Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI is the cheapest entry point (from $29/month) but offers basic monitoring with limited depth
- Peec.ai suits mid-market teams that want structured reporting and solid multi-language support, starting at ~€89/month
- Profound is the most enterprise-feature-rich option at $499/month, but it's still a monitoring platform — it shows you the problem, not the fix
- Promptwatch is the only platform in this comparison that closes the loop: it finds gaps, generates content to fill them, and tracks whether it worked — making it the strongest ROI story for a CFO conversation
The CFO problem with AI visibility tools
Most marketing teams buying AI visibility software in 2026 run into the same wall: the tool shows them a dashboard full of data, and then... nothing happens. You know your brand is invisible in ChatGPT for 40 prompts your competitors dominate. Great. Now what?
That's the question your CFO will ask. Not "does this track AI mentions?" but "what does this actually change, and how do we know it's working?"
This guide compares four platforms — Peec.ai, Promptwatch, Profound, and Otterly.AI — specifically through that lens. Not just features, but whether the platform gives you something concrete to show for the spend.
What these platforms actually do
Before getting into the comparison, it's worth being clear about what "AI visibility" software means in practice. These tools monitor how your brand appears in responses from AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and others. They track whether you're being cited, how often, for which prompts, and how you compare to competitors.
The category split is simple: some platforms stop at monitoring, and some go further into optimization. That distinction matters a lot when you're trying to justify a line item.
Platform-by-platform breakdown
Otterly.AI
Otterly is the easiest platform to get started with. The UI is clean, setup is fast, and you can be tracking brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews within an hour. Pricing starts at $29/month, which makes it genuinely accessible for small teams or agencies running initial experiments.
The tradeoff is depth. Otterly doesn't offer AI crawler logs, content generation, or gap analysis. You can see that you're not being cited for certain prompts, but the platform won't tell you why or what to do about it. For a CFO conversation, the pitch is "we're monitoring our AI presence" — which is a start, but not a strategy.
Otterly.AI
Where Otterly makes sense: teams that are just beginning to understand their AI visibility, or agencies that need a lightweight tool to include in client reporting. It's not where you stay long-term if you want to actually move the needle.
Peec.ai
Peec sits a step above Otterly in terms of structure and analytical depth. It tracks prompts, citations, and competitor share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini using UI scraping for more realistic results. The reporting is polished, and multi-language support is genuinely strong — one of Peec's clearest advantages if you're operating across markets.
Pricing starts at roughly €89/month for the Starter plan, with a 7-day trial. That's a reasonable entry point for mid-market teams.
The limitation is the same one that affects most monitoring tools: Peec tells you where you stand, but the work of actually improving your position happens elsewhere. There's no built-in content generation, no crawler log analysis, and no direct path from "you're invisible for these 30 prompts" to "here's the content that will fix it."
For a CFO, the ROI story is "we have better data about our AI presence." That's defensible, but it's not the same as "we improved our AI presence."
Profound
Profound is the most enterprise-oriented platform in this group. It covers 9+ AI engines including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, with a focus on forecasting and early signal detection. The platform has hourly tracking capabilities and goes deeper on competitive intelligence than either Otterly or Peec.
At $499/month, it's priced for teams that need serious analytical horsepower. If you're a large brand managing visibility across multiple markets and need granular data to feed into a broader strategy, Profound delivers.
But here's the honest assessment: Profound is still fundamentally a monitoring and measurement platform. It's excellent at showing you what's happening. The execution — the content creation, the optimization work, the schema implementation — still falls to your internal team. For companies with dedicated SEO and content resources who can act on the data, that's fine. For everyone else, you're paying $499/month for a very detailed picture of a problem you still have to solve yourself.
Profound
The CFO pitch for Profound is "we have enterprise-grade visibility data." Strong if your team can execute on it. Weaker if the data just sits in dashboards.
Promptwatch
Promptwatch is built differently from the other three. The core difference isn't in the monitoring — it's in what happens after the monitoring.
The platform runs what it calls an Answer Gap Analysis: it identifies exactly which prompts your competitors are visible for that you're not, and surfaces the specific content your site is missing. That's step one. Step two is a built-in AI writing agent that generates articles, listicles, and comparisons grounded in real citation data from 880M+ citations analyzed. Step three is tracking whether the new content actually improved your visibility scores, with page-level tracking showing which pages are being cited, by which models, and how often.
That loop — find gaps, create content, track results — is what makes the CFO conversation different. You're not just reporting on visibility; you're reporting on visibility improvements tied to specific content actions.
Beyond the core loop, Promptwatch also covers things the other platforms in this comparison don't: real-time AI crawler logs (so you can see when ChatGPT or Claude is crawling your site and fix indexing issues), Reddit and YouTube insights that influence AI recommendations, ChatGPT Shopping tracking, and prompt volume and difficulty scoring so you can prioritize high-value, winnable prompts.
It monitors 10 AI models: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Gemini, Meta/Llama, DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral, and Copilot. Pricing runs from $99/month (Essential) to $249/month (Professional) to $579/month (Business), with agency and enterprise pricing available.
For a CFO, the pitch is "we're tracking AI visibility and actively improving it, and here's the content we published and the visibility lift we measured." That's a materially stronger story than any monitoring-only tool can offer.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Otterly.AI | Peec.ai | Profound | Promptwatch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $29/mo | ~€89/mo | $499/mo | $99/mo |
| AI engines covered | 3 | 4+ | 9+ | 10 |
| Prompt tracking | Basic | Yes | Advanced | Yes + volume/difficulty scores |
| Competitor analysis | Basic | Yes | Advanced | Yes + heatmaps |
| Content gap analysis | No | No | No | Yes |
| Built-in content generation | No | No | No | Yes (AI writing agent) |
| AI crawler logs | No | No | No | Yes |
| Reddit/YouTube insights | No | No | No | Yes |
| ChatGPT Shopping tracking | No | No | No | Yes |
| Traffic attribution | No | No | No | Yes (GSC, snippet, server logs) |
| Multi-language support | Limited | Strong | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes (7 days) | Yes | Yes |
| CFO-ready ROI story | Weak | Moderate | Moderate | Strong |
How to think about this for your CFO
The question isn't really "which platform has the most features." It's "which platform can I defend in a budget review six months from now."
For monitoring-only tools, that defense depends entirely on what your team does with the data. If you have a content team ready to act on visibility gaps, Profound's depth might justify its price. If you're just starting out and want to understand the landscape, Peec or Otterly are reasonable starting points.
But if you want to walk into a budget review and show actual movement — "we identified 45 prompts where competitors outranked us, published 12 pieces of content targeting those gaps, and our AI visibility score improved by X%" — you need a platform that supports the full cycle, not just the measurement part.
That's the structural advantage Promptwatch has in this comparison. It's not just about having more features; it's about having the right sequence of features to produce a result you can report on.
Who should use what
A few honest recommendations based on team type:
You're a solo marketer or small agency testing the waters. Start with Otterly. It's cheap, fast to set up, and gives you enough to understand whether AI visibility is something your clients or stakeholders care about. Upgrade when you need more.
You're a mid-market marketing team with multi-language needs. Peec is worth a look, particularly if you're operating across European markets. The reporting is solid and the multi-language support is genuinely better than most competitors at this price point.
You're an enterprise with a dedicated SEO team and existing content operations. Profound's depth makes sense if your team has the bandwidth to act on the data. The forecasting and early signal detection features are legitimately useful for brands managing complex, multi-market visibility.
You need to show ROI, not just data. Promptwatch is the clearest choice. The combination of gap analysis, content generation, and result tracking gives you a closed loop that the other three platforms don't offer. It's also priced more accessibly than Profound, which matters when you're making the case to a CFO who's skeptical of new tool categories.
The bottom line
AI visibility is a real problem. Gartner's prediction that search engine volume will decline 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI chatbots isn't hypothetical anymore — it's happening. Brands that don't understand how they appear in AI responses are flying blind on an increasingly important channel.
But buying a monitoring tool and calling it a strategy is only slightly better than doing nothing. The platforms that will be easy to justify in budget reviews are the ones that don't just measure the gap — they help you close it.
Of the four platforms in this comparison, only Promptwatch is built around that outcome. The others are useful, some more than others, but they stop at the diagnosis. If your CFO asks "so what did we actually do about it?" you want a platform that has an answer.