Key takeaways
- Gauge has exactly two plans: Growth at $599/month and Enterprise (custom pricing). There is no self-serve tier below $599, which makes it one of the most expensive entry points in AI visibility tracking.
- Gauge's headline number, roughly 108,000 AI answers per month on Growth, comes from running 600 prompts daily across 6 platforms. Per answer, that works out to about half a cent, which is genuinely cheap. Per prompt, it's $1.00, which is middle of the pack.
- Claude and Grok are not included in Gauge's default platform set on any plan. You can add them via bring-your-own-API-key, but the provider bills you directly for those runs.
- Promptwatch ($95 to $579/month), Profound ($99 to $399/month, yearly billing), and Peec AI ($80 to $420/month, annual billing) all start cheaper, but engine coverage and feature depth vary wildly at entry level.
- Every vendor's own comparison page computes "cost per answer" in the way that flatters them most. The tables below use each vendor's currently published numbers, normalized the same way.
What Gauge actually costs in 2026
Gauge keeps its pricing simple, and simple cuts both ways. You get one self-serve plan and one enterprise plan. That's it.
Growth: $599/month
The Growth plan includes:
- 600 prompts, run daily, across 6 platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. That's 3,600 answers per day, or roughly 108,000 per month.
- 18 publish-ready articles per month from Gauge's content engine.
- Unlimited "Ask Gauge" agent chats.
- 10 seats, unlimited domains and competitors.
- GA4, Search Console, and DataForSEO integrations.
- CMS publishing to Webflow, Framer, Sanity, and GitHub.
- Slack integration, exports, email and Slack support.
- A 1-week free trial.
Enterprise: custom pricing
Enterprise adds custom volumes and, according to Gauge's pricing page, "all models + Claude and Grok." But the FAQ contradicts this slightly: Claude and Grok tracking is available on any plan via BYOK, with Anthropic or xAI billing you directly for the API usage. So even at Enterprise, those two engines effectively cost extra, just on someone else's invoice. It's an honest arrangement, but read the fine print before assuming you're getting 8 engines for one price.
One more thing worth flagging: some of Gauge's own resource pages still cite a "$99/month" starting price, which looks like stale content from before a relaunch at $599. If you see that number anywhere, treat it as outdated. The pricing page says $599, and that's the number that matters.
The per-answer math everyone fudges
Here's the problem with comparing these tools: every vendor computes "cost per answer" differently, and always in their own favor. Gauge compares its 108,000-answer Growth tier against Profound's entry tier. Profound compares its data depth against everyone's breadth. Peec compares annual prices against competitors' monthly ones (Gauge's own comparison page even admits this in a footnote).
So let's normalize. The table below uses each vendor's currently published pricing and stated response volumes, with the same formula everywhere: monthly price divided by prompts, and monthly price divided by tracked responses.
| Tool and plan | Price/mo | Prompts | Responses/mo | Engines | $/prompt | $/response |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gauge Growth | $599 | 600 | ~108,000 | 6 | $1.00 | ~$0.006 |
| Promptwatch Essential | $95 | 50 | 6,000 | All engines | $1.90 | $0.016 |
| Promptwatch Professional | $245 | 150 | 18,000 | All engines | $1.63 | $0.014 |
| Promptwatch Business | $579 | 350 | 42,000 | All engines | $1.65 | $0.014 |
| Profound Starter | $99 | 50 | 1,500 | ChatGPT only | $1.98 | $0.066 |
| Profound Growth | $399 | 100 | 9,000 | 3 | $3.99 | $0.044 |
| Peec AI Starter (annual) | $80 | 50 | ~4,500 | 3 of your choice | $1.60 | ~$0.018 |
| Peec AI Pro (annual) | $205 | 150 | ~13,500 | 3 of your choice | $1.37 | ~$0.015 |
| Peec AI Advanced (annual) | $420 | 350 | ~31,500 | 3 of your choice | $1.20 | ~$0.013 |
A few honest observations from this table:
Gauge wins on cost per response, and it isn't close. Half a cent per answer is real, and no one else gets near it at published volumes. But that number is driven by daily runs across 6 platforms whether you need them or not. If your brand only cares about ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, you're paying for 108,000 answers when 36,000 would do.
Peec AI quietly has the best prompt pricing once you commit annually. And Promptwatch's per-response cost barely moves across tiers, which tells you the pricing is linear rather than punitive.
Profound is the outlier in the bad direction. $0.066 per response at Starter is 11x Gauge's rate, and that's for ChatGPT-only tracking. Even Growth at $399 gets you 3 engines and 9,000 responses, which is $0.044 each.
One caveat on response counts generally: they're not all equally valuable. ChatGPT cites roughly 5 sources per web-search response, while Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite around 10, according to Promptwatch's average sources per response data. A "response" from an engine that cites heavily gives you more citation surface per unit. Raw response volume flatters tools that track citation-light engines.
Gauge vs Promptwatch
Promptwatch is the closest thing Gauge has to a philosophical rival. Both scrape real AI interfaces rather than sampling APIs, both generate content, and both frame themselves as agents that do work rather than dashboards that display it.
The pricing difference is stark at entry: Promptwatch Essential is $95/month for 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, all engines, plus API and MCP access. Gauge is $599/month, full stop. That's a 6.3x difference in the minimum commitment.
But flip it around. For $579 (Promptwatch Business), you get 350 prompts and 42,000 responses. For $599 (Gauge Growth), you get 600 prompts and 108,000 responses. At the top of the self-serve range, Gauge delivers roughly 2.5x the tracked volume for essentially the same money. If you genuinely need that volume, Gauge's ceiling is higher.
Where Promptwatch pulls ahead is feature depth per dollar. Crawler logs (Agent Analytics) show when AI systems visit your pages and what they read, which Gauge doesn't offer as a comparable product. Reddit and YouTube citation tracking, ChatGPT Shopping and Ads Radar, sentiment analysis, and country/state/city-level tracking are all in the stack. Promptwatch's data foundation, 26B+ analyzed citations, prompts, and responses, also feeds its content gap analysis, so the articles its Content Agents produce are grounded in what AI engines actually cite.
Gauge's counterargument is its Action Center and the "Ask Gauge" agent, plus CMS publishing to four platforms including GitHub and Sanity. Promptwatch publishes to Webflow, Framer, and WordPress. Neither is clearly better; it depends on your stack.
The honest summary: Promptwatch is the better choice below $579, and it's not particularly close. Gauge only makes sense if your prompt volume justifies the $599 tier or you want everything under one flat price with no add-on anxiety.
Gauge vs Profound
Profound is the enterprise name in this category, and in 2026 it finally published pricing: Starter at $99/month and Growth at $399/month, both billed yearly, with custom enterprise above that.
Profound
The problem is what those tiers contain. Starter tracks ChatGPT only. One engine, 50 prompts, 1,500 responses, 1 seat, no API. In a market where Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI surfaces collectively drive a large share of AI-influenced search behavior, single-engine tracking at $99 is a hard sell.
Growth at $399 gets you 3 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), 100 prompts, 9,000 responses, and 3 seats. Still no API, no SSO. Real API access, SSO/SAML, SOC2, and up to 9 engines are Enterprise-only, which means a sales conversation and procurement cycle.
Gauge's own comparison against Profound makes a fair point despite the self-interest: Profound is a workflow builder, something you architect yourself, while Gauge positions itself as a teammate you delegate to. Profound's strength is data depth and governance for large organizations. Its Agent Analytics integrates with Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, and others for AI referral traffic tracking, and it tracks unlimited domains even on Starter.
But the pricing structure punishes mid-market teams. Multi-engine coverage requires $399/month on annual billing, and that still caps you at 100 prompts. The gap between Growth and Enterprise is steep enough that many teams hit a ceiling before getting the features they need. Gauge at $599 with 6 engines, 600 prompts, and white-glove onboarding on every plan is arguably a better deal than Profound Growth, which is a sentence I didn't expect to write.
Where Profound wins: enterprise governance, SSO/SOC2, deep conversation analytics, and prompt volume data (Enterprise only). If you're a large org with procurement requirements, Profound speaks your language. Everyone else should look elsewhere.
Gauge vs Peec AI
Peec AI is the budget-conscious option of the three, and its 2026 pricing reflects a push for accessibility: Starter at $80/month, Pro at $205, Advanced at $420, all billed annually, with Enterprise custom above that.
The catch is engine selection. Every Peec plan below Enterprise includes 3 AI models of your choice, with extra models costing more (Enterprise unlocks up to 12). So the real question is whether your 3 chosen engines cover where your buyers actually are. If ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity are your whole universe, Peec's Starter at $80 is excellent value: 50 prompts, daily tracking, unlimited users, unlimited countries.
Unlimited seats on every plan is Peec's quiet differentiator. Promptwatch, Profound, and Gauge all cap seats at entry tiers (Profound Starter gets 1 seat, which is rough). If you have a five-person team that all needs dashboard access, Peec just saved you real money.
Against Gauge specifically, Peec is a different animal. Gauge gives you 6 fixed platforms, 600 prompts, content generation, and an agent, for $599. Peec gives you 3 chosen platforms, 50 to 350 prompts, and increasingly ambitious features as you climb tiers: AI Shopping and SKU-level tracking, a crawlability audit across 40+ AI bots, AI referrals, MCP access, and a Peec agent with custom skills. API access and SSO remain Enterprise-only, which is the same gate Profound uses.
Gauge claims it's 2-3x cheaper per answer than Peec, and by its own math that's true. But Peec's annual pricing means the real month-to-month comparison is less lopsided than Gauge's comparison tables suggest (Gauge's footnote admits it doesn't factor in annual discounts).
Feature comparison at a glance
| Feature | Gauge | Promptwatch | Profound | Peec AI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $599/mo | $95/mo | $99/mo (yearly) | $80/mo (annual) |
| Engines at entry | 6 fixed | All, no add-ons | ChatGPT only | 3 of your choice |
| Claude/Grok | BYOK only | Included | Enterprise only | Add-on/Enterprise |
| Content generation | 18 articles/mo | Tiered (5-30/mo) | Growth: 3/mo | Limited |
| CMS publishing | Webflow, Framer, Sanity, GitHub | Webflow, Framer, WordPress | Not listed | Not listed |
| AI crawler logs | Not offered | Yes, tiered volumes | Agent Analytics (traffic) | Crawlability audit |
| Reddit/YouTube citations | Claimed vs Peec | Yes, dedicated reports | No | No |
| Seats at entry | 10 | Tiered | 1 | Unlimited |
| API access | Not listed | Included from $95 | Enterprise only | Enterprise only |
| Real UI scraping | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Who should actually buy each one
Buy Gauge if you're a mid-to-large team that will genuinely use 600 daily prompts across 6 platforms and wants content production bundled in. The per-answer economics are the best in the category, and the flat pricing means no add-on surprises. Just confirm Claude and Grok coverage matters to you or not, because BYOK is the only path.
Buy Promptwatch if you want the deepest feature set per dollar: crawler logs, Reddit and YouTube citation tracking, shopping insights, API and MCP from the entry tier, and content agents that publish to your CMS. It's the most complete stack below $600, and the free Explore plan (10 prompts, ChatGPT) plus a 7-day trial on paid tiers means you can validate before committing.
Buy Profound if you're an enterprise that needs SSO, SOC2, governance, and deep conversation analytics, and you have the budget and procurement patience for a custom contract. Avoid Starter unless ChatGPT-only tracking genuinely covers your market.
Buy Peec AI if budget is the constraint and 3 engines cover your audience. Unlimited seats, unlimited countries, and daily tracking from $80/month is a strong package, and the annual discount is real. Just budget for model add-ons if you need more than 3.
Things to check before you sign anything
Billing structure matters more than headline price. Profound's published prices are annual-only. Peec's attractive numbers assume annual commitment; month-to-month runs higher. Gauge is month-to-month. Promptwatch offers both, with annual giving 12 months for the price of 10. A "$99" tool billed yearly and a "$95" tool billed monthly are not the same purchase.
Watch the engine gates. Profound Starter is ChatGPT-only. Peec includes 3 engines but charges for more. Gauge fixes 6 and makes Claude/Grok a BYOK extra. Promptwatch is the only one of the four that includes every engine on every plan with no add-ons.
And be skeptical of every vendor's comparison page, including the numbers in this guide if they're stale by the time you read them. This market reprices quarterly. Verify on each vendor's pricing page before you pull out a card, and if you're still shopping broadly, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com tracks the wider field beyond these four.
The verdict
Gauge is not overpriced, but it is expensive to start. The $599 floor excludes most small teams by design, and the value case only closes if you'll actually consume six-figure answer volumes and use the content engine. For everyone else, Promptwatch offers the best feature-to-price ratio from $95, Peec AI wins on raw affordability with annual billing, and Profound remains an enterprise product whose published tiers exist mainly to funnel you toward a sales call.