Profound vs Otterly vs Peec: which AI visibility tracker fits

AI visibility tools all sell the same promise: tell me whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and the rest mention or cite my brand when someone asks. Line up their entry prices, Otterly at 29 dollars, Peec near 95, Profound at 99, and they look like one product at three prices. They are not, because they do not meter the same thing. The sticker hides two separate dials, and which one matters depends on what you are tracking.

The same question, three positions

All three monitor a set of prompts across a set of answer engines and report where your brand shows up against competitors. Where they differ is who they are built for. Otterly anchors the accessible end, a low monthly price aimed at solo sites and small teams starting to watch AI search. Profound aims up-market: its cheapest plan tracks a single engine and its genuinely useful multi-engine tier costs several times more, which is a signal about who it wants. Peec, a Berlin company, sits in between and is the obvious first look for EU teams that want a European vendor.

What each charges in 2026

List prices as of mid-2026, and they move, so confirm the live tier before you commit.

• Otterly: Lite at 29 dollars a month tracks 15 prompts; Standard at 189 tracks 100 prompts and adds API and MCP access; Premium at 489 tracks 400. Every plan covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot; Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons. Annual billing takes about 15 percent off.
• Peec: self-serve from around 95 dollars a month, with Pro and Advanced tiers above it (roughly 245 and 495). The tiers step up on projects, one, two, then five, more than on a single prompt count, which suits tracking several brands. Three engines are included per plan and extra engines are monthly add-ons; Enterprise is custom.
• Profound: Starter at 99 dollars a month covers ChatGPT only; Growth at 399 (its popular tier) tracks three answer engines and adds content tooling; Enterprise is custom. Annual billing gives two months free, and Growth offers a free trial.

The two axes that actually move your bill

Every one of these prices on two dials at once, and comparisons that quote only the headline miss one of them. The first is how many prompts you track: the questions you want to check your brand against, like "best CRM for a small agency" or "cheapest EU course platform". More prompts, higher tier. The second, the sneaky one, is how many AI engines you watch.

The engine dial is where the cheap plan stops being cheap. Otterly bundles four engines but sells Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode as add-ons. Peec includes three engines and charges per extra model. Profound puts the whole thing behind the tier: its 99 dollar plan sees ChatGPT and nothing else, so the moment you want Perplexity or Google in the picture you are on the 399 dollar plan. So the honest way to compare is to fix the engines you actually need first, then read the price, because a 29 dollar plan that needs three add-ons is not a 29 dollar plan.

The free baseline these tools are priced against

Before any subscription, there is a version that costs nothing. Write down the handful of prompts a buyer would actually type, ask each main assistant those prompts once a month, and record whether your brand appears and how it is described. That manual grid answers the only question that matters at the start, am I cited or not, for the price of an hour. Our own AI search visibility auditor and the guide on how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity walk through building that grid and fixing what it finds.

What you pay a tool for is not the answer, it is the cadence: running that grid daily instead of monthly, keeping history so you can see a trend, benchmarking against named competitors, and alerting you when an answer changes. That is worth real money once AI visibility is a channel you report on to someone. It is not worth it while you are still finding out whether you have a problem. Run the grid by hand first; buy the tool when the manual version becomes the bottleneck.

Why a single check is a coin toss, not a reading

There is a catch in that manual grid worth understanding before you trust any single result, and it applies to the paid tools too. AI assistants are non-deterministic: ask ChatGPT or Perplexity the same buyer prompt twice and the brands they name can change from one run to the next, because the answer is generated probabilistically rather than read from a fixed ranking. So a one-off check does not tell you whether you are visible, it tells you what one roll returned. If your brand shows up you cannot tell a strong 80 percent presence from a lucky 20 percent one, and if it does not, the same uncertainty runs the other way.

That is the deeper reason these tools cost what they do, beyond just running the grid faster. What they actually sell is a mention rate: they run each prompt repeatedly, across engines and over time, and report how often your brand appears rather than whether it appeared once. A rate built from many samples is a real signal you can trend; a single hand-run answer is a coin toss you cannot. It also reframes the free baseline honestly, so the manual grid is still worth doing to find out whether you have a problem at all, but treat one run as a rough yes-or-no, not a number, and repeat the key prompts a few times before you read anything into the result.

It also explains something buyers find unsettling, that two of these trackers can watch the same brand and report different visibility. They are each sampling a moving target with their own prompt wording, sampling depth and refresh cadence, so their scores are not meant to agree to the decimal. What matters is that one tool, kept on a stable prompt set, moves in the right direction over time. The practical rule follows: pick one and stay on it, because a consistent method is what turns these samples into a trend, and switching tools resets the baseline. Do not read a small gap between two tools, or between two runs of one tool, as a real change.

Who each one is for

• Otterly if you are a solo site or small team turning an occasional manual check into a standing report on a budget. Start on Lite, add engines only as you need them, and move up when 15 prompts stops being enough.
• Peec if you want a European vendor or you track several brands, since it prices on projects as well as prompts. A sensible first look for an EU agency that would rather deal with a European supplier.
• Profound if you are a larger brand reporting across many markets and answer engines, where the Growth or Enterprise tier buys breadth a solo site does not need. Overkill, and overpriced, for a single small site.

The point

These are not one tool at three prices; they are three bets on how many prompts and engines you need to watch, aimed at three different sizes of buyer. Decide the engines and prompts first and the price follows, and remember the honest floor: a monthly grid you run by hand is free and answers the first question. Use the auditor to build that grid, and only reach for a paid tracker when reporting the channel, not discovering it, is the job.