Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI is the cheapest entry point (~$29/mo) but is monitoring-only with limited depth -- fine for dipping a toe in, not for serious optimization.
- Peec AI sits in the middle: clean UI, Berlin-based, good for teams that want solid monitoring data without complexity. Starts at $95/mo.
- Promptwatch starts at $99/mo and is the only one of the three that goes beyond monitoring to help you actually fix visibility gaps -- with content generation, crawler logs, and prompt intelligence built in.
- If your goal is to understand AND improve your AI search presence, Promptwatch is the clear step up. If you just need basic tracking on a tight budget, Otterly.AI or Peec AI will do the job.
The AI search visibility space has gotten crowded fast. A year ago, most marketing teams had never heard of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Now there are dozens of tools claiming to track how your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.
Three names come up constantly in the "budget-friendly" tier: Otterly.AI, Peec AI, and Promptwatch. They're often grouped together because they're all priced below the enterprise tier occupied by tools like Profound or BrightEdge. But they're actually quite different in what they do -- and what they don't.
This guide breaks down each one honestly so you can figure out which is worth your money in 2026.
What problem are these tools actually solving?
Before comparing features, it helps to be clear about the problem. When someone searches on ChatGPT or Perplexity, the AI generates an answer and cites sources. If your brand isn't being cited, you're invisible to a growing slice of your audience.
The question is: do you want to know you're invisible, or do you want to fix it?
Most tools in this space answer the first question. They show you a dashboard: here's your mention rate, here's how you compare to competitors, here are the prompts where you're not showing up. That's useful data. But it leaves you staring at a gap with no clear path forward.
The tools below take different positions on this. Let's look at each one.
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the cheapest serious option in the AI visibility space. Multiple sources peg its entry price around $29/month, which makes it genuinely accessible for solo marketers, small agencies, or anyone who wants to start tracking AI mentions without a big commitment.
What you get: brand mention tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, basic competitor comparisons, and a reasonably clean interface. It validates the category -- yes, your brand either shows up or it doesn't, and Otterly will tell you which.
What you don't get: any meaningful path to fixing what's broken. There's no content generation, no crawler logs, no prompt volume data, no Reddit or YouTube tracking. It's a monitoring dashboard, full stop.
That's not necessarily a knock. If you're a small team that just wants to answer "are we showing up in AI search?" without spending $100/month, Otterly.AI does that. The concern is that once you have the data, you'll quickly want to do something with it -- and Otterly won't help you there.
The other limitation worth noting: at the entry price point, prompt coverage is narrow. You're tracking a small number of queries, which means your visibility picture can be misleading if you're not careful about which prompts you choose.
Peec AI
Peec AI is a Berlin-based platform founded in early 2025 that's earned a reputation in the Reddit/AEO community as a solid mid-tier option. The r/aeo community has called it a "decent starting point" and "affordable" -- which is fair, though "affordable" is relative when the Starter plan runs $95/month.
What makes Peec AI stand out is its approach to data collection. It uses UI scraping rather than API calls, meaning it interacts with AI models the way a real user would. This matters because what users see in ChatGPT or Perplexity's interface can differ from what the API returns. You're getting a more accurate picture of the actual user experience.
The interface is clean and intuitive -- one of the better UIs in this tier. The Starter plan covers 3 AI models and 50 prompts tracked daily. The Pro plan ($245/month) bumps that to 150 prompts and 2 projects, and the Advanced plan ($495/month) adds multi-country tracking and GSC/GA/Looker integrations.
Peec AI also offers unlimited seats on all plans, which is a genuine advantage for teams where multiple people need access to the data.
The gap: like Otterly.AI, Peec AI is fundamentally a monitoring tool. It tells you what's happening but doesn't help you change it. No content generation, no crawler logs, no answer gap analysis that surfaces specific content you should create. The G2 rating is strong (5.0/5 based on early reviews), and direct Slack access to the founders is a nice touch for a startup -- but that support advantage will likely fade as they scale.
For teams that need clean, reliable monitoring data and don't yet need optimization features, Peec AI is a reasonable choice. The jump from $95 to $245 for the Pro plan is steep though, and at $495 for Advanced you're in territory where Promptwatch starts looking like better value.
Promptwatch
Promptwatch starts at $99/month -- just $4 more than Peec AI's Starter plan -- but it's doing something fundamentally different.
The core distinction is what happens after you see the data. Promptwatch is built around an optimization loop, not just a monitoring dashboard. Here's what that means in practice:
Finding gaps: The Answer Gap Analysis shows you exactly which prompts your competitors are visible for but you're not. Not just "you're missing from these results" -- but the specific topics and questions AI models want answered that your site doesn't currently address.
Creating content: Content Agents generate articles, listicles, comparisons, and briefs grounded in real prompt data. This isn't generic AI content -- it's built from citation data, prompt volumes, competitor analysis, and brand guidance. The Essential plan ($99/mo) includes 5 articles per month; Professional ($249/mo) gives you 15.
Tracking what changes: Page-level tracking shows which of your pages are being cited, how often, and by which models. The crawler logs (available from Professional tier upward) show real-time activity from AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot -- which pages they're reading, errors they're hitting, and when pages move from "crawled" to "cited."
That last piece -- AI crawler logs -- is something neither Otterly.AI nor Peec AI offers. It's the difference between knowing your content isn't being cited and understanding why it isn't being cited.
Other things Promptwatch does that the others don't: Reddit and YouTube tracking (both are major sources AI models pull from), ChatGPT Shopping monitoring, prompt volume estimates and difficulty scores, query fan-outs showing how one prompt branches into sub-queries, and offsite citation analysis tracking which external pages are driving your AI visibility.
The platform monitors 10 AI models: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Gemini, Meta/Llama, DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral, and Copilot. Peec AI's Starter plan covers 3 models.
The tradeoff: Promptwatch's interface is more complex. There's more to configure, more data to interpret, and a steeper learning curve than Peec AI's cleaner UI. If you want something you can set up in 20 minutes and check weekly, Peec AI might feel more comfortable. If you're serious about improving your AI visibility over time, the complexity is worth it.
Side-by-side comparison
| Feature | Otterly.AI | Peec AI | Promptwatch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | ~$29/mo | $95/mo | $99/mo |
| AI models (base plan) | 3 | 3 | 9+ |
| Prompts tracked (base) | Limited | 50 | 50 |
| UI scraping (real user data) | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Content generation | No | No | Yes (5 articles/mo) |
| Answer gap analysis | No | No | Yes |
| AI crawler logs | No | No | Yes (Pro+) |
| Reddit/YouTube tracking | No | No | Yes |
| ChatGPT Shopping tracking | No | No | Yes |
| Prompt volume data | No | No | Yes |
| Offsite citation analysis | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-country tracking | No | Advanced plan | Professional plan |
| Unlimited seats | No | Yes | No (plan-based) |
| Free trial | Yes | 7-day | 7-day |
| G2 rating | N/A | 5.0/5 | 4.9/5 |
Pricing breakdown
| Plan | Otterly.AI | Peec AI | Promptwatch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | ~$29/mo | $95/mo (50 prompts) | $99/mo (50 prompts, 5 articles) |
| Mid tier | ~$79/mo | $245/mo (150 prompts) | $249/mo (150 prompts, 15 articles) |
| Higher tier | ~$199/mo | $495/mo (350 prompts) | $579/mo (350 prompts, 30 articles) |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom |
At the entry level, Otterly.AI is clearly cheapest. But the gap between Peec AI and Promptwatch is basically nothing ($4/month), which makes the feature difference between them hard to justify in Peec AI's favor.
At the mid tier, Peec AI ($245) and Promptwatch ($249) are essentially the same price -- but Promptwatch's Professional plan adds crawler logs, 15 content articles, and multi-city tracking that Peec AI's Pro plan doesn't include.
At the higher tier, Promptwatch ($579) is more expensive than Peec AI ($495), but again the feature gap is significant: 30 articles per month, full crawler analytics, and the complete optimization stack.
Who should use which tool
Choose Otterly.AI if: You're just getting started with AI visibility tracking, have a tight budget, and want basic monitoring without complexity. It's a reasonable first step, but expect to outgrow it.
Choose Peec AI if: You want clean, reliable monitoring data with a good UI, your team needs unlimited seats, and you value direct access to the founders for support. It's a solid monitoring tool -- just don't expect it to help you fix what it finds.
Choose Promptwatch if: You want to actually improve your AI visibility, not just measure it. The content generation, answer gap analysis, and crawler logs make it an optimization platform rather than a dashboard. At $99/month, the entry price is nearly identical to Peec AI, and you get significantly more.
The honest take
The "budget" framing for these three tools is a bit misleading. Otterly.AI is genuinely budget-friendly. Peec AI and Promptwatch are mid-market tools that happen to be cheaper than enterprise options like Profound.
The more useful framing: what do you actually need?
If the answer is "I need to know whether my brand shows up in AI search results," any of these three will work. Otterly.AI is cheapest, Peec AI has the nicest interface, Promptwatch has the broadest model coverage.
If the answer is "I need to improve my brand's AI visibility," only Promptwatch has the tools to help you do that. The content agents, answer gap analysis, and crawler logs aren't nice-to-haves -- they're the difference between knowing you have a problem and being able to fix it.
That gap matters more as AI search continues to grow. Monitoring-only tools made sense when the category was new and teams just needed to understand what was happening. In 2026, the teams winning in AI search are the ones taking action on that data -- creating the right content, fixing crawl issues, and tracking which pages are actually getting cited.
For that workflow, Promptwatch is the only tool in this tier that's built for it.