Profound vs. Peec vs. Otterly: AI Visibility Pricing, Honestly

Most companies buying AI visibility tools right now don't need them yet. They need a spreadsheet, two hours, and a coffee.

Here's the direct answer on ai visibility tools pricing: Profound runs about $499/month, Peec sits between roughly €89 and $241/month, and Otterly spans $29 to $489/month, per the Discovered Labs comparison published this year (prices drift, so check each vendor's pricing page before you wire money). All three watch how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews answer questions in your category, and they tell you whether your brand gets cited. None of them will earn you a citation. That's still your content team's job.

The honest take: if your site does less than ~5,000 organic visits a month and your average deal size is under ~$2,000, you should run the manual audit below before paying anyone. If you're past those rough thresholds, one of these tools probably pays for itself inside a quarter. We'll show the math.

TL;DR

• Profound ~$499/mo, Peec ~€89–$241/mo, Otterly $29–$489/mo per Discovered Labs' 2026 comparison

• An AI-search visitor is worth ~4.4x a traditional organic visitor in Semrush's study

• Run a $0 manual prompt audit across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews first

• Paid monitoring earns its keep above ~5,000 monthly organic visits or ~$2,000 average deal size

• The tool is the thermometer; the citation work is still done by humans writing better answers

1. What AI visibility tools actually do (and what they can't)

An AI visibility tool runs a panel of prompts against the major generative engines on a schedule, parses the answers, and tells you three things: whether your domain was cited, which competitors got cited instead, and how that share of voice moves week over week. Some also flag the source URLs the model leaned on, which is the data point that actually matters.

What they cannot do: get you cited. They can't rewrite your content, they can't earn you a Reddit mention, they can't fix the fact that your pricing page reads like a brochure when ChatGPT wants a comparison table. Visibility tools are thermometers. They measure. The treatment is editorial work, and we wrote about the mechanics of that in how to get cited in AI Overviews.

The reason this distinction matters for ai visibility monitoring cost decisions: a $499/month thermometer that nobody acts on is a $5,988/year line item that produced zero citations. We see this pattern monthly with prospects who bought the tool before they had the team to use it.

2. Profound vs Peec vs Otterly: real prices and tiers

For the profound vs peec vs otterly question, here is what the Discovered Labs comparison reports as of 2026. Prices can move; always confirm on the vendor's site before purchase.

Prices reported by Discovered Labs' 2026 comparison; confirm on vendor pricing pages before purchase.

Profound is the enterprise-tier option at ~$499/month entry. Heaviest engine coverage, strongest competitive analytics, built for marketing teams who already have an AI-search strategy and need defensible reporting for their CMO.

Peec lands in the middle at roughly €89 to $241/month depending on tier. Decent coverage, cleaner UI than most, and a tier structure that lets you grow into it. Best fit if you're a Series A-ish company with one person owning organic.

Otterly opens at $29/month and ranges up to $489/month, which makes it the most accessible entry point on the market. The cheap tier is genuinely cheap, but you give up engine coverage and historical depth. Good for testing whether you'll actually use the data before spending real money.

For budget planning on geo tools pricing (GEO = generative engine optimization), figure ~$350 to $6,000 per year per tool. Most teams only need one.

3. The manual audit that costs $0 — do this first

Before you buy anything, run this. Two hours of work, no software.

Step one. Write down the 20 questions a prospect would ask an AI assistant when they're shopping for what you sell. Real questions, the way humans type them. "Best CRM for a 12-person consultancy." "How much does an AI agency in Karachi charge for a pilot." Not your branded keywords. The questions that exist before they've heard of you.

Step two. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and a Google search with AI Overviews enabled. Paste each prompt into all four. Record three things in a spreadsheet: (a) was your brand mentioned, (b) which competitors were mentioned, (c) which URLs were cited as sources.

Step three. Tally. If you're cited in fewer than 20% of relevant prompts, you have a content gap, not a measurement gap. Paying $499/month to confirm the gap weekly doesn't close it. Paying a writer to fix the underlying pages does.

This manual pass gives you 80% of what the paid tools surface in their first month. The 20% you lose is automation and historical trending, which only matter once you have a baseline worth trending.

4. When the spend is justified: thresholds by traffic and deal size

Here's the math nobody in the affiliate comparisons will show you, because it ends in "don't buy yet" for most readers.

Semrush's AI-search SEO traffic study found an AI-search visitor is worth approximately 4.4x a traditional organic visitor, measured by conversion rate and engagement depth. That multiplier is the whole economic case for AI visibility tools. If you can't translate it into revenue at your scale, the tool is decoration.

Rough thresholds, based on our client work — hedge these against your own numbers:

If your site does under ~5,000 monthly organic visits, the absolute number of AI-search visitors you stand to gain is small enough that a once-a-quarter manual audit catches every meaningful change. Spending $6,000/year to track it weekly is mismatched to the upside.

If your average deal size is under ~$2,000 and your sales cycle is short, the 4.4x multiplier on a handful of AI-referred visits doesn't clear the tool's annual cost plus the analyst hours to act on it. You need either higher volume or higher deal value to justify the line item.

If you're above both — say ~10,000 monthly organic visits and ~$5,000+ deal size — one tool, almost any of the three, pays back inside a quarter. At that point the question is which one, not whether.

5. What to do with the data: the citation-gap workflow

Buying the tool is the easy decision. Acting on its output is where most teams stall. The workflow we run for clients looks like this:

Each Monday, pull the prompts where a competitor got cited and you didn't. Identify the source URL the model used. Read it. Ask one question: what does that page do that ours doesn't? Usually the answer is structural — a comparison table, a clear pricing tier, a numbered list with specifics, a date-stamped update.

Fix one page per week. Re-run the same prompts two weeks later. Track which fixes moved you from not-cited to cited. Over a quarter, you'll have a playbook for what your category's AI engines actually reward, which is more valuable than the dashboard itself.

This is the work behind our content marketing service. The tool tells you which page needs surgery. The surgery still requires a writer who understands the category. There's also a short read on AI tools that streamline ops more broadly if you're auditing your whole stack, not just visibility monitoring.

6. Our recommendation by company stage

Pre-revenue or under ~5,000 monthly organic visits. Skip all three. Run the $0 manual audit quarterly. Spend the saved budget on one well-researched comparison post per month. You'll move the needle further.

~5,000 to ~20,000 monthly visits, deal size ~$2,000+. Start with Otterly's entry tier at $29/month. Use it for a quarter. If your team is actually pulling the weekly report and shipping page fixes, upgrade to a higher tier or move to Peec for better engine coverage. If the report sits unread, cancel and revisit in six months.

~20,000+ monthly visits or deal size ~$10,000+, with a dedicated organic owner. Profound is the defensible choice. The reporting depth and competitive analytics are built for the conversations you're already having with your CMO. The ~$499/month becomes a rounding error against the 4.4x AI-search visitor value once you have meaningful volume.

A note on tool stacking: we've seen teams buy two of these simultaneously to "cross-validate." Don't. The engines they're measuring are the same engines. Pick one, work it for six months, switch only if the reporting genuinely fails you.

FAQ

How much do AI visibility tools cost in 2026?

Per the Discovered Labs 2026 comparison, Profound starts around $499/month, Peec runs roughly €89 to $241/month across tiers, and Otterly spans $29 to $489/month. Annualized, budget between ~$350 and ~$6,000 per year for one tool. Vendor pricing can move quarterly, so confirm on each company's pricing page before purchase.

Is paid AI visibility monitoring worth it for a small business?

Usually not yet. If your site receives under ~5,000 monthly organic visits or your average deal size is under ~$2,000, a quarterly manual audit across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews catches the meaningful changes. Paid monitoring earns its keep once you have enough AI-referred volume that weekly trending data actually informs editorial decisions.

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

Profound is enterprise-tier with the deepest reporting and the highest entry price ($499/month). Peec sits in the middle (€89–$241/month) with cleaner UX, fitting growth-stage teams. Otterly opens at $29/month, making it the cheapest entry point but with less engine coverage at lower tiers. All three measure citation share across major AI engines; they differ in depth, polish, and reporting fidelity.

Can I track AI search visibility for free?

Yes, for a baseline. Write 20 prompts a prospect would actually ask, run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, and log citations and source URLs in a spreadsheet. This catches the same signal as the paid tools for the first quarter. You lose automation and historical trending, which only matter once you have a baseline worth comparing against.

How valuable is an AI-search visitor compared to regular organic?

Semrush's AI-search traffic study found AI-search visitors are worth approximately 4.4x a traditional organic visitor, measured by conversion and engagement metrics. That multiplier is the economic case for any spend on AI visibility tooling. The implication: even modest gains in AI citation share can produce outsized revenue impact once your overall traffic crosses the threshold where absolute AI-referred numbers become meaningful.

What to do this week

Block two hours on Thursday. Write your 20 prompts. Run the manual audit across all four engines. Log the gaps in a spreadsheet. Ship one page fix by Friday. If by next month you've fixed four pages and you're still hungry for weekly data, then go buy Otterly's entry tier and graduate from there.

If you'd rather have us run the audit and the fix workflow with you, start a conversation.