What Yoast, Rank Math And AIOSEO Publish

Here's what a checkbox costs you: three plugins put the same six words on three pricing pages, "AI visibility," and you'd pick the cheapest one assuming a checkmark means the same feature everywhere it shows up. It doesn't, and the plugin that hands you a sentiment score isn't the plugin that hands you the sentence an engine actually wrote, even when both call it the same thing. We sell the second kind, so we're not a neutral referee here, and we'd rather say that once, plainly, than have you find it out halfway through this post.

Everything below is sourced and dated: prices, install counts and feature names all trace to a public page you can check yourself. That's the actual cost of the checkbox, and it's why the rest of this post is five specific questions instead of one general complaint.

What Yoast, Rank Math And AIOSEO Publish

Yoast SEO carries the largest install base in this category, 10 to 13 million active sites by Capterra's own count, retrieved 2026-08-07, and that's two decades of trust no plugin our age gets to shortcut. Its AI+ tier runs $358.80 a year and adds AI Brand Insights across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, while Premium alone, at $118.80 a year, doesn't include it at all (offerings matrix, 2026-08-08).

Rank Math sells AI Visibility as a plan of its own, from €4.99 a month billed yearly, on top of its SEO plans: ChatGPT or Gemini on the two smaller tiers, both only on the largest, and the page doesn't say how many prompts each brand gets or which model answers them (Rank Math AI pricing, read 2026-09-25).

All in One SEO competes on the traditional half of the job instead, at $49 to $299 a year across four tiers on a 3-million-install base, and its own listing describes "AI-powered SEO insights" (HostKey, 2026-08-08). That's a fine choice for a customer who only wants the traditional half, and it's why the five questions later in this post are really about two plugins, not three.

That gap between Yoast's two tiers matters more than the sixty-dollar difference suggests: a store owner on Premium alone is paying for search-engine optimization only, with no answer-engine visibility at all, unless they know to ask for the separate AI+ line and pay for it on top. We'd rather build that in from day one than sell it as an upsell later, and our free tier proves it: it already answers on ChatGPT and Gemini before anyone pays us anything.

Our Own Method, In The Open

Here's what we do instead, and we'd want any vendor held to the same five things, us included. Every stored answer in an AEOSearch report names the model that answered it, so when Claude disagrees with ChatGPT you know which one you're reading, not a blended average standing in for both. We run three samples per question rather than one, so a single lucky rerun never gets to stand in for a stable number, and every report states the count in writing: four questions across ChatGPT and Gemini, one pass each, on the free tier.

We flag whether search was on or off for every answer, so a live result and a guess pulled from training data never share a score they didn't earn together. The report shows you the actual sentence an engine wrote, not a sentiment label standing in for it, so you can check our arithmetic against the source text the same afternoon you read it. And a failed engine call gets pulled out of the metric and counted on its own, so an outage never reads back to you as the market forgetting you exist.

The free scorecard stops at those four questions; a paid report runs twenty questions across three engines, three samples each, and stores every one of the 180 answers with the questions you lost on top. We think that's still the best value in the category today, and we'll happily be checked on that claim too.

We disclose all five of these details because a customer who can't check our work has no real reason to trust it over anyone else's, and "trust us" is not a method, it's a request. So every report ships as a page we'd hand to a skeptical business partner, not a dashboard where you take our word for it.

The Same Word, A Different Product

None of this makes Yoast or Rank Math dishonest, exactly: a sentiment score and a stored transcript both answer to the name "AI visibility," the way a sedan and a moving van both answer to "vehicle." The difference only shows up once you ask five plain questions of whatever's behind the checkmark, and each one closes a specific way a number can mislead without anyone technically lying: an unnamed model lets a cheaper one get swapped in without telling you the comparison changed, an unstated sample count lets one lucky run stand in for a stable measurement, unflagged grounding lets a training-data guess wear the same badge as a live search result, a summarized-only answer takes away your ability to check the vendor's arithmetic against the source, and an undisclosed failed call turns a vendor's own outage into your reported invisibility.

Run the five on us first, before you run them on anyone else, and you'll know inside five minutes whether a checkmark means a feature or a phrase.

Why We're Telling You This

We built this comparison to sell against the gap it names, and we'd rather tell you that once than have you wonder about it later. Yoast earned its install base one renewal at a time over many years, and we hope someone says the same about us one day, so we're not pretending a young plugin buys the same trust. We're not the incumbent here, and pretending otherwise would cost us the one thing a newcomer actually has to sell: that everything we show you, you can go check yourself. What we can offer today is the five questions above, answered in writing on every report we send, so you're buying a transcript you can read yourself and not a checkmark you have to take on faith.

Start with the free scorecard and run the checklist on us, or read the five questions to ask before you pay first if you'd rather practice on someone else. Either way, we look forward to showing our work, and the plugin is there whenever you're ready to see your own report.