LLM Pulse alternatives compared feature by feature, tier by tier (2026)

LLM Pulse is one of the cheaper ways into AI visibility tracking that still publishes a full price list. Starter costs €49 a month (€40.83 a month billed annually) for 50 tracked prompts in one project, run on five engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Gemini. Every plan includes unlimited team members, an MCP server with about 140 tools, page-level citation data, prioritized recommendations and a handful of GEO Writer drafts each month. The weekly Starter, Growth and Scale plans come with a 14-day free trial. Its plan descriptions aim Starter at one brand getting started and Scale at companies and agencies that track several brands.

Teams start comparing alternatives once they hit the tier walls. The prices on the pricing page we captured on November 6, 2026 are for weekly tracking. Daily tracking is sold as a separate set of plans, and those don't come with the trial. Sentiment, the YouTube and Reddit citation views and AI traffic analytics start on Growth (€99). Agent Analytics, which is LLM Pulse's AI crawler log product, starts on Scale (€299), along with the REST API, the Looker Studio connector, ChatGPT Shopping and ads tracking. Engines beyond the included five are paid add-ons on every plan, from €8 a month per model; Claude is €25 a month on weekly Starter. Some rows don't appear on any plan in our sources at all: personas, publishing to a CMS, checking AI claims against your own pages, and visibility in coding agents such as Codex or Claude Code.

LLM Pulse's homepage, captured November 6, 2026.

Below, six alternatives go on the same rows, sourced from vendor pages captured on November 6 and 8, 2026. For every gap we name the plan that fills it, since with LLM Pulse the useful question is usually what the tier with the feature costs, and what the same feature costs elsewhere. If you're already down to two tools, our Promptwatch vs LLM Pulse comparison works through 30 rows and a priced example for a 100-prompt team.

Quick verdict

Promptwatch is the alternative to trial first. It tracks daily on every plan, includes visitor analytics with conversions plus an MCP server and REST API on every paid plan, and from Professional ($245 a month) adds AI crawler logs that are IP-verified and tied to a citation rate per page. That depth is what LLM Pulse's Agent Analytics doesn't list, and LLM Pulse charges €299 for its version. The rest of the shortlist suits narrower needs:

• AthenaHQ suits teams that want a free tier and an AI agent on day one, and will work an action list every week.
• Scrunch AI suits sites that want bot traffic on the entry plan and are curious about agent-facing pages.
• Rankscale suits technical marketers who want hourly runs and shopping and ads tracking at €99, paid for in credits.
• Semrush AI Toolkit suits teams that already live in Semrush's keyword and backlink data.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar suits teams that want to look up any brand in a large prompt index next to Ahrefs' SEO data.

LLM Pulse alternatives at a glance

Tool	Best for	Starting price	What it doesn't list
Promptwatch	Explaining citations with crawler and traffic data, then publishing the fix	$95/mo (Essential), 7-day free trial	No crawler logs or AEO articles on Essential; no free plan; Naver, Baidu, Qwen and Doubao are not on its tracked-model list
AthenaHQ	A free start and an action queue	Essential free; Starter $295/mo	AI crawler logs, query fan-outs, an MCP server, tracking frequency
Scrunch AI	Bot traffic on the entry plan	Core $250/mo, 7-day free trial	Claude, Gemini and AI Mode on Core (Enterprise only); CMS publishing; AI-referred conversions
Rankscale	Hourly scheduling on a credit budget	Essentials €17/mo (yearly billing only); Pro €99/mo	Personas, CMS publishing; it doesn't generate content, per its own facts page
Semrush AI Toolkit	AI tracking beside classic SEO data	Base $99/mo per domain, billed annually	Query fan-outs, personas, ads tracking; crawler log analysis only on Enterprise AIO
Ahrefs Brand Radar	Looking up any brand in a prompt index	Prompt packages from €46.7/mo, or included from Ahrefs Lite (€119/mo)	Personas, an action queue, shopping and ads tracking, CMS publishing
LLM Pulse (reference)	Small teams happy with weekly data at a low price	Starter €49/mo, weekly tracking, 14-day trial	Personas, CMS publishing, fact checking, coding agents; crawler logs only from Scale (€299)

Prices and plan details come from each vendor's pricing page captured on November 6, 2026, plus product pages and llms.txt files read on November 8. Euro prices are what those pages showed a visitor in the Netherlands, and we haven't converted them. "Doesn't list" means the feature isn't on that vendor's pricing or product pages (checked November 2026). It may exist behind a sales call.

1. Promptwatch: the rows LLM Pulse keeps on Scale or doesn't list

Promptwatch starts at the same prompt count as LLM Pulse and a higher price. Essential is $95 a month (€85) for 1 project, 50 prompts and 6,000 responses a month, tracked daily. LLM Pulse Starter's allowance is 50 responses per model per week, or 250 a week across its five included engines. Professional is $245 (€205) for 2 projects, 150 prompts and 18,000 responses. Business is $579 (€499) for 5 projects, 350 prompts and 42,000 responses. All self-serve plans have a 7-day free trial on monthly billing and unlimited seats, and annual billing charges 10 months for 12.

Here is what the difference buys, gap by gap, with the plan each feature sits on:

• Crawler logs with diagnosis start on Professional. Agent Analytics checks every bot against its operator's published IP ranges, so a spoofed user agent doesn't pass as GPTBot, and it shows a citation rate per page and explains crawl errors. LLM Pulse's Agent Analytics shows per-URL bot traffic that its page says you can correlate with mentions and citations; IP verification and error tracking aren't listed.
• Visitor Analytics counts AI-referred visits and conversions on every plan, Essential included, through a script, a GTM template or the WordPress plugin. LLM Pulse's AI Traffic Analytics starts on Growth.
• The REST API and a hosted MCP server with 110+ tools come with every paid plan. LLM Pulse's MCP is on every plan too, but its API starts on Scale.
• Personas come with stacking and Persona Insights. Country tracking is on every paid plan, state and city on Business, and coordinate targeting from 20 m to 5 km on Business as well. LLM Pulse doesn't list personas, and its pages don't describe state, city or coordinate targeting.
• Tracking runs daily on every plan and every 12, 6 or 1 hours on Business.
• AEO articles start on Professional (5 a month) and publish to WordPress, Webflow or Framer. The automated Content Agent, with a schedule and a review inbox, is on Business. A CMS publishing feature isn't listed for LLM Pulse.
• Fact Check, from Business, lets you mark a claim AI makes about you as accurate or inaccurate, then searches your own crawled pages for ones that state it or the opposite.
• Prompt Volumes gives monthly volume, difficulty and citation rate per prompt, and coding agent tracking shows what Codex, Claude Code and OpenCode recommend. Neither is listed for LLM Pulse.

Promptwatch Persona insights, from the Promptwatch changelog. Example project data.

Engines aren't priced one by one. Promptwatch monitors the real interfaces of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Alexa and Meta AI, and tracks Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral and Grok via API. Every paid plan can track any of the supported engines.

The honest weak spots matter at LLM Pulse's price range. Essential has no crawler logs and no AEO articles, so at $95 you pay for daily data, visitor analytics, a site audit, Brand Narrative and API access, but not crawler data. ChatGPT Shopping and Ads Radar start on Business at $579, while LLM Pulse puts its shopping and ads tracking on Scale at €299. The 7-day trial is half as long as LLM Pulse's. And Korean or Chinese engines such as Naver AI Briefing or Baidu AI, which LLM Pulse sells as add-ons, aren't on Promptwatch's list.

2. AthenaHQ: a free agent, paid tracking in credits

AthenaHQ is the only tool here with a real free tier. Essential gives 300 credits ($25 of free credit) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, with unlimited users and the Athena AI agent. LLM Pulse's own agent only starts on Growth. Starter costs $295 a month for 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response, across 11 models including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Prompts and competitors are unlimited inside that pool, and unused credits roll over for a month.

AthenaHQ's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026.

Credits suit LLM Pulse's weekly rhythm better than a daily one. A panel of 100 prompts on four engines costs 400 credits per run, so four weekly runs use about 1,600 credits and fit comfortably. Run the same panel daily and you need about 12,000 a month. The trade-offs go beyond price. Starter is country-level for a single region, while multi-region tracking and persona targeting are Enterprise only. The API is a paid add-on on Starter. AI crawler logs, query fan-outs and an MCP server aren't listed on AthenaHQ's pricing or product pages (checked November 2026). It does list crawler access management through robots.txt and llms.txt, and SOC 2 Type 2.

3. Scrunch AI: bot traffic on the entry plan, four engines

Scrunch AI Core costs $250 a month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses, 5 site audits, one brand workspace and five user licenses, with a 7-day free trial. Core already includes AI agent and bot traffic, split into training, indexing and retrieval bots, which LLM Pulse only offers from Scale. Core also has one persona, limited query fan-outs, sentiment and basic content generation.

Scrunch's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026.

The engine list is the catch for anyone coming from LLM Pulse. Core tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Gemini and Google AI Mode, both in LLM Pulse's base five, are Enterprise only, as are Claude, Meta AI and Grok. So are the MCP server, the API, Looker Studio and AXP, Scrunch's system for serving AI-optimized pages to agents. Seats drop from unlimited to five. A crawl-to-citation link, IP verification, CMS publishing and AI-referred conversions aren't listed. Core is also limited to one country.

4. Rankscale: the same €99, more features, paid in credits

Rankscale is the closest match on price. Essentials is sold on yearly billing only and shown at €17 a month. After that come Pro at €99, Pro+ €229, Growth €385 and Enterprise €780. All 17+ engines are available on every plan, and scheduling runs anywhere from hourly to monthly, Essentials included. At the same €99 as LLM Pulse Growth, Rankscale Pro adds several things LLM Pulse keeps on Scale. You get AI Visits crawler data, shopping analysis across ChatGPT, AI Mode and Copilot, ad analytics and a Looker Studio connector. Pro also has unlimited seats in team workspaces, and there is a 7-day free Pro trial with limited credits.

Rankscale's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026. Prices shown in euros for a visitor in the Netherlands.

You pay for it in credit arithmetic. ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini each cost 0.25 credits per run, DeepSeek 1 and Claude 2. Pro's 1,200 credits a month cover 100 prompts on those four cheap engines (100 credits per run) about 12 times a month, so weekly works and daily doesn't. AI Visits connects to Cloudflare only, syncs daily and lists no IP verification or crawl-to-citation link. The REST API starts on Pro+. Rankscale's own facts page says it doesn't generate text, so there is no writer, and personas and CMS publishing aren't listed.

5. Semrush AI Toolkit: AI tracking inside an SEO suite

The Semrush AI Toolkit Base plan is $99 a month per domain, billed annually. It tracks 25 custom prompts daily on ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, and runs 300 instant AI visibility reports a day on any domain without prompt setup. That is useful for sizing up competitors before you build a panel. The bigger reason to pick it is everything around it: Semrush cites 28B+ keywords and 43T+ backlinks, plus rank tracking and a site audit for AI readiness. There's also a free plan that lists AI visibility features.

Against LLM Pulse Starter, the Base allowance is half the prompts (25 against 50), though Semrush runs them daily. Extra users start at €43 a month, where LLM Pulse's team members are free. Query fan-outs, personas and ads tracking aren't listed. Crawler log analysis, GA4 or Adobe conversion data and city-level detail are on the Enterprise AIO page only. MCP access comes with the Starter bundle (€190 a month, or €158.40 on annual billing), and the API sits on Advanced at a custom price.

6. Ahrefs Brand Radar: a prompt index next to backlink data

Ahrefs Brand Radar works differently from the rest. Custom prompts are bought as check packages (Basic €46.7 a month for 2,500 checks, Growth €93, Scale €234), or come with an Ahrefs plan from Lite at €119, which includes 5 prompts and 150 checks a month. The AI Visibility Index, from €179 a month, searches 538M+ prompts for any brand, product or category with no setup. Custom prompts cover AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, with fan-out queries shown, though Claude uses 8 checks per update.

Ahrefs' Bot Analytics page, captured November 8, 2026.

Bot Analytics is on every paid Ahrefs plan while in beta, via Cloudflare, Vercel, CloudFront or Fastly, and Web Analytics tracks AI-referred traffic free up to 1M events per project a month for verified sites. Both cover ground LLM Pulse charges Growth or Scale for. The weaknesses: Lite includes one user, with extra seats from €37.4 a month. IP verification and a crawl-to-citation link aren't listed. Personas, an action queue, shopping and ads tracking, and CMS publishing aren't listed either. Looker Studio starts on Advanced at €419.

Feature-gap table

Row	Promptwatch	LLM Pulse	AthenaHQ	Scrunch AI	Rankscale
Tracking cadence	Daily on every plan; hourly on Business	Weekly; daily on separate plans	Not listed	Not listed	Hourly to monthly, every plan
Prompt volumes and difficulty	Yes, every plan	Partial: prompt suggestions, no volumes	Partial: volumes on Starter, no difficulty	Partial: approximate volumes	Partial: volumes, no difficulty
Personas	Yes, with stacking	Not listed	Enterprise only	Yes, 1 on Core	Not listed
State, city, coordinates	State/city and coordinates on Business	Not described	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed
Social citation reports	Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram	From Growth; LinkedIn and Instagram not named	Not listed	Partial: "Social" segment	Not listed
Track one URL over time	Page Tracker, incl. competitors	Partial: audit of any URL	Not listed	Partial	Partial: page audits
AI crawler logs	From Professional	From Scale (€299)	Not listed	Yes, Core	From Pro, Cloudflare only
IP verification, crawl-to-citation, errors	Yes	Partial	Not listed	Partial	Partial: 404 signals
AI visits and conversions	Every plan	From Growth	Partial: via GA4	Not listed	Partial: GA4 beta, no conversions
Search Console and Bing	Both	Search Console; Bing not listed	Search Console; Bing not listed	Not listed	Search Console (beta); Bing not listed
Fact check against your pages	Business and up	Not listed	Enterprise only	Not listed	Not listed
CMS publishing	WordPress, Webflow, Framer; automated on Business	Not listed	Partial: Shopify	Not listed	Not listed
REST API	Every paid plan	From Scale	Add-on on Starter	Enterprise only	From Pro+
Coding agent visibility	Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed

Values come from our November 2026 feature matrix, built on the vendor pages cited above. "Not listed" means we didn't find it on that vendor's pricing or product pages.

Which blank rows matter depends on the team. An in-house content team feels the publishing and crawl-diagnosis rows first. If nobody can see that ClaudeBot hit a 404 on the page you want cited, the recommendation to "improve that page" goes nowhere, and without a CMS connection every draft becomes a copy-paste job. Local and multi-location brands should look at the location and persona rows, where LLM Pulse and most of this list stop at country. Agencies should check the API row, because client reporting pipelines tend to need it, and on LLM Pulse it starts at €299. The cadence row matters to everyone who reports weekly: with weekly runs, a drop that happens on Tuesday can stay invisible until the next run. Our explainer on AI crawls vs citation crawls covers why two crawler logs can disagree about the same traffic, which is worth knowing before you compare bot reports.

Who should pick which

• Pick Promptwatch if you need to explain why a page is or isn't cited, with IP-verified crawler logs (Professional) and conversions (every plan), and want to publish the fix to your CMS.
• Pick AthenaHQ if a free tier and a built-in agent matter more than crawler data, and you track one country.
• Pick Scrunch AI if you want bot traffic on the entry plan and can do without Gemini and AI Mode until Enterprise.
• Pick Rankscale if you want hourly scheduling, shopping and ads tracking at €99 and are happy to budget credits per engine.
• Pick Semrush AI Toolkit or Ahrefs Brand Radar if backlink and keyword data in the same account is the deciding factor.
• Stay on LLM Pulse if weekly data on five engines covers your reporting, you need Naver, Baidu, Qwen or Doubao, or you want shopping and ads tracking for €299 without a larger plan elsewhere.

Our recommendation

Most teams leave LLM Pulse when weekly mention counts stop answering the follow-up question, which is usually "why isn't this page cited, and what did the citations we do get bring in?" Promptwatch answers both halves in one project. Agent Analytics shows whether GPTBot or ClaudeBot fetched the page and how often that page ends up cited, and Visitor Analytics shows the visits and conversions that came after. When the answer is a missing or weak page, an AEO article can go straight to WordPress, Webflow or Framer. Start the 7-day free trial on Professional, connect your crawler logs on the first day, and load your LLM Pulse prompt list so you can compare a week of daily data with your last weekly runs.

FAQ

Which LLM Pulse alternative is cheapest?

Rankscale Essentials, shown at €17 a month and sold on yearly billing only, undercuts LLM Pulse Starter's €49. Ahrefs' prompt packages start at €46.7. AthenaHQ has a free tier with 300 credits. Promptwatch starts higher, at $95 a month, but tracks daily on every plan.

Which alternatives include AI crawler logs below €299?

Promptwatch's crawler logs start on Professional ($245, or €205). Scrunch AI Core ($250) includes bot traffic, Rankscale Pro (€99) includes Cloudflare-based AI Visits, and Ahrefs puts Bot Analytics on every paid plan during its beta. Of those, only Promptwatch lists IP verification and a citation rate per page.

Do any alternatives track daily without a separate plan?

Yes. Promptwatch runs daily on every plan, with 12, 6 and 1-hour options on Business. Rankscale schedules anywhere from hourly to monthly on every plan, paid in credits, and Semrush's Base plan tracks its 25 prompts daily.

Can I keep LLM Pulse while I test an alternative?

You can, and the trials line up well. LLM Pulse's 14-day trial and Promptwatch's 7-day trial overlap if you start both on the same day. Run the same prompts in each, then compare which pages get cited and what the crawler and traffic data say about them.