How much does AI search visibility cost for B2B SaaS?

When a founder asks what "AI visibility" costs, the answers range from free checker tools to five-figure retainers. That range is real. The products are just very different, and some of them are not measuring much at all.

Every week OwnedSignal tests how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google describe my own company, and I sell this work through OwnedSignal's AI Search Visibility service. Below are the published prices I could check, what you get at each level, and the questions that separate real work from a report with charts.

Three things you can buy

One vendor makes the relationship between the two explicit. Ranketize says its $699 audit is built for brands that could fund a program of $4,000 a month or more if the audit finds gaps.

Why a $699 audit and a $4,500 audit are different products

The published scopes show where the money goes.

Ranketize's $699 audit tests a set of buyer prompts by hand on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, twice, on separate days, then delivers a citation map, a site readiness review and a 30-day plan in 5 to 7 business days. It does not implement anything.

Veza Digital's $4,500 audit tracks 50 to 100 prompts across six AI platforms for 30 days, benchmarks three competitors, reviews 20 to 30 pages and ends with a 30-page report. It takes about six weeks.

So the questions to ask about any audit are concrete:

• How many buyer questions, and who wrote them?
• Which assistants, how many runs per question, and over how many days?
• Is the location and login state fixed and written down?
• Do you get the full answers and the sources, or only a score?
• Does anyone fix anything, or is it a report?

OwnedSignal's own tests show why location matters. On 26 October 2026, at about 09:11 to 09:12 Bucharest time, OwnedSignal's weekly logged-out check ran ChatGPT from a test machine whose IP address was in Seattle. For two commercial questions, "AEO consultant for B2B SaaS" and "Who helps technical SaaS founders get found and trusted before sales calls?", ChatGPT named Seattle-based providers. That was one run per question, not a pattern. It is still enough to show that an audit that doesn't say where it ran from may be measuring someone else's market.

What a monthly program should buy

DerivateX, an agency that sells GEO, publishes its own view of the price bands. Below about $2,000 a month, it says, you mostly buy content with little or no tracking. Between $3,000 and $8,000 you get tracked prompts, structured data and analysis of which competitors are cited and why. Above $8,000 the work adds original research and digital PR. That is one vendor describing its own market, so use it as a map, not a rule.

Whatever the price, three things should be in writing:

1. The exact prompt list, with the assistants each prompt is tracked on.
2. The fixes, with dates: which pages were written or changed, what structured data was added, which third-party sources were approached.
3. The reporting, with mentions, citations and recommendations counted separately, from repeated runs. More on that in how to measure AI visibility.

If a program can't show you the prompt list, nothing in it can be checked.

Red flags in an AI visibility quote

• A guarantee of mentions or recommendations. Nobody outside the AI companies controls what their assistants say, and answers change between runs.
• A single screenshot as proof. One answer on one day tells you very little.
• Bulk AI-written pages. Google's spam policies call mass-produced pages made mainly to manipulate rankings "scaled content abuse".
• Paid placements presented as earned mentions. Some programs include posting in communities such as Reddit. Ask who writes them, under what name, and whether they are disclosed.
• No word about Google. In a study of 24,067 prompts, Minuttia and Convex Works found that brands on Google's first page were 6.8 to 11.6 times more likely to be named in AI answers. That is a correlation, not proof that better SEO causes AI mentions, but a program that ignores search entirely is ignoring the closest thing to a signal the research has. The search side is covered by B2B SaaS SEO.

What to spend at your stage

If you have never checked what assistants say about you, start free. Run ten of your buyers' real questions yourself in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, logged out, and write down who is named and which sources are cited. The method is in how to test whether AI assistants know your company.

If you find a problem you can't explain, a fixed-scope audit makes sense before any retainer. If the audit shows your company is missing or described wrongly for questions that matter, then a program makes sense, with the prompt list and the fixes in writing.

A retainer without an audit first means paying monthly before anyone knows what is wrong.

Where OwnedSignal fits

I quote AI Search Visibility per project, so you get a fixed price before you commit. A typical project is an agreed set of buyer questions run repeatedly on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI features, an entity fix list, and the pages that answer the questions where competitors are cited and you are not.

The smallest way to start is the SEO & AI Search Visibility Sprint: €750 for 21 days. It covers five buyer questions run twice each on Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity, a Search Console review if you can give access, technical and content checks on up to 10 key pages, one agreed buyer-facing page improved or written ready to implement, and a prioritized plan. Your time is about 2 to 3 hours in total. That snapshot is smaller than Veza's 50 to 100 prompts, and it includes one page of real work instead of only a report.

If you want the search work and founder media together, Founder Presence + Discovery is €4,200 for 90 days, about €1,400 a month.

I don't guarantee recommendations, and I don't want to. What I commit to is the testing, the fixes, and an honest dated record of what changed and what didn't.