What two AI engines told a US security firm to buy, and what each of those products really costs

We put one question to the ChatGPT and Gemini product surfaces on 21 October 2026, worded the way a security business owner would word it, with no company name in it. The two answers were not variations on a theme. ChatGPT named exactly one paid product in the whole answer and quoted two prices for it that we then found word for word on the vendor page. Gemini named nine paid suppliers with a figure against almost every one, and when we opened each page on 22 October 2026 we could confirm two of those figures, found four that disagreed with the page, and found three vendors that publish no price at all.

What was asked, on which surfaces, and when

The question was "What should a security firm do to appear in AI answers?", put through a data provider to the ChatGPT product surface at 22:28 UTC and to the Gemini product surface at 22:43 UTC on 21 October 2026. Both engines ran a live web search for it. ChatGPT returned 101 source citations and Gemini returned 4. That gap is the first useful fact for anyone buying on the strength of an AI answer, because a four source answer and a hundred source answer are not the same kind of evidence even when they read with the same confidence.

ChatGPT's citation list was led by Google's and Microsoft's own documentation, seven from developers.google.com, seven from blog.google, five from blogs.bing.com, three from the Bing webmaster pages, three from ahrefs.com and three from Ahrefs' help centre. Gemini's four were writer.com, totheweb.com, semrush.com and coalitiontechnologies.com, which is one vendor's own site and one agency's own site out of four.

What each engine told the firm to do first

• ChatGPT put the free work first and said so plainly. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to fix crawling and indexing, then a complete Google Business Profile for real service locations, then separate pages for commercial guarding, armed and unarmed officers, event security, mobile patrols and each target city, answering buyer questions about price, licensing, insurance and response time. Only after all of that did it name a paid product.
• Gemini led with the review and directory ecosystem and asserted that AI models source 85 per cent of brand data off site, then asked for answer first content blocks, then Organization and LocalBusiness schema for service areas and certifications. It then listed tools and agencies in what it called order of deployment.
• Both engines independently named the same two things. A complete company profile and structured data describing the service area. Neither of those costs money.
• Only ChatGPT named the buying questions. It wrote out the kind of query a buyer actually types, such as best commercial security companies in Dallas and how much does unarmed security cost, which is the part a guarding firm can turn into pages this week.

Every price in the two answers, checked on the vendor page on 22 October 2026

• Ahrefs Brand Radar, the only paid product in ChatGPT's answer. It said custom prompt tracking from 50 dollars a month and the AI Visibility Index from 199 dollars a month. We read ahrefs.com/brand-radar on 22 October 2026 and the page states "Starts at $50/mo" against Custom Prompts and "$199/mo" against the AI Visibility Index, with 83 prompts a day, 2,500 checks a month and overage at 0.020 dollars a check. Both figures are exact. The same page also carries "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS" and the line "Free for every paid Ahrefs Lite plan and above", which the engine did not mention and which changes the arithmetic for anyone already paying Ahrefs.
• Semrush, first in Gemini's list. Gemini said plans start at 139.95 dollars a month for Pro and run to 499.95 for Business. We fetched semrush.com/pricing on 22 October 2026 and were served semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/, where the three published tiers read 139 dollars a month, 199 dollars a month and 299 dollars a month billed monthly, with annual equivalents of 117.33, 165.17 and 248.17. The page we read names no Pro plan, no Business plan, no 139.95 and no 499.95. The ladder has been renamed and repriced and the engine quoted the old one.
• Otterly, second in Gemini's list at 29 dollars a month. That one is right. otterly.ai/pricing on 22 October 2026 publishes Lite at 29 dollars a month, or 25 a month billed annually. What the engine left out is the limit that matters here, 15 search prompts, and four engines on that plan, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Google Gemini is a 9 dollar a month add on at that tier, Google AI Mode another 9, and Claude another 29.
• ZipTie, which Gemini said starts at 99 dollars a month and placed at ziptie.dev. Both details moved. ziptie.dev now redirects to ziptie.ai, and the pricing page there on 22 October 2026 is a usage calculator whose own presets read Starter from 42.75 dollars a month, Professional from 659.59 and Enterprise from 3,137.09, priced at 0.01 dollars for one prompt on one engine for one check across seven engines. The entry figure is less than half what the engine said.
• BrightLocal, which Gemini said starts at 39 dollars a month. brightlocal.com/pricing on 22 October 2026 publishes a one location Track plan at 41 dollars a month billed monthly, or 369 dollars billed annually, which the page itself shows as 31 a month. Manage is 54 monthly or 485 annually, Grow is 65 monthly or 584 annually. The Track plan's feature list opens with a Local AI Visibility Tracker, flagged as new.
• Yext, which Gemini said starts around 199 dollars a year. We could not verify it. yext.com/pricing, yext.com/pricing/ and yext.com/platform/pricing all returned HTTP 404 on 22 October 2026, the first two by redirecting to yext.com/404. A 404 records what the server did on that date and is not evidence about Yext's actual rate.
• iPullRank, at a typical 10,000 dollars a month and up. ipullrank.com returned 200 and renders 936 words. There is no retainer figure in them. The dollar amounts on the page are client outcomes, including 2.4 billion in incremental revenue and 290 million in revenue, not a price.
• Seer Interactive, at 5,000 to 10,000 dollars a month. seerinteractive.com returned 200 and renders 918 words, and the only dollar figures in them are community giving, 15 million pledged by 2032 and 802,595 donated in 2024. No retainer is published.
• Coalition Technologies, at a typical 3,000 to 5,000 dollars a month. This one is the best illustration of the whole problem. coalitiontechnologies.com/pricing returned 200 and is titled "Marketing Pricing Estimator", and the page is a calculator. Read without running its scripts it renders every number as a zero, including "Your total online marketing & advertising budget $ 0" and "$ 0 per hour". A page named pricing that publishes no price to a reader who does not execute its code is the condition an engine is guessing around.

The cheapest published path for a single state guarding firm, in order

• Nothing at all. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Business Profile and Bing Places are free, both engines named them, and ChatGPT named them first. The guarding, patrol, event and integration pages, the state licence number, the insurance limits and the response time commitment are writing work, not software.
• 31 to 41 dollars a month. BrightLocal Track for one location, 369 billed annually or 41 billed monthly, with the Local AI Visibility Tracker in the plan, read on its pricing page on 22 October 2026.
• 29 dollars a month. Otterly Lite, 15 prompts on four engines, with Gemini and Claude as paid add ons at 9 and 29 dollars a month on that tier.
• 42.75 dollars a month and up. The ziptie.ai Starter preset, seven engines, usage priced from 0.01 dollars a check.
• 50 dollars a month. Ahrefs Brand Radar custom prompts, free to anyone already on a paid Ahrefs Lite plan or above, which many security marketing teams already are.
• 199 dollars a month. The Ahrefs AI Visibility Index tier, 83 prompts a day.
• Unquoted. Everything Gemini listed as an agency. Three of the three agencies it named publish no retainer figure on their own sites, so the only number that exists for that work is the one in your written proposal.

Why the gap between the two answers matters more than either answer

A guarding company reading the Gemini answer alone would budget for Semrush at 139.95, ZipTie at 99 and Yext at 199 a year, and all three of those figures failed on the vendor page the next day. A firm reading the ChatGPT answer alone would budget 50 or 199 dollars a month and both figures held. The difference is not that one engine is careless. It is that the answer with 101 citations was assembled from pages that carry prices, led by the platform makers' own documentation, and the answer with 4 citations was assembled from a vendor site, an agency site and two marketing blogs.

So the check worth running before you pay anybody is the one the engines will not run for you. Open the vendor page, find the number, and write down the date you read it. Six brand renames were caught in this programme in a week, the newest being visiblevet.com, which on 22 October 2026 serves lesli.com under the title "Lesli Rose, Get Recommended by Google and AI". We verified that redirect ourselves the same day. A vendor fact belongs to the URL it was read on, never to the brand name in an answer.

Where AI Knows Us sits in this, and where a rival is cheaper

We do not sell security marketing, local SEO, review generation or listings management, and nothing above is a pitch for any of it. What we sell is the measurement on the other side of that work. We ask buying questions with your company name absent from the question, on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and report which firms were named and which URLs produced the answer. Our own ladder, read from aiknowsus.com/llms.txt on 22 October 2026, is SEO Start at 149 dollars a month in the US and UK and 99 elsewhere, which watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, then Growth at 299 in the US and UK and 199 elsewhere for 100 questions on all five surfaces weekly, then Scale at 599 and 399 for 300 questions. Growth is the cheapest plan of ours that reads all five surfaces, so nobody should read 149 as an AI visibility entry price.

Where a rival beats us, by name and with the figure. For a single location security firm, BrightLocal is the right place to start and not us. Its Track plan covers one location at 41 dollars a month billed monthly or 369 billed annually, the plan includes a Local AI Visibility Tracker, and that is a seventh of our cheapest plan that watches engines. SE Ranking beats us on arithmetic at the next level up. Its Core plan, read on seranking.com/subscription.html on 22 October 2026 after seranking.com/pricing/ redirected there, is 129 dollars a month billed monthly with 100 prompts tracked daily, against our 299 for 100 questions watched weekly. That is less than half the price at a higher frequency, and we did not verify which engines are behind SE Ranking's prompt count, so compare that line yourself. Profound publishes single sign on, SAML and SOC 2 compliance and up to nine answer engines on its enterprise tier, and a word boundary search of our own pricing page, 119,203 bytes read on 22 October 2026, returns zero hits for sso, saml, soc 2, iso, dpa and white label. Our page also contradicts itself on multi site coverage, rendering "Businesses covered 1 1 1 1 1 1 10 1" above a row reading "More than one business No" in all eight columns, and listing "Claude included No Yes No Yes Yes No Yes Yes" beside an FAQ describing all five apps. Both readings render.

What this page establishes and what it does not. One question per engine on one night, which fixes what each engine said then rather than what it says now, and one fetch per vendor URL on 22 October 2026. Every figure above is attached to the page it was read on. The number to act on is the one in a written quote.

What security company owners ask about getting named in AI answers

Do I need to buy anything to be named by ChatGPT or Gemini

Not for the first step, and the engine with a hundred citations said so before it named a product. The complete Google Business Profile, the Bing Places claim, the page per service and per city, the state licence number in text, the insurance limits and the response time are the whole of the opening move. Buy software when you need to see whether that work moved the answer.

Why did the two engines give such different shopping lists

Because they read different pages. The ChatGPT answer cited 101 sources led by Google, Microsoft and OpenAI documentation. The Gemini answer cited four, two of which were a vendor's and an agency's own marketing. The list a vendor site produces looks like a vendor list.

What should a guarding firm actually publish

Separate pages for contract guarding, armed and unarmed officers, mobile patrols, event security and alarm monitoring, because these are bought by different people, and a page for each city you really cover. Put the licence number, the insurance limits, the screening process, the supervision ratio and an honest response time in text on the page rather than inside a PDF or a quote form, because text is what an answer is assembled from.

How often should I re test

Monthly is enough for one state. Keep the prompt wording identical every time so the comparison means something, and record the cited URLs as well as the company names, because the URLs are the pages you can go and fix.

Is an agency worth it for AI visibility work

Both engines said to establish a baseline before hiring, and ChatGPT added that no agency, tool or file settles the outcome. The three agencies Gemini named publish no retainer figure between them, so there is no market rate to compare a proposal against. Ask for the measured baseline, the named engines, the prompt list and the report format in writing before you sign.