Key takeaways
- Peec AI and Otterly.AI are the fastest to set up, both self-serve with onboarding measured in minutes, not calls.
- Profound quietly removed its self-serve paid brand plans in September 2026. It's now a 7-day trial or a sales conversation for Enterprise pricing, which is a real problem if you're a solo marketer without a procurement process.
- Scrunch's Core plan ($250/mo) is self-serve, but reviewers are split on onboarding, some call it easy, others call it cumbersome.
- Otterly's Lite plan at $29/month is explicitly marketed to solo marketers, but the jump to Standard ($189/month) for more than 15 prompts is steep.
- None of these four tools write and publish content for you. If you want monitoring and a fix-it layer in one place, that's a different category, and it's worth knowing what you're giving up by going monitoring-only.
If you're running marketing solo, your AEO budget decision isn't really about features. It's about how many hours you can spend configuring a dashboard before you lose interest and stop checking it. I've watched this happen with keyword tools for a decade: somebody signs up, spends forty minutes fighting a setup wizard, and then never logs in again. The tool that wins isn't the one with the most columns in its pricing table, it's the one you'll actually open every week.
So this guide ranks Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, and Scrunch specifically on ease of setup, with pricing and feature depth as secondary context. All four track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and similar engines mention or cite your brand. The differences are in how much friction sits between you and a usable first report.
The quick comparison
| Tool | Setup speed | Entry price (solo tier) | Prompts included | Engines at entry | Biggest catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Minutes, self-serve | $29/mo (Lite) | 15 | 4 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot) | Jump to 100 prompts costs $189/mo |
| Peec AI | Minutes, guided kickstart | ~$95/mo (€85 Starter) | 50 | 3, pick your own | Extra engines are a paid add-on |
| Scrunch | Self-serve but mixed reviews | $250/mo (Core) | 125 unique | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot) | No self-serve tier below $250 |
| Profound | Trial only, then a sales call | No self-serve paid tier as of Sept 2026 | Auto-assigned in trial | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews (trial) | Enterprise-only pricing now, reportedly $1,000-$5,000+/mo |
1. Otterly.AI: built for exactly this use case
Otterly is the only one of these four that advertises itself directly at solo marketers. The Lite plan, $29/month, literally says "for solo marketers and small teams" on the pricing page. You get 15 search prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode available as paid add-ons if you need them later.
Setup is what you'd expect from a tool aimed at people without a dedicated analyst: pick your brand, add a handful of prompts you care about, and you're looking at daily citation data within the same session you signed up. No sales call, no custom onboarding deck. There's a 14-day free trial, and the Semrush integration is a nice touch if you're already paying for Semrush and don't want a second login to manage.
The catch is the prompt ceiling. Fifteen prompts covers maybe three or four core topics with a few variations each. That's fine for checking "do we show up at all" on your highest-value queries, but if you want real coverage across a content library, you'll hit the wall fast and the next tier is a 6.5x price jump to $189/month for 100 prompts. Plan your 15 prompts carefully before you start, they're the whole ballgame on this tier.
Otterly.AI
2. Peec AI: the best balance of speed and depth
Peec AI's own differentiator, according to multiple independent reviewers, is speed paired with actionable insight. Even Profound's own comparison page concedes that Peec has a responsive, self-serve model with proactive onboarding, which is a notable thing for a competitor to admit.
The Starter plan runs €85/month (roughly $95), covering 50 prompts and letting you choose any 3 AI models to track from day one. Onboarding includes a guided kickstart session, and reviewers describe adding a domain, competitors, and prompts as something that "typically takes a few minutes" rather than the multi-week ramp some enterprise platforms require. One review on Rankability called it "refreshingly simple," with an onboarding prompt sitting right there on the first screen.
The tradeoff: that $95/month price assumes exactly 3 engines. Want a 4th? That's a $35/month add-on on Starter, scaling up to $165/month per extra engine on the Advanced plan. For a solo marketer tracking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, 3 engines is probably enough anyway, so this mostly matters if you also care about Gemini or Copilot specifically.
3. Scrunch: self-serve, but the reviews don't agree on how smooth it is
Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, and scrunchai.com now redirects to scrunch.com. Since the acquisition, pricing settled into a simpler two-tier structure: Core at $250/month (125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses, 5 site audits, 4 LLMs, basic content generation) and a custom Enterprise tier that unlocks the full Agent Experience Platform and 9 LLMs including Claude and Gemini.
Here's where it gets murky for the "ease of setup" question specifically. Scrunch's own homepage claims you can "see results in 30 seconds" by running a site AI audit before you even sign up, and one reviewer rated Setup Complexity 5/5, calling it quick and easy. But another reviewer scored Ease of Use & Onboarding at just 3.9/5, and G2 reviews are genuinely split, some call initial setup very easy, others describe onboarding and initial configuration as cumbersome. Agencies that need multi-client setups get white-glove onboarding, which suggests Scrunch's self-serve path for a single brand isn't as polished as its agency path.
For a solo marketer, Core is also the most expensive self-serve entry point on this list at $250/month, nearly three times Otterly's Lite plan. You're paying for site audits and basic content generation bundled in, which neither Otterly nor Peec offers at the entry tier, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. But if your only job is checking citations, Scrunch is overbuilt and overpriced for the task.
4. Profound: no longer a solo-marketer option
This is the one that changed the most in 2026, and it matters a lot for this specific guide. Earlier in the year, Profound had published self-serve brand plans starting at $99/month. As of September 2026, those are gone. The pricing page now shows only a free 7-day trial (50 prompts/day across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, no history, no exports, no API) and a custom Enterprise tier. Third-party estimates from a competing vendor peg that Enterprise pricing somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000+ per month; an older Reddit estimate puts it closer to $1,000/month per brand per country.
The timing lines up with Profound announcing a $180 million Series D, visible as a banner on its own pricing page. Reading between the lines, Profound has moved upmarket toward enterprise contracts and left the solo-marketer segment to competitors like Otterly and Peec.
Even setting price aside, the setup experience isn't built for quick starts. Profound's FAQ claims setup is "instant," but that's for the auto-recommended, non-customizable prompt set in the trial. G2 reviewers note you have to spend real time setting up keyword lists for prompt tracking, and some have flagged UI performance issues, including page loads taking up to 15 seconds and a broken Watched URL deletion feature. For a one-person team trying to get a usable answer in an afternoon, this isn't the tool anymore, unless you're also the kind of solo marketer with enterprise budget approval, in which case the depth (prompt volumes, shopping views, agent-traffic analytics) is genuinely strong.
Profound
What these tools don't do
Here's the thing nobody's pricing page says out loud: Profound, Peec, Otterly, and Scrunch's Core tier are monitoring tools. They tell you whether you're cited. None of the entry tiers write the page that wins the citation back, and only Scrunch's higher tiers even attempt basic content generation.
If you're solo, that gap matters more than it would on a five-person team, because there's no one else to hand the "we lost this citation, go write a better page" task to. According to Promptwatch's data on average sources per response, ChatGPT typically cites around five sources per answer while Google AI Overviews cites close to ten, which means every ChatGPT slot is roughly twice as contested as a Google AI Overviews slot, worth knowing before you decide where to spend your limited prompt budget. The same Promptwatch dataset found that in August 2026, ChatGPT Search mostly cited mid-to-high authority sites (DR 46-90) rather than the biggest domains on the web, with the very top tier (DR 91-100) falling to just 3% of citations by mid-August. That's good news if you're a solo marketer without a flagship-domain backlink profile: there's a real lane to get cited without competing against the biggest sites in your space.
Promptwatch takes a different approach from the four tools above: it pairs the same kind of prompt tracking and citation monitoring with Content Agents that draft and publish GEO-optimized pages to your CMS, plus a Unified Actions list that prioritizes what to fix first. For a solo marketer, that closes the loop that Otterly, Peec, and Scrunch's lower tiers leave open, you see the gap and the tool also helps you close it, rather than just reporting that it exists.
So which one do you actually pick
If you want the fastest path to a working dashboard today and your budget is under $100/month, start with Otterly's Lite plan. Fifteen prompts is tight, but it's enough to answer the core question: does ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews know your brand exists. Pick your prompts carefully.
If you can stretch to roughly $95/month and want more flexibility in which three engines you track, plus faster onboarding support, Peec AI edges out Otterly on setup polish according to most reviewers, even if it's a bit pricier.
Skip Scrunch unless you specifically want the site-audit and basic content tools bundled in and can justify $250/month solo. And skip Profound entirely unless you have enterprise budget, because the self-serve door that used to exist for solo marketers closed in September 2026.
If you'd rather not choose between monitoring tools and content-fixing tools separately, it's worth comparing the broader field of GEO platforms, including ones built around an action layer rather than a dashboard, at the GEO software directory on bestgeosoftware.com. And if your real bottleneck is deciding which AI search queries matter in the first place, the rank-tracking tools listed at ai-rank-tools.com are worth a look before you commit to any single vendor's prompt list.