Profound vs Peec vs Otterly: Real Prices and When a Spreadsheet Wins

TL;DR

• Published ai visibility tools pricing lands at roughly $499/mo (Profound), €89/mo and up (Peec), and $29–$489/mo (Otterly).

• Pew's July 2025 study found users click cited sources in AI summaries only 1% of the time.

• Semrush's 2025 study values an AI-search visitor at 4.4x an organic one, which lifts the math but doesn't save it for small sites.

• For most SMBs under ~$50k MRR from organic, a 20-prompt monthly spreadsheet beats every paid tool on cost and decision quality.

• Buy a platform when you have a dedicated owner, 5+ brands or markets to track, and a budget line that already funds enterprise SEO tooling.

1. What AI visibility tools actually measure — and what no tool can see

AI visibility platforms answer one question: when a user asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, or Claude about your category, does your brand show up, and how often?

They do it by running a list of prompts on a schedule, scraping the answers, and counting mentions, citations, and rank position. Useful work. Honest work. But narrower than the marketing pages suggest.

Three things no tool can see, no matter the tier. First, the personalized answer — what an actual logged-in user sees, with memory and location and prior chats biasing the result. Second, the conversion behavior downstream — whether the citation became a visit, a signup, or a deal. Third, the model-update drift — when OpenAI ships a new retrieval layer at 11pm on a Tuesday and last week's ranking baseline becomes noise.

What you're buying, then, is a sampled, depersonalized, schedule-based read on share-of-voice inside answer engines. Not market truth. A useful proxy with known blind spots. Keep that frame as we walk through prices.

2. Real prices: Profound, Peec, and Otterly

Here are the public numbers, taken from the Discovered Labs vendor comparison (May 2026):

• Profound sits at around $499/mo for its standard tier, with enterprise pricing on request.

• Peec starts at roughly €89/mo (~$96 at June 2026 rates) and scales up by prompt volume and competitor tracking.

• Otterly spans $29/mo to $489/mo, the widest range of the three, with the $29 tier built for solo operators tracking one brand.

For anything beyond those headline numbers — overage charges, seat fees, API access — see each vendor's published pricing page. The comparison sites recycle each other's numbers, and tiers change quarterly.

What matters more than the sticker price is what the sticker price has to earn back. Which is the next question, and the one nobody writing affiliate comparisons wants to answer.

3. Break-even math: monitoring spend vs realistic AI-referral value

Here's the operator question: at what client size does $499/mo of monitoring pay back?

Start with the denominator. Pew Research's July 2025 study found that users click a cited source in an AI summary only 1% of the time. One percent. That's the click-through reality any monitoring-tool ROI math has to survive.

The counterweight: Semrush's 2025 AI Search SEO Traffic Study values an AI-search visitor at 4.4x an organic visitor on conversion-weighted behavior. AI-referred users arrive with intent already shaped, which raises the per-visit ceiling.

Now stitch them together with hedged operator math. Say your category sees 10,000 monthly AI answers mentioning your space. At a 1% click rate, that's 100 clicks. If your average organic visitor is worth, say, $2 in attributed revenue (typical for B2B services in our client work), an AI visitor at 4.4x is worth roughly $8.80. One hundred clicks × $8.80 = $880/mo of attributable value.

A $499/mo Profound subscription consumes 57% of that ceiling — before you've paid the human who reads the dashboards. Break-even moves into comfortable territory only when monthly AI answer volume in your category clears roughly 25,000–50,000, which in practice means national brands, regulated verticals, or aggregator sites.

Prices per Discovered Labs comparison, May 2026. Break-even figures are operator estimates from our client work, not vendor claims.

The inversion is uncomfortable for the category: the businesses most excited about ai search monitoring tools for small business are usually the ones for whom the math doesn't work yet. Track the channel. Don't pay enterprise rates to do it.

4. The manual alternative: a 20-prompt monthly sampling protocol

Here's the protocol we hand to clients who don't clear the break-even bar. It costs the analyst's time and a Google Sheet.

The 20-prompt monthly sample. Pick 20 prompts that map to real buyer intent — five top-of-funnel category questions, five competitor comparisons, five problem-symptom queries, and five branded prompts. Run each one, once a month, in four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. That's 80 manual queries. Budget two hours.

What you log per query. Date, engine, prompt, whether your brand was mentioned (yes/no), whether you were cited with a link (yes/no), citation position if cited, top three competitors mentioned, and a copy-pasted excerpt of the answer for the diff next month.

What it gives you. A monthly delta on share-of-voice in your top 20 buyer prompts, across the four engines that account for the majority of AI search behavior. Not a real-time dashboard. A board-ready trend line.

What it doesn't give you. Coverage of thousands of long-tail prompts, weekly cadence, or the optics of a tool subscription on a deck slide. Honest tradeoffs.

We pair this protocol with GA4 tracking for AI search traffic on the conversion side, and the citation playbook for Google AI Overviews on the offense side. Together, those three workflows replace the paid tool for most SMBs through about $50k MRR from organic.

If you want the spreadsheet template, it lives inside our SEO service workflow. Same columns we use internally.

5. Tool-by-tool fit: when each one actually earns its line item

Having run versions of all three in client engagements over the last 14 months, here's the honest fit map.

Profound (~$499/mo) — enterprise and regulated verticals. Worth it when you have a named owner of AI visibility, 5+ brands or product lines, and a competitive set where a 2-point share-of-voice swing maps to seven figures. Financial services, pharma, large SaaS. The dashboards are designed for someone whose job title contains the word Director.

Peec (from ~€89/mo) — mid-market and agencies. The sweet spot is an agency tracking 8–15 client brands or a mid-market company with a hands-on SEO lead. Strong on competitor sets, weaker on enterprise audit trails. If you've already outgrown a spreadsheet but a Profound contract would eat your whole tooling budget, this is the bridge.

Otterly ($29–$489/mo) — solo operators and SMBs that genuinely need a tool. The $29 tier is the only sub-$100 product in the category that's not a toy. Sensible for a solo founder who's been cited in AI Overviews twice and wants to know whether it's repeatable. The higher tiers compete with Peec and lose on UX more than on data.

And the fourth option, which the vendor comparisons never list: the 20-prompt spreadsheet, $0/mo, for everyone under that break-even line. Including most of the people reading articles titled otterly ai pricing at 11pm trying to justify a subscription to their cofounder.

6. What we run for clients, and why

Our default for new SEO engagements is the spreadsheet for the first 90 days. It does three things a tool can't.

It forces the team to read the actual AI answers, which surfaces messaging gaps no dashboard would flag. It establishes a baseline owned by the client, not locked behind a vendor login. And it makes the eventual tool decision evidence-based — at month 90, if the prompt set has grown past 50 or the team is spending more than four hours a month on the protocol, we graduate to Peec or Otterly depending on brand count.

We've moved exactly one client to Profound in the last 14 months. They run six brands across two regulated verticals and were already spending mid-five-figures on enterprise SEO tooling. The math worked. For the other 13, the spreadsheet plus GA4 plus a citation playbook has held.

That's the bet behind this piece: most ai visibility tools pricing decisions are answered before they're asked, by a denominator most buyers haven't run. Run it first. Buy second.

For a fuller version of how we wire AI visibility into a working SEO program, see our SEO services page and the AI tools stack we actually use for internal ops.

FAQ

What's the real difference between Profound, Peec, and Otterly on price?

Profound sits around $499/mo per the Discovered Labs comparison, Peec starts near €89/mo, and Otterly ranges $29–$489/mo. The headline numbers hide overage, seat, and competitor-tracking fees, so check each vendor's pricing page before committing to a tier.

Are ai search monitoring tools for small business worth it under $50k MRR?

Usually not. Pew's July 2025 data shows users click cited sources in AI summaries only 1% of the time. Until your category produces enough AI answers to clear roughly $880/mo of attributable value, a 20-prompt monthly spreadsheet gives you the same decision quality at zero subscription cost.

How does the 4.4x Semrush number change the math?

It raises the per-visit value of AI-referred traffic, which helps. Semrush's 2025 study found AI-search visitors convert at 4.4x an organic visitor. That moves the break-even bar down but doesn't eliminate it — you still need enough click volume to justify a $499/mo line item, which most SMBs don't have yet.

Which tool does Entropy use internally for client work?

For most clients we run a manual 20-prompt monthly protocol across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude — about two analyst hours per month. We graduate clients to Peec or Otterly when the prompt set passes 50 or brand count passes three. Profound has fit one client in 14 months.

What should I do this week if I'm trying to decide?

Run the denominator math before you book a demo. Estimate monthly AI answers in your category, multiply by 1%, multiply by your blended visitor value times 4.4. If the result is under $1,500/mo of attributable value, start with the spreadsheet protocol. Revisit in 90 days with real data.

What to do this week

Pick your 20 prompts on Monday. Run them across four engines on Tuesday. Log the results in a sheet by Friday. Re-run the same 20 on the first business day of next month. You'll know more about your AI visibility in 60 days than a $499/mo dashboard would have told you in six.

If you'd rather have us build the workflow with you, say hi.