of per add-on is what lets us offer AI tracking to more clients, including smaller businesses.
Should you build your own or buy a tool?
Building made sense for us because we already run SEO IQ and already pay for DataForSEO.
Ask yourself these five questions first:
- Do you have someone who can build the tracker and fix it when an API changes?
- Do you already have a database and dashboard to store and show the answers?
- Do you need client-ready reports this week? If so, a paid tool is faster.
- How many prompts, engines and locations do you need? Multiply them to get your checks.
- Is weekly enough for the decisions you make? If yes, per-check pricing wins.
How to read your answers:
- No to the first two: start with a tool.
- Yes to both: a weekly tracker on a data API can cost less than a cup of coffee a month in API fees. Just count your own time honestly.
Where to go next:
- Want a team to get your business cited in AI answers? See our AI SEO service.
- Curious how ready Malaysian businesses are for AI search? Read our study of 500 Malaysian SME websites.
- Want a quick check of your own site? Request a free SEO check.
Method
- Prices: checked on each vendor’s pricing page and rechecked on 26 October 2026, in US dollars, before tax. We did not convert to Malaysian ringgit, to avoid quoting an exchange rate we have not sourced.
- Our bill: pulled from DataForSEO’s task list for 27 September to 26 October 2026. We counted a call as the tracker’s when its search text matched one of the tracker’s prompts. Costs are as billed by DataForSEO.
- Monthly figures: one weekly run multiplied by 4.33 weeks.
- Scenarios: checks multiplied by $0.0012 (standard queue) or $0.004 (live mode). Our own row uses the measured bill.
- Ahrefs per-check rate: the Basic add-on price of $50 divided by about 1,610 checks a month gives about $0.031. The $0.020 figure is Ahrefs’ overage rate.
- SE Ranking total: Core at $129 plus the AI Search add-on at $89, on monthly billing.
- Raw data: DataForSEO call log (CSV) and cost comparison (CSV). The call log leaves out prompt text to protect client privacy.
Sources
- SE Ranking pricing, SE Ranking, checked 23 and 26 October 2026.
- Custom prompts pricing, Ahrefs, checked 24 and 26 October 2026.
- LLM Scraper API pricing, DataForSEO, checked 23 and 26 October 2026.
- Google AI Mode SERP API pricing, DataForSEO, checked 23 and 26 October 2026.
- Google Organic SERP API pricing, DataForSEO, checked 23 and 26 October 2026.
- DataForSEO API v3 pricing, DataForSEO, checked 26 October 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How much does AI visibility tracking cost?
In October 2026, SE Ranking's AI Search add-on cost $89 a month for 200 prompts checked daily, on top of a paid plan (Core from $129 a month, so about $218 a month in total on monthly billing). Ahrefs' custom prompts add-ons started at $50 a month for 2,500 checks. Our own tracker on DataForSEO cost about $1.89 a month in API fees for 93 prompts on 4 AI engines, checked weekly. Copying SE Ranking's daily cadence for 200 prompts on 3 engines would cost about $21.60 a month on DataForSEO. None of the DIY figures include the time to build and maintain the tracker.
Does SE Ranking track AI prompts daily?
Yes. SE Ranking's pricing page lists its prompt allowance as prompts to track daily. We did not find a weekly option on that page, so if you only need weekly checks you may be paying for more than you use.
Can I track ChatGPT answers weekly instead of daily?
Yes. Ahrefs lets you set custom prompts to daily, weekly or monthly, and a tracker you build on an API such as DataForSEO runs on whatever schedule you choose.
Is it worth building your own AI visibility tracker?
Only if you already have someone who can build and maintain it and somewhere to show the results. If you need client-ready reports today, a paid tool is faster.