The Crawl Costs Nothing. Knowing If AI Cites You Costs $1,499.

Start Here

• Technical crawl, free: Google Search Console plus Screaming Frog's free tier at 500 URLs. For most sites that is the whole job.
• Technical crawl, serious: Screaming Frog at about EUR245 a year, one flat licence, unlimited URLs.
• AI visibility on a budget: LLMrefs, free for one keyword, $79 a month for 50 across seven engines.

The Split Nobody Names

Until recently "analyse my website" meant one thing: crawl it, find the broken bits, check what it ranks for. In 2026 it means two things, and the second one costs roughly twenty times the first.

Both matter. Only one of them is sold to you aggressively, and it is not the one most sites need first.

The Crawl Job: Almost Free

Search Console is non-optional and it is free. It is the only source of actual Google data - real impressions, real positions, real queries. Every paid tool models what Search Console measures. If you are paying $139 a month and not reading your own Search Console export, you are buying an estimate of something you already have exactly.

Screaming Frog is the price-to-power outlier. One flat licence, around EUR245 a year, crawls as many URLs as your machine can hold. Compare that with Semrush Business at $499.95 a month, which caps at 100,000 pages per project. For pure technical crawling nothing comes close on cost.

What the expensive platforms actually sell is backlink and keyword data - Ahrefs claims roughly 30 trillion indexed pages, Semrush around 43 trillion. That index is the product. The site audit is bundled.

The common setup among people doing this daily is two tools: a cloud platform for backlinks and keywords, plus Screaming Frog for crawling, at roughly $272 a month combined.

The AI Visibility Job: Read the Prompt Count First

These tools answer a question Search Console cannot: when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your topic, are you in the answer?

These Tools Do Not Monitor Your Site

Look at the last column again, because this is the thing the category is sold without.

Surfer's $219-a-month Scale plan includes five prompts. Semrush gives you 25 a day. SE Ranking's base gives 50. Hall's free tier gives 25 questions updated weekly.

If your site ranks for three thousand queries, a 25-prompt tracker is sampling less than 1% of them - and sampling the 1% you picked, which are the queries you already thought of. You are not monitoring your AI visibility. You are running a 25-question survey, monthly, on a list you wrote.

That can still be worth paying for. A directional read on whether you appear at all is better than nothing, and the competitor gap view is genuinely useful. But it is a sample, the pricing does not say so, and buying it as comprehensive coverage will mislead you about what you are seeing.

The Add-On Trap

Only Semrush builds AI tracking into the audit product itself, as AI Search Health. Everywhere else it is bolted on, so "one tool that does both" means paying twice:

• SE Ranking: $65 Essential plus $89 add-on = $154 a month for 50 prompts.
• Surfer: $219 Scale for five prompts, or $95 more for 25.
• Semrush: $99 add-on, or bundles from $199.

Against LLMrefs at $79 for 50 keywords across seven engines, the add-on route looks poor unless you already pay for the base platform for other reasons.

Two Limitations Worth Knowing Before You Buy

BrightEdge carries a 48-hour data lag on AI-specific metrics. For a category whose selling point is knowing what assistants say about you, two-day-old data is a meaningful caveat on an enterprise contract.

Goodie AI tracks 11+ engines and has no backlink analysis. It is the broadest engine coverage here and it is not an SEO tool - you will still need something else for the crawl job.

Decision Framework

• Small site, no budget - Search Console plus Screaming Frog free. Genuinely enough for most sites, and the Search Console export is the single most under-read file most owners have.
• You crawl regularly - Screaming Frog paid, ~EUR245 a year. Unlimited URLs, one flat fee, no monthly meter.
• You need backlinks and keyword data - Ahrefs from $129 or Semrush from $139.95. You are buying the index, not the audit.
• First look at AI visibility - LLMrefs free on one keyword, then $79. Cheapest honest entry, seven engines.
• You already pay for Semrush - the $99 AI add-on, since it is the only one integrated into the audit itself.
• You need many prompts tracked - Nightwatch scales to 10,000 keywords at $699. Most cheaper tools cap in the dozens.
• Broadest engine coverage - Goodie AI from $399, 11+ engines. Pair it with a crawler.
• Agency reporting to clients - Sitebulb at $18-$42 desktop produces the most client-ready output per pound on this page.

The Stack That Covers Both Jobs

1. Google Search Console, free. Real Google data. Start every analysis here, not in a paid dashboard.
2. Screaming Frog, ~EUR245/year. The crawl, unlimited, one payment.
3. LLMrefs, $79/month. 50 keywords across seven assistants. Directional AI visibility without the add-on tax.
4. Ahrefs or Semrush, from $129, only once backlink and competitor keyword data is actually changing your decisions.

Steps one to three cost about $100 a month all in and cover both jobs for most sites. Step four is the one to defer until you can name the decision it informs.

FAQ

What is the best free website analysis tool?

Google Search Console, by a distance, because it is the only source of real Google data rather than a model of it. Pair it with Screaming Frog's free tier for crawling up to 500 URLs and WebPageTest for performance.

Do I need an AI visibility tool?

Only if you can act on the answer. Entry is $79 a month at LLMrefs, most tools track between 5 and 50 prompts, and none of them covers your whole query set - so treat the output as a directional sample rather than coverage.

Is Screaming Frog better value than Semrush?

For technical crawling, yes - about EUR245 a year flat with unlimited URLs against $139.95 a month capped at 100,000 pages per project. But Semrush sells a keyword and backlink index that Screaming Frog does not have. They are not the same product.

Which tool tracks the most AI engines?

Goodie AI at 11+, from $399 a month, though it has no backlink analysis. Hall covers 8 from $199 with a free tier, and LLMrefs covers 7 from $79.

All pricing verified 3 October 2026 from vendor pricing pages and published comparisons. We have not purchased or run every tool listed; capability descriptions come from vendor documentation and the sources cited. Prices in EUR and GBP are quoted as the vendor lists them.

Related: best AI text to image tools, where the same free-tier small print decides whether you can use the output at all.