AI Tools Insider Research
Independent, reproducible data studies on the AI tools industry. We fund our own subscriptions, run the numbers ourselves, and publish the full data so you can check every figure. To date we have analyzed 115 leading AI tools across three studies, all free to read and free to cite.
The studies
Each study answers one concrete question about how the AI tools industry actually behaves, using public data and a method anyone can repeat. Full adopter lists, tables and methodology notes live on each page.
The State of AI Tool Pricing 2026: What 30 AI Tools Actually Cost
We priced 30 popular AI tools across 10 categories. The average paid plan is $24.66 a month and the median is $15.50, so a few expensive outliers drag the average up. 93% (28 of 30) offer some kind of free tier and 80% have a genuinely useful one. A full power-user stack runs about $134.47 a month, a 28x spread from the cheapest paid plan.
We Checked the robots.txt of 41 Top AI Tools: Who Blocks ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
We fetched the live robots.txt of 41 leading AI tools to see who blocks AI crawlers. The surprise: 88% (36 of 41) block no AI crawler at all. Only 5 tools block any AI bot, and the few blocks that exist are mostly aimed at training crawlers like GPTBot, not the citation crawlers that feed AI search. Most AI companies leave their own content wide open to AI.
Who Actually Publishes an llms.txt? We Checked 44 Top AI Tools
We fetched the live /llms.txt of 44 leading AI and SaaS tools. Just 57% (25 of 44) serve a valid one, and only 21 are genuinely curated maps rather than dumps or stubs. Only 5 of the 25 also publish llms-full.txt, and file sizes span 200x, from under 1KB to over 500KB. Adoption of the AI-search standard is real but far from universal, even among AI companies.
How we work
Deterministic, not vibes. Every study is built from public data with a reproducible script: we fetch live pricing pages, robots.txt files and llms.txt files, validate what we find (for example, we follow redirects and confirm a real Markdown file rather than an HTML soft-404), and record the raw result. Where a number could be argued, we show the underlying table so you can judge it yourself.
Independent and honest. We fund our own tool subscriptions and take no payment to include, exclude or rank a tool in a study. Some pages carry affiliate links to tools we recommend, clearly disclosed, but the research data is never influenced by them. When the data contradicts a headline we wanted to write, we change the headline.
Free to build on. All of our research is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. Quote it, chart it, republish it, feed it to your own model. All we ask is a credit and a link back to the source study.
Cite this research
Writing about the AI tools industry? Use any of our data with attribution. Copy-paste citation:
AI Tools Insider Research (2026). Original data studies on AI tool pricing, AI-crawler access and llms.txt adoption. Retrieved from https://aitoolsinsiderhq.com/ai-research.html (CC BY 4.0).
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Press and data requests
Journalists, analysts and researchers are welcome to use these studies. If you want the raw data behind a figure, a quote for a story, or you spotted something we should correct, email hello@aitoolsinsiderhq.com. We reply, and we are happy to share the underlying tables.
Questions
Who runs AI Tools Insider Research?
AI Tools Insider is an independent AI tools review site. We fund our own subscriptions and run our own analyses on public data, then publish the full data so anyone can check the numbers.
Can I cite or republish these studies?
Yes. Every study is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, so you may quote, republish and build on the data, including commercially, as long as you credit AI Tools Insider with a link to the source study.
How many AI tools have you analyzed?
Across the three studies we have analyzed 115 leading AI tools: 30 for pricing, 41 for AI-crawler blocking, and 44 for llms.txt adoption. Some tools appear in more than one study.
How can journalists or researchers reach you?
Email hello@aitoolsinsiderhq.com for data requests, interviews, or corrections. We are glad to share the raw data behind any study.