Is VisiScan Worth It?
VisiScan is a four-engine local named-rate scan: free 40 answers, $49 report, $29/mo weekly monitor. Live sheet from 29 August 2026, and why Promptwatch is still the platform.
VisiScan is not a GEO platform with crawler logs. It is a scanner at visiscan.app: it reads your site, invents buyer questions, asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, then tells you whether your name came back. Founder on /about: Mike Holp. pricing.md last verified 24 August 2026. We fetched the live pages on 29 August 2026.
Worth it if you run a local trade or clinic and wanted a one-shot named-rate. Not worth it if you typed "AI visibility tool" and meant daily prompts, Grok, AI Overviews, or Promptwatch Agent Analytics.
What the vendor actually sells
Three SKUs, all four engines. Free scan: 5 buyer-intent questions, 2 samples per question and engine, up to 40 live answers, visibility score 0-100, readiness score, top rival, one highest-impact fix. About 60 seconds. No credit card. pricing.md: 1 scan per URL, no API. Homepage: scores with no signup; add email to keep a link to the free breakdown.
Full report: $49 one-time. 12 questions, 3 samples, up to 144 answers, quoted competitors, citation game plan, 30+ signals, industry benchmark, L1-L5 agent-readiness ladder, copy-paste schema.org and llms.txt. 7-day "clarity" refund if the report does not show five things you did not know. Shareable page.
Monitor: $29/mo or $290/yr (vendor annual -17%). Weekly re-scans at full-report depth, score trends, competitor-watch alerts, AI-traffic beacon (count visits from ChatGPT and other AI engines), Monitor API. Cancel in the billing portal. Partial provider results are labeled; replay is not sold as live.
llms.txt: visibility score is a weighted named-rate; trust and comparison intents get 1.5x. Methodology is a public page. Reports are dated observations, not permanent rankings.
The three tiers are a funnel, not a platform. The free scan earns the email. The $49 report is the deliverable most local owners actually want, a shareable PDF they can hand to a webmaster. The $29 monitor is the recurring version of that same scan, run weekly. None of the three gives you a standing prompt list you check daily, and none of them ships a CMS publish path or a crawler log.
Copy that fights the meter
One homepage section says enter your email to unlock the full report (144 answers). The priced SKU is $49. Keep pricing.md. Screenshot checkout.
The hero animation uses Harborlight Plumbing in Astoria, Ridgeline, Fast Bros, Astoria 24hr, "16 live answers," then "named in 3/20." The block is labeled illustrative. Do not paste those names into a case-study column.
Vendor counters on the same page: 328 scans completed, 289 businesses on the AI Visibility Index, average visibility score 25. August 2026. We did not recount.
FAQ audience is local services: plumbers, electricians, HVAC, dentists, lawyers, accountants, roofers, landscapers, medical clinics. Agencies may scan any URL and share; no per-seat license. Full reports are one-time per scan. That is a PDF workflow, not a workspace with 50 standing prompts.
No Grok, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, or AI Mode on pricing.md. Schema and llms.txt are files you paste. There is no Webflow or Framer publish path on this listing. The beacon on Monitor counts referrers. It is not conversion analytics.
Rank versus Promptwatch
Promptwatch Explore is free: 10 ChatGPT prompts. Essential $95/mo with 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, 200K visitor events, five AEO articles, citation analytics. Professional $245/mo with 150 prompts, 18,000 responses, 1M visitor events, 25M crawler logs, 15 AEO articles. Business $579/mo. Agency Kick-off $199, Growth $399, Scale $799. 4.7/5 G2, 1,840-plus customers, Amsterdam, April 2025. There is no $29 Promptwatch plan. VisiScan Monitor at $29/mo is a different invoice. Do not mix them.
Promptwatch tracks a longer engine list, including Grok and Google AI surfaces on the fact sheet. Agent Analytics is CDN crawler logs with crawl-to-citation. Citation views include Reddit and YouTube. Content Agents publish with a review inbox. VisiScan's job is a sampled named-rate plus paste-in files. Useful. Smaller.
The two products answer different questions. VisiScan answers "did my name come back on four engines for one URL this week." Promptwatch answers "which prompt moved, which page was cited, did the bot fetch it, did a visitor convert, and what should we publish next." A plumber who wants a one-time read needs the first. A brand running a program needs the second.
Who should pay
Yes to the free scan. The question and sample counts are written down, which we prefer to a mystery grade.
Yes to $49 if you wanted a shareable 144-answer pack for one local URL and you will paste schema yourself. Use the 7-day window if the report is empty of surprises.
Yes to $29/mo only if weekly 12-question checks on four engines are the whole program. That is a light monitor, not Essential.
No if you needed crawler logs, conversions, CMS agents, or more than four engines. Buy Promptwatch. Start on Explore. Move to Essential when the sample is too small. Move to Professional when logs decide it.
VisiScan is worth a free minute and maybe a $49 PDF. It is not worth treating $29 Monitor as a GEO platform.