Disclaimer: pricing and features in this post come from public sources, verified July 2026, and are subject to change. We build a competing product, ClerAEO AI, and the section covering it states our limits alongside the comparison.
These three names land on the same shortlist constantly, which is a little odd, because they are built for three different buyers. Comparing them feature by feature produces a table that misleads. Comparing them by the team each one assumes you have produces a decision.
Otterly.AI: the fastest first number
Otterly.AI is one of the earliest tools in the category and remains one of the simplest, which is its strength rather than a criticism. Published pricing as of July 2026 starts at $29/mo. You can be tracking prompts the same afternoon you decide to try, with no demo, no procurement and no implementation. For a solo consultant, a small marketing team, or anyone still testing whether AI visibility is a real problem for their brand, that combination is genuinely hard to beat - and it beats us on price and time-to-value plainly. The limitation is scope. Otterly monitors; it does not diagnose or prescribe. It will tell you your presence rate changed, and leave the questions of what to fix and whether your last fix caused the change entirely to you. Teams that outgrow it usually outgrow it for that reason, not because the monitoring stopped working.
Peec AI: the mid-market and agency pick
Peec AI has grown fast with European agencies and in-house marketing teams, and the reason is legibility. Competitor comparison sits in the core view rather than in a corner of the product, the interface is clean enough to put in front of a client without a walkthrough, and the reporting is shaped for someone who has to explain the numbers to a stakeholder every month. If your job involves presenting AI visibility to people who do not work on it daily, that matters more than an extra analytics module. The limitation is commercial rather than technical: Peec AI publishes tier names but not prices. If you are running a fast evaluation across several tools, an unpriced product either drops off the list or extends your timeline by a sales cycle. That is a real cost, and it is the most common complaint we hear from buyers comparing this shortlist.
Profound: the enterprise platform
Profound is the most established of the three and sits at the enterprise end of the market. It markets detailed analysis of the prompts and conversations behind AI answers, and along with Brandlight and Evertune it has the deepest feature set and the largest customer base in the category. Published pricing as of July 2026 starts at $99/mo, but the entry tier and the enterprise deployment are effectively different products - the capability that makes Profound the enterprise choice lives in quoted tiers. The limitation is the one that comes with every enterprise platform: it assumes a team. Depth of analysis only converts into decisions when somebody owns the output, has time to read it, and has the authority to act on it. Bought by a two-person marketing team, it becomes an expensive and rarely opened dashboard.
Head to head on the axes that matter
- Time to first number: Otterly.AI wins outright - same-day, no sales call. Peec AI and Profound both start with a conversation.
- Cost to start: Otterly.AI at $29/mo published, Profound at $99/mo published, Peec AI unknown because it publishes no prices.
- Analytical depth: Profound, clearly. Peec AI is deliberately mid-market. Otterly is deliberately shallow.
- Reporting to non-specialists: Peec AI, by design. This is what agencies buy it for.
- Enterprise scaffolding - procurement, security review, support commitments: Profound. Neither of the others is aiming at that buyer.
- Fix-and-measure attribution: none of the three foregrounds it. All three tell you where you stand; none makes a measured verdict on a shipped change the central object.
Which fits which team
- Solo consultant or small team testing the category: Otterly.AI. Spend $29 before you spend a quarter.
- Agency reporting to clients, or a marketing team that has to present monthly: Peec AI - budget a sales conversation into your timeline.
- Enterprise brand with an analyst who owns AI visibility as part of their job: Profound.
- Already deep in Ahrefs or Semrush: try their AI visibility features first, at $398/mo and roughly $99/mo respectively as of July 2026, before adding a fourth login.
Where ClerAEO AI fits, and where it does not
Our honest position against this shortlist: we are not the cheapest, we are not the most proven, and we track fewer engines than several competitors today - ChatGPT and Claude are wired, with Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Copilot rolling out. Our pricing is quoted on request rather than published, which is the same friction we just criticised in Peec AI. We are pre-launch with no published customer count, so if a long reference list is your risk control, Profound is the correct choice and we would say so on a call. What we do differently is the loop after the measurement: each recommendation you ship opens a 28-day attribution window scoped to the prompts it should affect, and closes with a measured verdict in percentage points, where movement under five points is reported as no change rather than a small win. No competitor on this shortlist foregrounds measured outcomes that way. If your problem is that nobody in your company can say whether last quarter's AEO work did anything, that is the gap we are built for. If your problem is that you need a number by Friday for under fifty dollars, buy Otterly.
The trap in all three
Every tool here will show you a number that moves. None of them can prove why it moved, because you cannot randomise an answer engine's outputs. Ask each vendor what threshold they use before calling a movement real - if your presence rate goes from 42% to 45%, the most likely explanation is sampling variance, not your work. A tool that celebrates that move is training your team to believe things that are not true, and it will do it politely, in a well-designed chart, every month.