Promptwatch vs AIclicks vs Promptmonitor vs Waikay: Budget Trackers Ranked (2026)
Cheap AI visibility trackers ranked: AIclicks, Promptmonitor and Waikay against Promptwatch's free Explore plan and $95 Essential tier.
Not every team needs a four-figure AI visibility contract. A founder checking whether ChatGPT recommends their product, a freelancer with three small clients, a marketer who wants proof before asking for budget: all of them want something under $100 a month that tells the truth. This page ranks three budget trackers, AIclicks, Promptmonitor and Waikay, against Promptwatch's two cheapest options, the free Explore plan and Essential at $95 a month.
How we ranked
Cheap tools tend to save money in three places: fewer engines, slower refresh, and fewer prompts. So we looked at what $0, about $30 and about $100 actually buy on each tool, measured in engines, refresh cadence and prompt count. Then we checked whether the published limits agree with each other, and whether the tool does anything beyond counting mentions.
AIclicks, Promptmonitor and Waikay figures come from their entries in our catalog. Promptwatch figures come from its llms.txt, re-checked on 15 October 2026. Where the catalog has no number, we say "Not published" rather than estimate one.
1. Promptwatch
Promptwatch isn't the cheapest tool here at every price point, but it has the best ladder. Explore is free: 10 prompts, ChatGPT only, 1 project, 1 seat. That is enough to see whether ChatGPT names you on your most important questions, and it costs nothing to keep running.
Essential at $95 a month, with a 7-day trial, is where it becomes a working tool. You get 50 prompts that run across all tracked models, 6,000 responses, 200K visitor events, 5 AEO articles and a daily prompt refresh. The tracked models include ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, DeepSeek, Mistral and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Prompts carry search volumes, difficulty scores and query fan-outs, and citation analytics show the cited pages and domains, including Reddit and YouTube. Visitor analytics attribute AI-referred traffic to conversions, and MCP and API access come with every paid plan.
What Essential doesn't include is crawler logs. Agent Analytics, which shows ChatGPTBot and ClaudeBot visits and the path from crawl to citation, starts on Professional at $245 with 25M crawler logs. That is the honest upgrade point.
2. AIclicks
AIclicks refreshes daily on every plan, which not every budget tracker can say. Starter costs $59 a month (around $47 billed annually) for 30 prompts, 5 AI articles and 3 engines of your choice from a pool of more than ten, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Grok, Meta, DeepSeek and Mistral. It adds citation and source intelligence, a query fan-out analyzer, "AI Lift" recommendations, and AI article generation with CMS publishing.
The engine mechanic is the thing to understand before paying. Three engines at $59 means choosing which ones you ignore. Pro at $189 gets you 4 engines, 150 prompts, unlimited sites and GA4, API and MCP integrations. Six engines need Business at $499, and all engines are Enterprise only. The trial is 3 days, the shortest on this page. AIclicks also sells Reddit growth services and ChatGPT ads, which some buyers will want to know about a vendor that measures those same sources.
3. Promptmonitor
Promptmonitor is the lowest-priced way here to cover six models. Starter at $29 a month includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity, with 25 prompts and 1 seat. Growth at $39 doubles prompts to 50, refreshes daily and allows unlimited seats. Pro at $129 brings 150 prompts and adds Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Agency is custom with white-label.
Its most original feature is publisher contact extraction. It pulls contact details for the authors of pages AI engines cite, which turns a citation report into an outreach list. The listing also names AI crawler and bot analytics, an llms.txt generator and cookie-free web analytics.
There are caveats. Starter refreshes twice a week, while the pricing FAQ claims daily refresh on every plan, so the tier table and the FAQ disagree. AI Overviews and AI Mode wait for the $129 tier. The listing records no sentiment analysis and no API. And the product was acquired in January 2026 by a buyer who hasn't been disclosed, which leaves the roadmap and data handling as open questions.
4. Waikay
Waikay works differently from the other three. Instead of a prompt dashboard, it runs topic-based audits of what AI engines believe about your brand, then reports gaps, errors and competitor advantages with suggested actions. A Knowledge Score rates how well AI understands you, and a Fact Tracker flags hallucinations. It covers 4 engines in 13 languages.
There is a free option with 3 credits to test reports, and paid plans start at $24.95 a month on credits. The catalog doesn't break down what each paid tier includes. Waikay's own FAQ addresses confusion about the credit system and notes that API-based queries can differ from what people see in consumer chat apps. The price also rose from $19.95 to $24.95. It ranks last as a tracker because it isn't really one. As a cheap hallucination check for a comms team, it fills a gap the others leave open.
Side by side
| Promptwatch | AIclicks | Promptmonitor | Waikay | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free option | Explore: 10 prompts, ChatGPT only | Not published (3-day trial) | Not published | 3 free credits |
| Cheapest paid plan | Essential $95/mo | Starter $59/mo (about $47 annual) | Starter $29/mo | From $24.95/mo (credits) |
| Prompts at that plan | 50 | 30 | 25 | Not published (credit-based) |
| Engines at that plan | All tracked models | 3 of your choice | 6 | 4 |
| Refresh at that plan | Daily | Daily | Twice a week (FAQ says daily) | Not published |
| AI Overviews and AI Mode | Yes | In the engine pool (counts toward your 3) | From Pro, $129/mo | Not published |
| Citation detail | Page, domain, Reddit, YouTube, offsite | Citation and source intelligence | Cited-source contact extraction | Not published |
| AI crawler logs | Professional ($245/mo) and up | Not published | Crawler and bot analytics listed | Not published |
| AI-referred conversions | Yes, from Essential | GA4 integration from Pro | Not published | Not published |
| API or MCP | MCP and API on all paid plans | From Pro, $189/mo | Not published | Not published |
Who should pick which
Pick Promptmonitor if six models for $29 is the whole brief and you're comfortable with an undisclosed owner and a twice-weekly refresh on Starter. Pick AIclicks if daily refresh matters and three engines cover the places your buyers ask. Pick Waikay if your worry is AI saying something wrong about you rather than how often you appear.
Pick Promptwatch if you want to start free and move up without switching tools later.
Our recommendation
For most budget buyers the smartest first move is Promptwatch Explore, because it costs nothing and gives you a real ChatGPT baseline. When you outgrow it, Essential at $95 covers every tracked model with daily refresh, citation analytics down to Reddit and YouTube, and visitor analytics that tie AI-referred visits to conversions. None of the three budget tools documents conversion attribution at their cheapest tier. Five AEO articles a month from Content Agents come included, published to Webflow, Framer or WordPress after review. And when you need to know whether AI crawlers reach your pages at all, Agent Analytics on Professional is the next step on the same account.