Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI is the most accessible entry point at $29/month, but it's primarily a monitoring dashboard with limited optimization features.
- Peec AI sits in the mid-tier at €89/month and offers daily tracking with stronger prompt coverage, though it still lacks content generation.
- Rankshift is a newer, lean tool focused on brand mention tracking across ChatGPT and Perplexity — good for getting started, limited for scaling.
- Promptwatch is the only platform in this comparison that closes the full loop: find visibility gaps, generate content to fix them, then track the results. It's priced higher but does significantly more.
- If you're choosing purely on budget, Otterly.AI wins. If you want to actually improve your AI visibility rather than just observe it, Promptwatch is the better investment.
The AI visibility tools market has exploded. In 2024, barely anyone was tracking how their brand appeared in ChatGPT or Perplexity. By early 2026, it's a board-level conversation for most mid-sized brands, and there are now well over 100 tools claiming to solve the problem.
Four names come up constantly in the budget-to-mid-tier range: Otterly.AI, Rankshift, Promptwatch, and Peec AI. They're all positioned around the same core promise — help you understand how visible your brand is in AI search engines. But they're quite different in what they actually deliver.
This comparison breaks down what each tool does, what it costs, where it falls short, and who it's actually built for.
What "AI visibility" actually means (and why it matters)
Before getting into the tools, it's worth being precise about what we're measuring. AI visibility is whether your brand gets mentioned, cited, or recommended when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews a question relevant to your category.
Traditional SEO tells you where you rank on a results page. AI visibility tells you whether you exist in the conversation at all. These are different problems, and the gap between them is growing. According to data from Nobori.ai's 2025 AI Search Visibility Statistics report, B2B companies tracking AI search visibility jumped from 8% to 47% in a single year.
The tools in this comparison all try to answer some version of: "Is my brand showing up when AI models answer questions in my space?" But they differ enormously in how deeply they answer that question, and what they help you do about it.
The four tools at a glance
| Tool | Starting price | AI engines covered | Content generation | Crawler logs | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/month | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews) | No | No | Yes |
| Rankshift | Not publicly listed | ChatGPT, Perplexity | No | No | Yes |
| Peec AI | €89/month | 3 engines on starter | No | No | Yes |
| Promptwatch | $99/month | 10 engines | Yes (built-in AI writer) | Yes (Professional+) | Yes |
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the most-cited budget option in this space, and for good reason. At $29/month for the Lite plan (15 prompts, 4 engines), it's the lowest-cost way to get real monitoring data across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
The interface is clean. You set up prompts relevant to your category, and Otterly tracks how often your brand appears in AI responses versus competitors. You get share-of-voice metrics, mention rates, and a view of which prompts you're winning or losing.
What Otterly doesn't do is tell you what to do about it. There's no content gap analysis, no built-in writing tools, no crawler logs showing you which pages AI models are actually reading. It's a monitoring dashboard, and a decent one, but it stops there.
That's fine if you have a content team that can take the data and run with it. If you're a solo marketer or a small team without dedicated SEO resources, you'll hit a wall quickly: you can see that you're invisible for certain prompts, but you're on your own figuring out how to fix it.
Otterly's pricing scales up from $29 to higher tiers as you add prompts and competitors. The value proposition holds at the entry level, but mid-tier plans start to feel expensive relative to what you get when compared to tools that include optimization features.
Best for: Teams that want affordable monitoring and already have the internal capacity to act on the data.
Rankshift
Rankshift is a newer entrant focused specifically on brand visibility tracking across ChatGPT and Perplexity. It's lean by design — the interface is straightforward, setup is fast, and you can see your brand's mention rate across a set of tracked prompts within minutes.
The tool covers fewer AI engines than Otterly or Peec AI, which is a meaningful limitation as AI search becomes more fragmented. If your audience uses Claude or Gemini heavily, Rankshift won't capture that.
Pricing isn't publicly listed on the website, which is a minor frustration when you're trying to compare options. You need to sign up or contact them to get numbers, which adds friction to the evaluation process.
Like Otterly, Rankshift is monitoring-only. It shows you where you stand but doesn't help you improve. There's no content generation, no gap analysis, no crawler data. For a brand just getting started with AI visibility tracking and wanting to understand the basics, it's a reasonable starting point. For anyone who needs to move from "we know we're invisible" to "we're doing something about it," it's not enough on its own.
Best for: Small teams or individuals who want a quick, low-friction way to start tracking AI mentions and don't yet need optimization features.
Peec AI
Peec AI sits in the mid-tier at €89/month for the Starter plan, which covers 50 prompts across 3 AI engines. It's a step up from Otterly in terms of prompt volume and tracking frequency — daily updates rather than weekly on some plans.
The platform has a cleaner analytics layer than some competitors, with decent competitor comparison views and prompt-level breakdowns. If you're running regular reporting for a client or internal stakeholder, Peec AI's dashboards are presentable.
The limitations are similar to the others in this tier: it's a monitoring platform. There's no content generation, no crawler log access, no traffic attribution. You get good data on where you stand, but the "what do we do now?" question is left unanswered.
At €89/month, Peec AI is priced closer to Promptwatch's entry tier, which makes the comparison harder to justify. You're paying mid-tier prices for monitoring-only capabilities, whereas Promptwatch at $99/month includes content generation, answer gap analysis, and broader engine coverage.
That said, Peec AI does have a solid reputation among European teams, partly because it's priced in euros and has good support. If you're a European brand doing basic monitoring and the content optimization features aren't a priority yet, it's a reasonable choice.
Best for: European marketing teams that want daily tracking and clean reporting, and aren't yet ready to invest in optimization workflows.
Promptwatch
Promptwatch takes a different approach from the other three. It's built around what it calls an "action loop": find gaps, create content, track results. That framing matters because it reflects a genuine architectural difference, not just a marketing angle.
On the monitoring side, Promptwatch covers 10 AI engines including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI, and Copilot. That's meaningfully broader than any of the other tools in this comparison.
The Answer Gap Analysis feature is where it gets interesting. It shows you which prompts your competitors are appearing for that you're not — and crucially, it shows you the specific content gaps on your site that are causing the problem. You're not just seeing that you're invisible; you're seeing why, and what to write to fix it.
The built-in AI writing agent generates articles, listicles, and comparisons grounded in citation data from over 880 million citations analyzed. This isn't generic content generation — it's content engineered around what AI models actually cite, which is a different thing entirely from what most SEO content tools produce.
Promptwatch also includes AI crawler logs (on Professional and above), which show you exactly which pages ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are crawling on your site, how often, and what errors they're encountering. None of the other three tools in this comparison have anything like this.
Traffic attribution closes the loop: you can connect AI visibility improvements to actual revenue through a code snippet, Google Search Console integration, or server log analysis.
Pricing starts at $99/month (Essential: 1 site, 50 prompts, 5 articles), $249/month (Professional: 2 sites, 150 prompts, 15 articles, crawler logs), and $579/month (Business: 5 sites, 350 prompts, 30 articles). There's also a free trial.
The honest trade-off: Promptwatch costs more than Otterly.AI at the entry level. If you genuinely only need basic monitoring and have no interest in optimization, you're paying for features you won't use. But if you want to actually move the needle on AI visibility rather than just measure it, the gap between Promptwatch and the monitoring-only tools is substantial.
Best for: Marketing teams and SEO professionals who want to track AI visibility and take action on what they find — not just observe it.
Head-to-head: feature comparison
| Feature | Otterly.AI | Rankshift | Peec AI | Promptwatch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI engines covered | 4 | 2 | 3 | 10 |
| Prompt tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor comparison | Yes | Basic | Yes | Yes |
| Answer gap analysis | No | No | No | Yes |
| Built-in content generation | No | No | No | Yes |
| AI crawler logs | No | No | No | Yes (Pro+) |
| Traffic attribution | No | No | No | Yes |
| Reddit/YouTube insights | No | No | No | Yes |
| ChatGPT Shopping tracking | No | No | No | Yes |
| Prompt volume/difficulty scores | No | No | No | Yes |
| Starting price | $29/month | Not listed | €89/month | $99/month |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The monitoring-only problem
There's a pattern worth naming directly. Otterly.AI, Rankshift, and Peec AI are all monitoring-only platforms. They're well-built for what they do, but they share the same fundamental limitation: they show you a problem without helping you solve it.
This matters more in AI visibility than in traditional SEO. With traditional SEO, the path from "I'm not ranking" to "here's what to do" is relatively well-understood. You look at the top-ranking pages, identify what they cover, and write something better. The playbook is established.
With AI visibility, the playbook is still being written. Which types of content get cited by ChatGPT? How does Perplexity decide what to include? What does Claude look for when recommending a product? These questions don't have obvious answers, and most marketing teams don't have the time or expertise to figure it out from raw monitoring data alone.
That's why the distinction between monitoring and optimization matters so much right now. A tool that shows you the gap and helps you close it is genuinely more valuable than one that just shows you the gap.
Which tool should you choose?
The honest answer depends on what you actually need:
If you're just getting started and want to understand whether your brand shows up in AI search at all, Otterly.AI at $29/month is a reasonable first step. The price is low enough that it's not a big commitment, and the data is real.
If you want slightly more depth and daily tracking, and you're based in Europe, Peec AI is worth considering. Just go in knowing you're paying for monitoring, not optimization.
If you want a quick, simple setup to track ChatGPT and Perplexity mentions specifically, Rankshift is worth a look — though the lack of public pricing and limited engine coverage are genuine drawbacks.
If you want to actually improve your AI visibility rather than just track it, Promptwatch is the only tool in this comparison that gives you the full picture: where you're invisible, why, what to create, and whether it worked. The $99/month entry point is higher than Otterly's $29, but you're getting a fundamentally different category of tool.
The market is moving fast. Brands that are monitoring-only today will need optimization capabilities soon. The question is whether you want to build that workflow now or retrofit it later.