Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI has the lowest sticker price ($29/mo) but Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons that can push a fully-loaded plan past $350/mo.
- Peec AI's Starter tier (€85/mo) only lets you pick 3 of 6 models, and Claude is gated to Enterprise entirely.
- ByDefault ($99/mo Starter) is the only one of the three that bundles Claude at entry price and adds AI crawler log analytics plus auto-generated articles tied to tracked prompts.
- None of the three ties citations back to revenue automatically — you'll need manual UTM/GA work regardless of which one you pick.
- If you need genuine end-to-end optimization (not just monitoring) at a similar price tier, it's worth comparing all three against platforms like Promptwatch, which builds content generation and crawler analytics into its core plans.
Why "budget AI visibility tool" is a real category now
Two years ago, nobody needed a tool to tell them whether ChatGPT was recommending their brand. Now half your prospects research a purchase by asking an AI model instead of typing into Google, and the citation landscape is a lot more crowded than people assume. Promptwatch's data on unique domains per ChatGPT response found that nearly half of all citation-enabled answers (47.6%) name 10 or more different domains, and two-thirds name at least 8 (ChatGPT unique domains per response, Sep-Oct 2026). That's not a small list you can eyeball manually once a week.
So a wave of lean, self-serve tools showed up to fill the gap below Profound and Scrunch's enterprise pricing. ByDefault, Otterly.AI, and Peec AI are the three names that keep surfacing in "cheapest AI visibility tool" searches, and all three sit in a tight band between $29 and roughly $100 a month at entry level. I spent time comparing their actual pricing pages rather than the recycled numbers that show up in half the listicles about this category (Peec in particular has had conflicting figures floating around since a reported August 2026 pricing update), so here's where things stand as of this writing.
The three tools at a glance
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts included | Models at entry price | Notable extra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo (Lite) | 15 | 4 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot) | GEO Audit tool, fastest onboarding |
| Peec AI | €85/mo (Starter) | 50 | 3 of 6 (your choice, no Claude) | Source/domain gap analysis, unlimited seats |
| ByDefault | $99/mo (Starter) | 50 | 4 of 8 incl. Claude and coding agents | AI crawler analytics + auto-generated articles |
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI: cheapest headline price, but read the fine print
Otterly.AI's $29/mo Lite plan is genuinely the lowest credible entry point in the category, and the onboarding really is as simple as reviewers say: paste prompts, pick engines, get results within a day. It tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot out of the box, with daily refresh and unlimited team seats on every tier, which matters if you're a small agency that doesn't want to pay per-seat the way some competitors do.
The catch is the engine list. Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are not included at Lite — they're separately metered add-ons. On the Standard tier ($189/mo), Claude costs an extra $109/mo and Gemini another $59/mo; on Premium ($489/mo), Claude alone jumps to $439/mo. Add those up and a team that wants full 7-engine coverage at Premium is paying north of $1,200/month, not the $489 the pricing page advertises. That's a meaningful gap between the headline number and what most serious buyers will actually spend.
Where Otterly genuinely earns its reputation is the GEO Audit tool — a page-level crawlability and content-gap checker that multiple independent reviewers describe as more developed than Peec's equivalent. It's also the only one of the three with public ChatGPT Ads and Shopping tracking, and Google AI Overviews ad tracking, neither of which show up in Peec or ByDefault's feature lists.
Peec AI: strong source analysis, but the model cap bites
Peec AI starts at €85/mo for 50 prompts, but the "choose 3 models" limit on Starter and Pro means you're picking from ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini — and leaving three out. Claude is reserved for Enterprise entirely on Peec's self-serve tiers, which is a real gap if your buyers research on Claude or you're in a market where it has meaningful share.
What Peec does well is source classification. It tags citations as competitor, editorial, reference, or UGC, and runs gap analysis to show which sources mention your competitors but not you — genuinely useful if the question you're trying to answer is "why am I invisible here" rather than just "am I visible." Peec also doesn't charge per seat; unlimited users on every plan, including Starter, which is unusual at this price point. A handful of reviewers also flag that Peec's actual differentiator for small teams is response time: direct Slack access to the Peec team, repeatedly cited as faster and more personal than what you get from larger platforms.
One honest caveat: Peec's pricing has reportedly shifted more than once in 2026, and third-party trackers disagree on current figures (some cite euro annual-billing rates that don't match what's live on Peec's own pricing page). Confirm numbers directly with Peec before budgeting around any figure you read online, including this one.
ByDefault: the newest of the three, and the only one with a content layer baked in
ByDefault's Starter plan runs $99/mo for 50 prompts and 4 trackable models, but it's the only tool of the three that lets you include Claude at entry price alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It also tracks visibility inside coding assistants — Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode — which matters specifically if you sell developer tools or infrastructure; ByDefault's own case studies lean on customers like Upstash and Context7 who care about showing up when someone asks "which Redis provider should I use" inside an IDE, not just inside a chat window.
The other distinguishing feature is AI crawler analytics bundled into the base tier. ByDefault connects to Cloudflare, Vercel, or server logs to show which bots (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, and others) are actually hitting your pages and which of those visits turn into citations. That's a feature most budget tools gate behind enterprise pricing, and it's genuinely useful for diagnosing why visibility isn't moving even after you publish new content.
Starting at Growth ($249/mo), ByDefault also writes five articles a month targeting your tracked prompts specifically, built around the exact fan-out search queries a model ran before answering. Reviewers note that both Otterly and Peec stop at the insight — "the workflow ends at the report" — while ByDefault's Growth tier tries to close that loop, even if the execution is lighter than a full content-operations platform.
What ByDefault doesn't have yet: Perplexity tracking is listed as "Soon," not live, and Microsoft Copilot isn't on the roadmap at all as far as public documentation shows. If Perplexity matters to your buyers today, that's a real gap to weigh against the Claude and crawler advantages.
Where the real cost differences show up
The headline prices make this look like a simple $29 vs $85 vs $99 comparison. It isn't, once you price out what a typical mid-size team actually needs: 4-5 models, a few hundred prompts, some crawler visibility.
| Scenario | Otterly.AI | Peec AI | ByDefault |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry tier price | $29/mo | $99/mo | |
| Prompts at entry | 15 | 50 | 50 |
| Claude included at entry? | No (add-on) | No (Enterprise only) | Yes |
| Content generation included? | No | No | Yes, from Growth tier |
| Realistic 5-engine monthly cost | $350-490+ | Enterprise quote required | $99-249 (if 5th model needed, check current roadmap) |
If your only goal is "cheapest possible way to start monitoring," Otterly's $29 Lite plan is still the right answer — you'll get 15 prompts across 4 engines and a genuinely fast setup. If you need source-level gap analysis and don't mind picking 3 engines, Peec's Starter tier is reasonable, especially for agencies that value the Slack support line. If Claude coverage, crawler-level diagnostics, or some hands-off content production matter more than shaving another $70 off the bill, ByDefault's Starter tier is arguably the better buy even though it's the most expensive of the three entry points.
What all three are missing
A few things are worth knowing before you commit to any budget tool in this category. None of the three attributes citations to actual revenue or pipeline out of the box — you're on your own for connecting a visibility increase to a traffic or conversion lift, typically through manual GA or CRM tagging. None of them track Meta AI, Grok, or DeepSeek, which matters more by the month as Meta-WebIndexer's crawler share has grown sharply this year. And none offers the kind of automated, prioritized action list (something like a GEO to-do list) that pricier platforms build around their monitoring data — you still have to decide what to fix.
That last gap is where it's worth at least glancing at what the next tier up offers. Promptwatch sits closer to the $95-245/mo range and bundles crawler logs, visitor analytics, Reddit and YouTube citation tracking, and automated content generation with CMS publishing into its core plans rather than selling them as add-ons — a meaningfully different approach from monitoring-only tools, since it's built to act on the data, not just report it.
Which one should you actually pick
If you're a solo marketer or a two-person team testing the waters, start with Otterly's $29 Lite plan — it's the lowest-friction way to find out whether AI visibility is even worth tracking for your brand before you commit more budget. If you're an agency juggling several client accounts and want source-level diagnostics without per-seat costs, Peec's Starter tier is a sensible middle ground, as long as you're comfortable giving up Claude coverage. If Claude matters, or you sell to developers who research inside coding assistants, or you want crawler-level visibility and some automated content without jumping straight to a $250+/mo enterprise platform, ByDefault's $99 Starter is worth the extra $70 over Otterly's entry price.
Whatever you choose, run it for a full month before switching. Citation patterns move slowly enough that a week of data tells you almost nothing, and fast enough that a quarter of inaction will leave you guessing why a competitor started showing up in answers you used to own. For a broader rundown of GEO software at every price point, the directory at bestgeosoftware.com is a good place to keep comparing options as pricing in this category keeps shifting.