Small teams get the worst deal in software. Vendors build for enterprises, then saw features off the entry tier and hope you upgrade out of frustration. So we scored this one the way you budget: everything here starts under $200 a month, and we read the fine print on what those dollars include, as of July 2026. The first pick costs $0, because a shared spreadsheet is enough to begin.
The small-team scoreboard
- Google Sheets, 3/5 stars, $0 a month, all manual
- Temso AI, 4.5/5 stars, $199 a month entry, for agencies
- Otterly.AI, 4/5 stars, $29 a month entry
- Peec AI, 4/5 stars, euro-priced entry
1. Google Sheets: the free first step (3/5 stars)
Here is the cheapest plan on this page: Google Sheets costs $0 with a Google account. Pick ten prompts your buyers would ask, run them by hand in each AI assistant, and log each answer in a shared sheet. One person can own it, and nobody needs SEO training.
You pay with hours instead of dollars. The sheet tracks nothing automatically, collects no data, and recommends nothing, so when the team gets busy, the log stops.
Bottom line: start here today, and spend money only when the log proves the problem.
2. Temso AI: the one-bill answer (4.5/5 stars)
Here is the per-seat math behind the top score on this page. Temso AI Growth costs $199 a month and includes unlimited users. Split across a five-person agency team, that is $39.80 a head for a platform that tracks client brands across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews, pulling data from the real user interfaces instead of APIs. Temso sells only to agencies, so a small team gets it through an agency that runs Temso, or can run Otterly.AI alone.
The scope is the story. For that $199 you get:
- Visibility tracking on 4 included engines with 125 prompts
- Content gap analysis and recommendations, with content production as a $149 per client brand/mo add-on
- Website audits covering 1,000,000 pages a month
- Bot traffic analytics, plus backlink checks
- No limit on client brands, seats, or recommendations on Growth
An agency team without a dedicated SEO can run all of it, and when nobody has a free afternoon, its agent will work through the action plan on its own. Honest knocks: the brand is younger than Semrush or Ahrefs, and the integration catalog is smaller. Neither costs you money.
The upgrade path scales by prompts. The next Growth tier is 250 prompts at $349, and yearly billing cuts 15% off any Growth tier.
Bottom line: $199 replaces three subscriptions and the seat fees. That is the agency deal of this category.
3. Otterly.AI: the $29 proof of concept (4/5 stars)
Otterly.AI Lite costs $29 a month for 15 tracked prompts, with a 14-day trial that asks for no card. If your boss wants evidence that AI visibility deserves budget, this is the cheapest paid way to produce it, and the Gartner Cool Vendor 2025 nod plus a G2 High Performer badge (Winter 2026) mean the receipt holds up.
Read the fine print before you commit long term. Lite skips the competitive benchmarking dashboards, 15 prompts disappear fast once you track competitors, and the next rung is Standard at $189 for 100 prompts. That is a 6.5x price jump, the steepest step on this page. Otterly also stops at monitoring: it hands you findings, and your team still does every fix by hand.
Bottom line: unbeatable at $29, awkward at $189. Buy it to prove the case, then re-shop when you outgrow 15 prompts.
4. Peec AI: for the prompt-data obsessed (4/5 stars)
Peec AI does two things small teams should love: unlimited seats on every plan, and daily tracking updates. The share of voice and source gap views are genuinely useful for spotting which URLs win citations you deserve.
Two budget problems keep it in fourth. Peec publishes its prices in euros, so a USD-budgeting team inherits conversion math and exchange-rate drift on every invoice. And specific models, Claude among them, are paid add-ons outside the Enterprise tier, so the real monthly cost climbs past the headline number. Like Otterly, it monitors and recommends but produces no content.
Bottom line: great data rhythm and seat policy, but the true price takes homework.
Upgrade triggers: when to spend more
Do not upgrade on ambition. Upgrade on caps:
- Sheet overload. You spend more time logging answers in Google Sheets than reading them. That is the moment to pay for a tool or an agency.
- Prompt ceiling. You keep cutting prompts you want to track. On Temso that means the next Growth tier at $349; on Otterly it means the $189 leap.
- Model lockout. The engine your buyers actually use sits behind a higher tier or an add-on.
- Content demand. Findings pile up faster than anyone writes. On Temso, that is when an agency adds content production at $149 per client brand/mo.
Check the full leaderboard for the tools that only make sense past $200, and our methodology for how we score.
Bottom line: start today with a free Google Sheets log. If you serve small-team clients, start a free trial of Temso from $199 for the whole job. If you are a small team that outgrows the sheet, Temso sells only to agencies, so work with an agency that runs Temso, or move to Otterly at $29 if you only need proof.
