Recomma vs Rankscale (2026): credits and engine breadth vs measured fixes

Rankscale and Recomma both ask AI assistants the questions your buyers ask and count how often your brand is named. Rankscale sells credits rather than prompts, offers seventeen-plus engines on every plan, and lets each question run on its own schedule, from hourly to monthly. Recomma sells a fixed number of prompts, captures ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode from the page a reader sees, attaches a sample size and an error bar to every figure, and re-measures each fix fourteen days after it ships. Rankscale is the more flexible and, at small volumes, the cheaper tool; Recomma is built for teams that have to prove which changes moved the number.

At a glance

Rankscale's figures are from its pricing page in US dollars. Recomma's are from the plan table the product enforces.

Plans, prices and credits

Rankscale sells five self-serve plans and a custom one. Essentials is $17 a month, billed yearly only, for 120 credits and two brand dashboards. Pro is $99 a month for 1,200 credits and ten brands; Pro+ is $229 for 3,000 and 25; Growth, aimed at agencies, is $385 for 5,500 and 50; Enterprise is $780 for 12,000 and 100. Questions are unlimited — only running them spends credits — and unused credits roll over, up to twice the monthly allowance on Pro and Pro+ and three times on Growth and Enterprise. More credits and brand slots can be bought in the app. Rankscale pricing.

A credit is not an answer. ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini cost a quarter of a credit per answer, DeepSeek one, and the newer models more: Claude Sonnet 5.5 three credits (four with web search), Gemini 3.8 Flash two (four), Meta Muse Spark four, according to the changelog. A plan's "up to 4,800 answers" assumes the quarter-credit engines throughout.

Recomma sells three self-serve plans and an Enterprise tier quoted by a person. Starter is $30 a month for 50 prompts, sampled weekly, on one project. Growth is $299 for 300 prompts, sampled daily, across three projects. Scale is $999 for 500 prompts, daily, with no limit on projects or engines. Prompts pool across the workspace, so an agency decides which client gets the coverage. The full table is on the pricing page.

What the same tracking costs

Using Rankscale's own calculator — a quarter of a credit per answer, 30 runs a month for daily and 4.33 for weekly — here is what three engines (ChatGPT, AI Mode and Gemini) cost at Recomma's plan sizes. The units are not identical: a Rankscale run is one answer per engine, and the figures below take the cheapest plan whose credits cover the month.

So Recomma is the cheaper of the two at both sizes: Starter covers a few dozen questions daily for $30 where Rankscale needs Pro at $99, and Growth covers the hundreds where Rankscale needs Enterprise. Adding Claude or a newer model moves Rankscale's figures up quickly, since each of those answers costs four to sixteen times a quarter-credit one.

Engines, and how answers are collected

Rankscale lists ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral, Grok, Microsoft Copilot and Meta Muse Spark among "17+" engines, all available on every plan with no per-engine upsell. Its credit calculator sorts them into "GUI engines" — answers taken from the consumer product — and "API engines", such as Perplexity Sonar, the GPT, Gemini and Claude models, and Mistral Large; since 12 October 2026 the app groups them the same way when adding questions (changelog). A buyer can therefore choose, per question, whether to measure the interface or the model.

Recomma captures ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode from the interface, and asks Perplexity through its own API. Interface and API can disagree sharply: in our own study, only 8% of the pages cited in ChatGPT's interface answer appeared in the API answer to the same question (ChatGPT's interface versus its API). Rankscale's GUI option avoids that problem for the engines it covers that way; the risk is only in reading an API engine as if it were what a buyer sees. What sampling can and cannot see sets out the trade-off.

What happens after the number

Rankscale goes well past a visibility score. Its site and pricing page list competitor benchmarking, citation and sources-box analysis, sentiment, query fan-out, shopping and ad analytics, local map listings, prompt research that estimates prompt volume, AI-written recommendations (Scout), custom dashboards, page audits, and a GA4 and Search Console connection that shows which engines send visitors. Charts can be annotated to mark a launch or a fix (changelog).

Recomma's additions are about whether a number can be trusted and whether a fix worked:

• Every figure carries the number of answers behind it and a 95% Wilson interval, and a reading too thin to mean anything is dimmed rather than drawn as a trend. Why the error bar. Rankscale does not publish a sample size or interval on its figures.
• Each tracked question is priced with keyword data — monthly searches, the share of clicks a top result takes, and what advertisers bid — so you can see what the market behind a gap is worth.
• A gap becomes an action. When the action closes, the reading on its prompts is frozen, and fourteen days later the same prompts are asked again on fresh answers. The verdict is kept whether or not anything moved — a step beyond a note on a chart.
• The brand's own site is audited against fifteen markup rules that AI crawlers trip on, with each failing page's markup as it is and as it should be. The checklist lists all fifteen.

API, MCP and exports

Rankscale's REST API, which it calls the Metrics API, comes with Pro+ and above; it covers metrics and share links today, and the changelog shows it gaining raw execution exports and batch question creation (Rankscale API). CSV and Google Sheets exports and a Data Studio connector start at Pro, and white-labelled dashboards at Growth.

Its MCP server, marked beta, is on every plan. Reading is always on; creating questions, topics and dashboard views, and runs that spend credits, are separate permissions that stay off unless granted; new questions are created inactive, and credit-spending runs show their cost first and wait for confirmation (Rankscale MCP, docs).

Recomma's read-only REST API comes with Scale; CSV export comes with every plan. Its MCP server, also on every plan, reads and writes: an assistant can list the gaps, read the site findings with their before-and-after markup, propose new prompts and close an action. Every write previews first and needs a separate write scope, and new prompts land as suggestions that spend nothing until a person accepts them. Fixing what AI search gets wrong, from Claude Code walks through it. On MCP the two are closer than on anything else here.

Where Rankscale is the better choice

• Engine breadth. Seventeen-plus engines on every plan, including Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek. Recomma tracks five, and three below Scale.
• Cadence. Any question can run hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Recomma runs a project daily or weekly.
• Flexible spending. Credits roll over, questions are unlimited, and an agency can spend more on one client and less on another.
• Breadth of analysis. Shopping, ads, local listings, query fan-out and traffic from GA4 and Search Console.
• Track record and trial. Rankscale has customers and reviews to read and a seven-day Pro trial; Recomma is new, has none yet, and its trial is three days with a card.

Where Recomma is the better choice

• Many questions, tracked daily. 300 prompts on Growth at $299, where Rankscale's credits for the same run need Enterprise at $780.
• Predictable cost. A plan buys a number of prompts; there is no per-model rate to watch as engines are added.
• Interface answers where there is an interface. ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode come from the page a reader sees; only Perplexity is asked through its API.
• Numbers you can defend. A sample size and confidence interval on every figure, so a change that is noise is shown as noise.
• Proof that a fix worked. Actions re-measured fourteen days after they close, against a frozen baseline, with the verdict kept.
• What the gaps are worth. Every prompt shows the priced demand behind it, so a gap comes with a market size, not only a count.

Choose Rankscale if… choose Recomma if…

Choose Rankscale if you need Copilot, Claude or Grok; you want hourly tracking or a different cadence per question; you track a few dozen questions and want them daily for under $100; or you sell products and want shopping, ads and local data beside visibility.

Choose Recomma if ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode and Perplexity cover the engines your buyers use; you track hundreds of questions daily; you have to show a client or a board which changes moved the number, with the error bar to back it; or you want to see what the market behind each gap is worth.

For other comparisons, see Recomma vs Peec AI, Recomma vs Otterly.AI and Recomma vs AthenaHQ, or the wider list of AI visibility tools.

How we compared

Rankscale's plans, prices, credit rates, engines and integrations were read from its public pricing page, API and MCP pages, documentation and changelog on 14 October 2026, in US dollars. Credit costs for the newest models come from the changelog, since the pricing page's calculator shows only some of them. Where Rankscale does not publish something — a sample size or interval on its figures, or a re-measurement of fixes — the table says so rather than guessing. Third-party review scores were left out because they could not be checked at the source. Recomma's figures are drawn from the same plan table its API enforces, so they change on this page when they change in the product.