LLMrefs alternatives, priced against the same $79

Both headline 500, and the two 500s are not the same unit. LLMrefs' card reads "Track 500 prompts for brand mentions, sources and fan-out queries", read on 3 September 2026: a set of prompts held under tracking, refreshed at least weekly. Keylight's 500 is a weekly budget, where one question sent to one engine once spends one of them. Nothing on LLMrefs' card says whether its 500 prompts each run on every engine it includes or are spread across them, and that unstated detail is the difference between 500 checks a week and several thousand.

Keylight's own specification assumed the two were equivalent when it set Solo at 500, "to hold the line against LLMrefs, which sells the same volume at the same $79". On the evidence of their pricing card, that is not something a buyer can verify, and neither can we.

One more thing before treating $79 as fixed: LLMrefs prints a "Limited time only" badge directly under the figure, recorded 3 September 2026. The vendor presents its own price as promotional, so any comparison built on it has a shelf life.

What LLMrefs does well

One plan is the whole proposition, and for a buyer who does not want to work out which tier they need, that is worth something on its own. Seats and projects are both unlimited on it: "Unlimited team members in your organization" and "Unlimited projects, one subscription for all your domains", read 16 September 2026. Ayzeo and Rankshift give seats away at their entry tiers too, so this is not unique, but LLMrefs is the only one of the three that also includes every engine it offers.

Refresh frequency is stated plainly, inside a collapsed FAQ answer: "Every keyword is updated in the dashboard at least once per week."

LLMrefs argues for its own data quality rather than assuming it. Its site opens with "Forget vague visibility scores", read 2 September 2026, and its claim is specific: "We always ensure statistically significant brand ranking outcomes are found for each of your tracked keywords", read 3 September 2026.

Counting the engines

LLMrefs lists eleven engine names on its homepage, all on the single plan with no surcharge, read 16 September 2026: OpenAI ChatGPT, OpenAI ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Google Gemini, Perplexity AI, Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and DeepSeek AI.

Counted as distinct products that is ten. ChatGPT and ChatGPT Search are one product with a search mode turned on, so counting both adds one to the list.

Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode look like the same duplication and are not. The AI Overview box sits above ordinary Google results; AI Mode is a separate conversational tab. Asked the same question on 7 September 2026, the two returned different answers naming different brands, recorded in Keylight's own specification, so neither stands in for the other. Both count, for LLMrefs and for us.

Ten against Keylight's eight, on the same $79. LLMrefs covers more engines, and it covers more even after the duplicate comes out.

What its own pages do not show

Read on 16 September 2026, LLMrefs' pricing and FAQ pages put no margin of error next to a score, and neither links to a page setting out how the score is calculated. Neither says how many separate questions sit behind a number, which is what a margin is worked out from.

That is what those two pages showed on that date, not a statement about the product underneath. The claim about statistical significance is made; neither of those two pages shows the working behind it. Whether that matters depends on whether a reader ever has to defend a number to somebody who asks how it was produced.

The alternatives, priced

Every figure is an entry tier, with its billing period and its currency. Competitor figures were read in a real browser on 3 September 2026, except the Semrush tier split and Peec's per-model add-on rates, both established on 4 September. The Keylight row comes from its own specification.

Three notes that a citation would drop. Ahrefs sells two things: Brand Radar is bundled inside the Lite, Standard and Advanced plans from $129, and Brand Radar AI is a standalone product from $199 a month, also sold as monthly packages at $50 for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000 with per-check overage. Scrunch's annual figure could not be read at all on 3 September 2026, because its page carried a banner about a coming change and the layout appeared broken. And MaxAEO is missing on purpose: its pricing page returned unfinished template text with placeholder figures that day, and quoting those would be inventing a price.

Where metering changes the comparison

Three vendors above sell engines separately, so their headline figures are not comparable with an all-engines price until the add-ons are counted. Two have pages of their own: Peec AI alternatives and Profound alternatives. The same field by buying situation is in the best AI visibility tools.

Peec AI's $95 Starter includes three of the six models it offers below its Enterprise tier, and a fourth costs $35 a month more. Adding all three missing models brings Starter to $200 a month, or $170 billed annually. Otterly.AI sells Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode as add-ons on every tier including the $29 one, with Claude alone from $29 a month on Lite. Ayzeo's $39 Starter includes ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, and the other five engines are $29 a month each.

Metering is not a criticism. It suits a buyer who already knows which three engines matter to them. It only misleads when a metered headline sits beside a flat one with no add-on rate attached, which is why the column above carries it.

Keylight at the same $79

Solo is $79 a month, or two months free billed annually, an effective $65.83, priced as of 3 September 2026. It buys 500 tracked questions a week, one workspace and five seats, across eight engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok and DeepSeek. No engine sits behind an add-on, and the customer decides how to spend the 500 across them.

Two limits belong in the same paragraph as that price. Grok and Claude are each capped at 10% of weekly capacity, because both are billed by usage rather than per request and cost more to run than the other six. A $39 a month add-on lifts either cap by 100 a week, which changes the mix inside the 500 rather than the 500 itself. And Solo is the one plan that cannot buy more capacity at all: the $100-a-month lot of 1,000 extra checks a week is sold on Business and above, never on Solo. The $39 add-on does not change that either, because it raises how much of the 500 can go to Grok or Claude rather than raising the 500. So 500 a week is a ceiling on Solo, and a business that outgrows it moves to Business at $149. LLMrefs answers that question differently, telling its own FAQ readers they can add more keywords at any time.

What Keylight publishes, and what LLMrefs' pages did not on 16 September 2026: a margin of error beside every score, a week-on-week move called a change only when its whole range sits clear of zero, the exact text each engine produced kept behind its score, and a methodology page anyone can open without logging in. One input behind that page is Olivier Martinez's critical survey of 45 studies, posted to arXiv on 15 July 2026, which found that "no reviewed technique shows a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability or downstream behavior". A vendor publishing that about its own category is an odd thing to find.

What Keylight does not have in version 1 is any custom integration: no Zapier, no Slack bot, no CRM connection. Getting numbers out means the dashboard, a spreadsheet export of a workspace's whole history, or the monthly report, which is Keylight-branded on Solo because the unbranded version is an Agency feature.

The pair at $79 comes down to this: LLMrefs includes more engines and unlimited seats, and Keylight shows its working.