Key takeaways
- Searchable uses credit-based pricing (Starter $50/50 prompts, Professional $125/200 prompts, Scale $400/2,000 prompts), which sounds clean but gets expensive fast once you factor in how many prompts you actually need to monitor a real brand
- Profound is the enterprise leader with serious funding and Fortune 500 clients, but pricing is custom and out of reach for most SMBs and mid-market teams
- Otterly.AI is the most accessible entry point in the category, starting around $29/month, but it's a monitoring tool -- it won't help you fix what it finds
- Promptwatch is the only platform in this comparison that closes the loop: it tracks your AI visibility, shows you exactly what content you're missing, and generates that content for you
Why Searchable's pricing is worth scrutinizing
The AI visibility tools market has exploded. Between mid-2025 and spring 2026, the category raised over $300M in funding, and new platforms launched almost monthly. Most of them look similar on a pricing page: a few tiers, a prompt limit, a handful of AI engines covered.
Searchable is one of the newer entrants. It's not a bad tool, but its credit-based pricing model creates a trap that's easy to miss when you're comparing plans on a tab. Before you commit, it's worth understanding exactly what you're buying at each tier -- and how that stacks up against the alternatives that have been in the market longer and built more complete feature sets.
This guide breaks down Searchable's tiers, then puts them side by side with Promptwatch, Profound, and Otterly.AI so you can make an actual decision.
Searchable pricing: what each tier gets you
Based on available pricing data, Searchable runs on a credit model with three main tiers:
- Starter: $50/month for 50 prompts
- Professional: $125/month for 200 prompts
- Scale: $400/month for 2,000 prompts
The credit-based structure means you're buying prompt runs, not a flat subscription. That's not inherently bad -- it can be flexible if your usage is predictable. But in practice, most brands underestimate how many prompts they need to get useful data.
Fifty prompts sounds like a lot until you realize that monitoring a single product category across five AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews) with ten query variations burns through 50 prompts in one pass. At the Starter tier, you're essentially buying one week of real monitoring.
The Professional tier at $125/month for 200 prompts is more workable, but it still limits you to roughly 40 prompts per engine if you're covering five platforms. For a brand with multiple product lines or a competitive market, that's not enough to build a reliable picture.
The Scale tier at $400/month for 2,000 prompts is where the math starts to make sense for serious monitoring -- but at that price point, you're paying more than Promptwatch's Professional plan ($249/month) for a tool that, based on available feature comparisons, focuses primarily on monitoring without the content generation or crawler log capabilities that more complete platforms offer.
The other thing worth noting: credit-based pricing adds cognitive overhead. You're always watching the meter. That's a different experience from a flat-tier subscription where you know exactly what you're getting each month.
The comparison: Searchable vs Promptwatch vs Profound vs Otterly.AI
Here's a direct feature and pricing comparison across the four platforms:
| Searchable | Otterly.AI | Profound | Promptwatch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $50/mo | ~$29/mo | Custom (enterprise) | $99/mo |
| Pricing model | Credit-based | Flat tiers | Custom | Flat tiers |
| Prompt tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI engines covered | Limited | 5+ | 5+ | 10 |
| Citation analytics | Basic | Basic | Yes | Yes |
| Crawler logs | No | No | No | Yes |
| Content generation | No | No | No | Yes |
| Answer gap analysis | No | No | Limited | Yes |
| Reddit/YouTube insights | No | No | No | Yes |
| ChatGPT Shopping tracking | No | No | No | Yes |
| Traffic attribution | No | No | Limited | Yes |
| Page-level tracking | No | No | No | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Best for | Small teams testing the waters | Entry-level monitoring | Enterprise brands | SMB to enterprise, full optimization |
The pattern is clear. Searchable and Otterly.AI are both monitoring tools. Profound is a monitoring tool with enterprise analytics depth. Promptwatch is the only one in this group that goes beyond showing you data to actually helping you act on it.
Otterly.AI: the easiest entry point, but that's the ceiling
Otterly.AI has been in the market longer than most and has built a solid reputation as the most accessible option for teams just getting started with AI visibility tracking.
At around $29/month for entry-level access, it's genuinely hard to argue against trying it if you've never measured your AI visibility before. The setup is fast, the interface is clean, and it covers the major AI engines.
The limitation is that Otterly.AI is a monitoring dashboard. It tells you where you appear and where you don't. It doesn't tell you what to do about it. There's no content gap analysis, no content generation, no crawler logs showing you why AI engines are or aren't citing your pages.
For a small brand that just wants to know "are we showing up in ChatGPT?" -- Otterly.AI is fine. For a brand that wants to actually improve its AI visibility, you'll hit the ceiling quickly and end up needing a second tool to act on what you're seeing.
Profound: the enterprise leader, but priced accordingly
Profound is the most-funded platform in the category -- $155M raised, a $1B valuation, and a client list that includes Fortune 500 companies. If you're a large enterprise with a dedicated AI search team and a budget to match, Profound is worth evaluating seriously.
The problem for most readers is that Profound's pricing is custom and enterprise-oriented. There's no self-serve tier, no published starting price, and no free trial in the traditional sense. You're looking at a sales process, a procurement cycle, and a contract.
That's appropriate for what Profound is. It's not trying to serve a 10-person SaaS startup. But if you're reading a pricing comparison guide, you're probably not a Fortune 500 brand with a six-figure software budget. Profound's feature depth is real, but so is the barrier to entry.
One other gap worth noting: even at Profound's price point, it doesn't offer AI crawler logs, Reddit/YouTube insights, or ChatGPT Shopping tracking -- capabilities that Promptwatch includes at a fraction of the cost.
Promptwatch: the platform that actually closes the loop
Most AI visibility tools are built around a single question: "Where do we appear?" Promptwatch is built around a different question: "How do we appear more, and what do we do about it?"
The difference matters. Monitoring tells you you're invisible for a prompt. Promptwatch's Answer Gap Analysis shows you exactly which prompts your competitors are winning that you're not -- and then its Content Agents generate the articles, listicles, and comparisons designed to close those gaps. You can go from "we're not showing up for this query" to "we have a published page targeting that query" without leaving the platform.
The pricing is also the most transparent in this comparison:
- Essential: $99/month -- 1 site, 50 prompts, 5 articles/month
- Professional: $249/month -- 2 sites, 150 prompts, 15 articles/month, crawler logs, city/state tracking
- Business: $579/month -- 5 sites, 350 prompts, 30 articles/month
Compared to Searchable's Scale tier at $400/month for 2,000 prompts (monitoring only), Promptwatch's Professional plan at $249/month gives you 150 prompts plus content generation, crawler logs, and traffic attribution. The prompt count is lower, but you're getting a fundamentally different product.
The crawler logs alone are worth calling out. Promptwatch shows you real-time logs of AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.) hitting your website -- which pages they read, how often they return, and when a page moves from crawled to cited. No other platform in this comparison offers that. It's the difference between guessing why you're not being cited and actually knowing.
How to think about the prompt limit question
Every platform in this comparison uses some form of prompt limit, and it's the number buyers fixate on most. But prompt count is a misleading metric if you don't account for what happens after the prompt runs.
A monitoring-only tool that runs 2,000 prompts gives you 2,000 data points. A platform with content generation that runs 150 prompts gives you 150 data points plus the ability to act on every gap it finds. The second scenario is more valuable for most brands, even though the raw number looks smaller.
The right question isn't "how many prompts do I get?" It's "what can I do with the results?"
If your team has the bandwidth to take monitoring data and independently commission content, run A/B tests, and track whether new pages get cited -- then a higher-prompt monitoring tool might make sense. Most teams don't have that bandwidth. They need the tool to do more of the work.
Which tool is right for you?
The honest answer depends on where you are and what you're trying to accomplish.
If you've never measured AI visibility and want to understand the basics without spending much, Otterly.AI at ~$29/month is a reasonable starting point. You'll learn what the data looks like and whether your brand is showing up.
If you're a large enterprise with a dedicated team and a procurement process, Profound is worth a conversation. The feature depth is real, and the client list suggests it delivers for that audience.
If you're a mid-market brand, a SaaS company, or a digital agency that needs to actually move the needle on AI visibility -- not just measure it -- Promptwatch is the clearest choice. The pricing is transparent, the feature set covers the full optimization loop, and it's the only platform here that connects monitoring to content creation to traffic attribution in one place.
Searchable sits in an awkward middle. The credit model adds friction, the feature set is monitoring-focused, and the Scale tier pricing puts it in direct competition with platforms that offer significantly more. It's not a bad tool, but it's hard to identify a buyer profile where it's the obvious choice over the alternatives.
A note on what the market looks like right now
The AI visibility tools market is still shaking out. According to Surmado's 2026 analysis, the category raised over $300M between summer 2025 and spring 2026. That kind of funding velocity tends to produce a lot of similar-looking dashboards before the market consolidates around platforms that actually drive outcomes.
The tools that will matter in two years are the ones that help brands take action, not just collect data. Monitoring is table stakes. The question is what comes after the monitor.
For most brands evaluating this category in 2026, the practical advice is: start with a free trial, run your actual prompts, and see which tool surfaces gaps you didn't know existed. Promptwatch offers a free trial covering your first 50 prompts -- that's enough to see whether the gap analysis and content recommendations are useful before committing to a paid plan.
The AI search landscape is changing fast enough that the tool you choose now will need to evolve with it. Platforms built around the full optimization loop -- find gaps, create content, track results -- are better positioned to stay relevant than monitoring dashboards that depend on you doing all the hard work yourself.