Key takeaways
- Airefs starts at $24/mo vs Peec AI's $95/mo — a significant gap for early-stage startups watching every dollar
- Both tools are monitoring-only: they show you where you're invisible in AI search but don't help you fix it
- Peec AI has stronger analytics depth and a faster-growing feature set, backed by $29M in funding
- Airefs wins on pure price-to-coverage ratio for teams that just need basic brand tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
- Neither tool offers content generation, crawler logs, or traffic attribution — if you need those, you'll want to look at more capable platforms
AI search visibility has gone from a niche concern to something marketing teams at every stage are being asked about. If your brand isn't showing up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question in your category, you're losing ground to competitors who are. That's the basic pitch behind tools like Peec AI and Airefs.
The problem is that the market now has 40+ tools making nearly identical claims. For a startup with a tight budget, the noise is exhausting. This guide cuts through it: what do Peec AI and Airefs actually do, where do they differ, and which one makes sense for your situation?
What both tools are trying to solve
Before comparing features, it's worth being clear about the category. "AI visibility" tools track how often your brand appears in responses from AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and others. You give the tool a list of prompts relevant to your business, it runs them against AI models on a schedule, and reports back on whether your brand was mentioned, cited, or recommended.
That's the core loop. Both Peec AI and Airefs do this. Where they differ is in depth, price, and what's included beyond the basics.
Peec AI: what you get
Peec AI is one of the faster-growing players in the space. According to Surmado's 2026 AI visibility tools comparison, Peec AI raised $29M and hit $4M+ ARR in roughly ten months — which is a real signal that teams are paying for it and sticking around.
The platform covers multiple AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and others), tracks brand mentions and citations, and gives you share-of-voice metrics across competitors. The UI is generally considered clean and the onboarding is fast.
Where Peec AI earns its price is in analytics. You get more granular reporting than most entry-level tools: sentiment breakdowns, competitor share-of-voice comparisons, and historical trend data. For a marketing team that needs to report upward on AI visibility, Peec AI gives you charts and data that look credible in a slide deck.
The starting price is $95/mo. That's not enterprise pricing, but it's not pocket change for a seed-stage startup either.
Airefs: what you get
Airefs is positioned explicitly as the budget alternative. Their own blog calls out that at $24/mo, they're saving teams $66-71/mo compared to Peec AI's entry tier. That's a real number.
The feature set is leaner. You get brand tracking across the main AI engines, basic mention monitoring, and prompt-level reporting. What you don't get is the depth of analytics Peec AI offers — the competitor share-of-voice breakdowns, the sentiment analysis, the richer historical data.
For a startup that just wants to know "is ChatGPT mentioning us or not?" — Airefs does the job. It's not trying to be a full analytics platform. It's trying to be the cheapest way to get a baseline read on your AI visibility.
Side-by-side comparison
| Feature | Peec AI | Airefs |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $95/mo | $24/mo |
| AI engines covered | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini, others | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews |
| Brand mention tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor share-of-voice | Yes | Limited |
| Sentiment analysis | Yes | No |
| Historical trend data | Yes | Basic |
| Content generation | No | No |
| Crawler logs / AI traffic | No | No |
| Traffic attribution | No | No |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | Mid-market teams needing analytics depth | Startups needing basic monitoring on a budget |
The honest limitation both share
Here's the thing neither tool's marketing will tell you: they're both monitoring-only dashboards. They show you the problem. They don't help you fix it.
You can see that Perplexity isn't citing your brand for "best project management tools for remote teams." But Peec AI and Airefs won't tell you what content you're missing, what your competitors are doing differently, or how to create something that changes the result. You get the diagnosis, not the treatment.
This is a real gap. For a startup trying to actually improve its AI visibility — not just measure it — monitoring alone is a starting point, not a solution.
If you need to go beyond tracking — content gap analysis, AI-optimized content generation, crawler log monitoring, traffic attribution — you'd want to look at a platform like Promptwatch, which is built around the full loop: find gaps, create content, track results.
But if your current goal is simply "get a dashboard that tells me whether we're showing up in AI answers," both Peec AI and Airefs are legitimate options. The question is just which one fits your budget and how much reporting depth you need.
When to choose Airefs
Airefs makes sense if:
- You're pre-Series A and every $70/mo matters
- You just need a baseline — "are we visible or not?" is the question you're answering
- You don't need to present AI visibility data to a board or investors yet
- You're testing whether AI visibility monitoring is worth investing in before committing to a more capable platform
It's a reasonable first step. Don't expect deep analytics or competitor intelligence, but for basic monitoring it works.
When to choose Peec AI
Peec AI makes sense if:
- You have a marketing budget and need to report on AI visibility to stakeholders
- Competitor share-of-voice data matters to you — knowing that your competitor is cited 3x more than you in a given category is actionable
- You want a platform with momentum behind it ($29M raised, fast growth) that's likely to keep improving
- You're tracking multiple brands or need more prompt volume than Airefs supports
The $95/mo entry price is justified if you're actually using the analytics. If you're just checking whether your brand name appears occasionally, it's probably more than you need.
Other budget options worth knowing about
Peec AI and Airefs aren't the only tools in this price range. A few others worth considering:
Promptmonitor ($29/mo) sits between Airefs and Peec AI on price and offers basic monitoring with slightly more coverage than Airefs.
Otterly.AI starts at $29/mo and is frequently cited as the most accessible entry-level monitoring tool. It covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews with a clean interface.
Otterly.AI
Rankshift is another budget-friendly option with decent multi-engine coverage.
LLM Pulse tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more at a competitive price point.
None of these solve the monitoring-only problem. But if budget is the primary constraint, they give you more options to compare before committing.
The broader market context
It's worth knowing what you're buying into. According to Surmado's 2026 analysis, the AI visibility tools market raised $300M+ in funding between summer 2025 and spring 2026. Profound is the category leader at the enterprise end ($155M raised, $1B valuation). Peec AI is the fastest-growing challenger in the mid-market.
Airefs is a smaller player without the same funding story. That's not necessarily a problem — plenty of good tools are bootstrapped — but it's worth factoring in when thinking about long-term reliability and feature development pace.
Ahrefs (the SEO platform, not Airefs) also launched Brand Radar as an AI visibility module, and their CMO Tim Soulo has been vocal about why he thinks it's the better choice over Peec AI for teams already on Ahrefs. If you're already paying for Ahrefs, that's worth evaluating before adding a separate tool.
Which one should you pick?
If you're a startup with under $50/mo to spend on AI visibility monitoring, Airefs is the practical choice. It does the basics, it's cheap, and it'll tell you whether you have a visibility problem worth investing in solving.
If you have $100/mo and need to actually report on AI visibility — with competitor data, trends, and something that looks credible in a presentation — Peec AI is the better tool. The analytics depth justifies the price difference for teams that will actually use it.
If you're at the stage where you need to not just monitor but actually improve your AI visibility, neither tool is sufficient on its own. That's when it's worth looking at platforms that close the loop between measurement and action.