Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly: the 2026 head-to-head

The AI visibility category barely existed in early 2024. By spring 2026 it had absorbed well over $300 million in venture funding, and three names came to define its price ladder. Profound sits at the top: the most funded, the most enterprise, the one whose customer logos read like a stock index. Peec AI occupies the fast-growing middle, converting mid-market marketing teams at a pace that produced more than $4 million in annual recurring revenue within ten months of launch. Otterly holds the ground floor, a self-serve monitor whose $29 entry plan made it the first tool many founders ever pointed at ChatGPT.

The comparison matters because the three are usually shortlisted together, yet they answer different budgets and different jobs. This guide lays out the verified facts, funding, pricing, engines and features, then gives a direct verdict rather than a shrug. If you want the wider tool landscape first, the full field is mapped in the best AI visibility tools, and the underlying discipline is defined in what is AI visibility.

One framing note before the details. Every tool in this category answers the question "where am I missing from AI answers?" The harder question, the one that determines whether the subscription pays for itself, is "what happens next?" Keep that question in mind as you read, because it is where the three tools converge on the same limitation.

Profound's numbers set the ceiling for the category. The company has raised approximately $155 million in total, capped by a $96 million Series C in early 2026 that valued it at $1 billion, with investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Its customer list includes Target, Walmart, Figma, Ramp and MongoDB, which tells you the product is sold to enterprise marketing and communications organizations with dedicated teams to absorb its output.

The platform earns that positioning on depth. Profound tracks brand presence across the major answer engines at high prompt volume, breaks out share of voice against competitors, and analyzes which sources drive citations. Two 2026 additions push it beyond dashboards: autonomous Agents, which run analysis workflows on their own, and a hosted MCP server that pipes Profound data and those Agents directly into AI tools a team already uses, such as Claude or Cursor. For an enterprise that wants AI visibility data flowing into existing workflows rather than sitting in another tab, this is genuinely ahead of the field.

The trade-off is access. Profound does not publish flat self-serve pricing; plans are sold as quote-based contracts scaled to enterprise budgets. Independent comparisons consistently place it far above every self-serve tool in this guide. And for all its analytical power, the output is still insight: recommendations a content team must turn into published pages. If Profound's price is the obstacle, the realistic alternatives are cataloged in our Profound alternatives guide.

Peec AI is the growth story of the category's middle tier. The Berlin-founded company raised $29 million and reported crossing $4 million in annual recurring revenue within ten months, a revenue ramp few marketing SaaS products manage. The customer base skews toward mid-market marketing teams and agencies that find Profound oversized and Otterly undersized.

Published pricing starts at 89 euros per month for 25 tracked prompts, with a 199 euro Pro tier covering 100 prompts. For that you get prompt-level tracking across the major engines, competitor benchmarking, source analysis showing which domains drive the answers in your category, and team workspaces. Like Profound, Peec has leaned into interoperability: its MCP server and API connect Peec data into Claude, Cursor, n8n and similar tools, so an agency can query visibility data from inside its own automation stack.

Peec's weakness mirrors its strength. It is an analytics product through and through, excellent at describing the gap, silent on closing it. At 89 euros per month it also costs roughly three times the entry price of Otterly or Reachroller, which matters for a founder testing whether AI visibility deserves budget at all. Teams weighing that trade-off can see the field in our Peec AI alternatives breakdown.

Otterly took the opposite bet from Profound: make AI visibility monitoring cheap enough that trying it requires no meeting. The Lite plan costs $29 per month, or $25 on annual billing, and covers 15 search prompts across four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. A $189 Standard tier raises the count to 100 prompts with unlimited workspaces, and a $999 Growth tier serves agencies running monitoring at scale.

What you get is deliberately simple: mention tracking for your brand and competitors on the prompts you choose, link and citation reporting, and alerting when answers shift. The simplicity is the product. A marketer can set up monitoring in an afternoon and show a stakeholder hard evidence of AI answer presence by the end of the week.

The limits arrive quickly. Fifteen prompts is thin coverage once you count the buying questions that matter in a real category, and the tool ends at the report. There is no content generation, no fix workflow, no recheck loop. Otterly tells you the roof leaks. The bucket and the ladder are your problem.

Line the three tools up and a pattern emerges: each one ends where the work begins. A visibility report identifies the buying questions where AI engines skip your brand and shows which sources the engines cited instead. Acting on that means writing an answer-shaped page for each lost question, structuring it so engines can extract it, adding schema, getting it indexed, then re-asking the question to see whether the answer changed. That loop is the entire point of tracking, and none of the three run it for you.

For an enterprise this is fine, arguably preferable. Target and Walmart have content teams; what they need from Profound is intelligence, and Profound's Agents and MCP integration are built precisely to feed intelligence into big-team workflows. Peec makes the same assumption one size down: the agency or marketing team consuming its dashboards has writers on staff.

A founder or five-person SMB breaks the assumption. There is no content team waiting for insights. Every report line item becomes hours of unassisted writing, which in practice means most gaps never get fixed and the subscription quietly becomes a scoreboard for a game nobody is playing. That failure mode, paying to watch your own absence, is the single most common complaint pattern in this category, and it is a product design gap rather than a user discipline problem.

Translate the price ladder into a year of spend. Profound is a quote-based enterprise contract, out of scope for most SMB budgets before the conversation starts. Peec at 89 euros per month runs roughly $1,150 per year at entry, and its 199 euro Pro tier about $2,570. Otterly Lite costs $348 per year for 15 prompts, with the useful Standard tier at $2,268. None of those figures include a single written word of fix content; add freelance or agency writing at market rates and the real cost of acting on the reports multiplies several times over.

Reachroller Starter is $29 per month for 400 credits and 25 tracked questions, where one credit buys one stored AI answer and a generated fix page costs ten credits. The same $348 annual spend that buys Otterly monitoring buys tracking plus roughly forty publish-ready fix pages a year, each with slug, title tag, meta description, schema markup and indexing steps included, and each followed by a recheck that confirms whether the answer flipped. The honest caveat: Reachroller is a young product, ChatGPT tracking is live today and Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok tracking are built and rolling out. Every answer behind every score is stored and inspectable, a methodology choice explained in how to measure AI visibility.

It is worth pausing on the capital story, because it shapes what you will be sold over the next two years. More than $300 million entered this category between mid 2025 and spring 2026, and venture funding at that scale comes with growth expectations that get expressed as pricing. Profound's $1 billion valuation implies a revenue plan measured in the hundreds of millions, which is why its center of gravity will stay enterprise: the product will keep accumulating features that justify five-figure contracts, and the self-serve buyer will keep being an afterthought. Peec's $29 million round points the same direction one tier down; the pressure to move upmarket from 89 euros is structural.

For a buyer, two practical consequences follow. First, expect the monitoring layer to commoditize. When multiple well-funded vendors sell prompt tracking across the same public engines, the tracking itself stops being a moat and prices at the low end fall, as Otterly's $29 floor already shows. Second, expect the differentiation to move to what happens after the report: workflow integrations, agents, and content generation. Profound's Agents and MCP push is the enterprise version of this bet. Reachroller's generated fix pages are the SMB version. The dashboards will converge; the loops will not.

A last consideration is data continuity. AI visibility scores only become meaningful as history accumulates, which creates gentle lock-in with whichever tool you start on. That argues for starting on a tool whose entry price you can sustain for a year, and for preferring tools that store raw answers over tools that store only scores, since raw answers remain interpretable even if you later switch platforms.

You do not have to take this guide's word for any of it; the evaluation is cheap to run. Start by writing down 15 buying questions for your category, phrased the way a real buyer would ask an assistant, with your brand name appearing in none of them. Unbranded phrasing matters because a question containing your name gets you mentioned by construction and tells you nothing, a distinction covered in branded vs unbranded prompts.

Then run trials in parallel. Otterly and Reachroller both offer self-serve starts at the $29 tier, Peec offers a trial at its 89 euro tier, and Profound requires a sales conversation, which is itself data about fit. Load the same 15 questions into each and judge four things after a week: whether you can read the raw answers behind every score, whether the tool distinguishes repeated-run rates from single checks, what acting on a lost question requires, and what the price will be at your real question count.

The fourth judgment usually decides it. On monitoring-only tools, the cost of acting is your writing time multiplied by every gap found, forever. On Reachroller, a lost question becomes a generated, publish-ready page for ten credits, and the recheck tells you whether it worked. One week of parallel trials makes the difference concrete in your own category, with your own questions.

Each tool wins its own floor. If you run enterprise marketing with a content team ready to execute, Profound is the deepest platform in the category and its $1 billion valuation reflects real product leadership, particularly the Agents and MCP work. If you are a mid-market team or agency that wants serious analytics without an enterprise contract, Peec AI has earned its growth. If you want the cheapest possible thermometer, Otterly's $29 plan is exactly that.

For most SMBs and founders, the recommendation is Reachroller, and the reasoning is concrete rather than sentimental. It enters at the same $29 as Otterly while the other two climb toward four and five figures. It is the only one of the four that both runs the tracking and writes the fix, which is the difference between owning a scoreboard and playing the game. And it shows its receipts: every score links to the raw stored answers behind it, so you are never asked to trust a number you cannot audit. Measure with the tool that also does the work.