Key takeaways
- Profound raised a $180M Series D in September 2026 at a $1.8B valuation, but its own pricing page now shows only a 7-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier. The $99/mo and $399/mo numbers floating around older roundups no longer appear on tryprofound.com/pricing.
- Peec AI's live pricing (peec.ai/pricing) is Starter at 85 euro/mo, Pro at 205 euro/mo, Advanced at 425 euro/mo. Third-party blogs quote everything from 75 to 103 euro for the same tier, which tells you more about how fast this market moves than about Peec.
- Otterly.AI publishes its pricing outright: Lite at $29/mo, Standard at $189/mo, Premium at $489/mo, with four AI engines included and three more as paid add-ons.
- Scrunch AI was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 and now runs a public Core plan at $250/mo plus a custom Enterprise tier, a real shift from the "custom pricing only" story that older articles still repeat.
- None of these four tools agree on how they collect their data, and that single fact, more than funding or logos, is what should decide which one you trust with a budget.
Why "which one is official enough to trust" is the right question
I spent a few hours doing the thing nobody wants to do: opening every vendor's actual pricing page instead of trusting a listicle. The gap between what blogs say and what the vendors currently publish is bigger than I expected. One widely cited "2026 comparison" still lists Peec AI at 89 euro a month. The live page says 85. Another says Scrunch is "custom pricing only." It has had a public $250/mo tier for months. A third keeps repeating Profound's old $99 Starter tier, which has quietly disappeared from Profound's own site.
This matters more in AEO than in most software categories, because the entire pitch of these tools is "we tell you the truth about what AI says." If a tool's own pricing page can't stay consistent with what third parties report about it, that's worth noticing before you trust its citation data.
So instead of ranking these four tools by feature count, I'm going to walk through what's actually documented, by each vendor, right now, and let you decide which one's claims hold up.
The four tools, at a glance
| Tool | Funding / ownership | Live pricing (per vendor's own page) | Data collection method (as documented) | Action layer beyond reporting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | $335M+ raised total, $1.8B valuation (Sept 2026 Series D) | Free 7-day trial; Enterprise custom only | Consumer panels (1.9B+ real prompts) + platform data | Aim agents: builds briefs, publishes to CMS |
| Peec AI | $29M raised, reportedly $10M ARR 16 months after launch | Starter 85 euro/mo, Pro 205 euro/mo, Advanced 425 euro/mo, Enterprise custom | UI scraping of chat interfaces, documented openly; API for extra engines | Scored recommendations only, no publishing |
| Otterly.AI | Undisclosed funding, Gartner Cool Vendor 2025 | Lite $29/mo, Standard $189/mo, Premium $489/mo, Enterprise custom | Not publicly documented | Agent Analytics (crawler logs), no content generation |
| Scrunch AI | $26M Series A, acquired by Sitecore June 2026 | Core $250/mo, Enterprise custom | Not publicly documented (pre-acquisition: browser automation + APIs) | Agent Experience Platform (AXP), a parallel site layer for bots |
Profound: the biggest valuation, the thinnest public pricing
Profound's growth story is real. The company went from a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026 to a $180M Series D at $1.8B just seven months later, led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. That's an unusually fast re-rate for an AEO vendor, and it's backed by SOC 2 Type 2 certification and a reported customer list that includes Target, Walmart, Ramp, and MongoDB.
Here's the catch. Profound's own pricing page, tryprofound.com/pricing, currently shows exactly two tiers: a free 7-day trial limited to 50 prompts a day across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and a custom Enterprise plan with up to nine answer engines, SSO, and API access. The $99/mo Starter and $399/mo Growth tiers that still appear in several 2026 roundups aren't on the vendor's own site. That doesn't mean they're fake, pricing pages get updated without everyone else's blog post catching up, but it means you shouldn't plan a budget around a number you read secondhand. Book the demo and get the current figure in writing.
What genuinely differentiates Profound is its Prompt Volumes data, sourced from consumer panels across 35 countries rather than extrapolated from keyword search volume. That's a real methodological difference from tools that infer demand. Profound also claims ChatGPT's answers overlap with Google's top results only about 12% of the time, a stat worth remembering the next time someone tells you ranking well on Google is enough.
On the action side, Profound's Aim agents run sub-agents from human-approved plans and can publish directly into a connected CMS, with a human-review checkpoint before anything goes live. That puts Profound in the same "monitoring plus execution" bracket as Scrunch's AXP, rather than the pure-dashboard bracket where Peec and Otterly sit.
Peec AI: the fastest-growing, and the hardest to pin down on price
Peec AI is the one tool in this comparison where I'd flag the pricing confusion as a genuine red flag for anyone trying to budget. I found five different figures across five different "2026 reviews": 89 euro, 95 euro, 75 euro, 103 euro, $95. The only number I'd actually trust is the one sitting on peec.ai/pricing right now: Starter at 85 euro/mo (50 prompts, 3 models, 1 project), Pro at 205 euro/mo, Advanced at 425 euro/mo with multi-country tracking and a Looker Studio integration, and a custom Enterprise tier covering up to 13 models.
What's not in dispute is Peec's growth. Founded in Berlin in early 2025, the company raised a $21M Series A led by Singular after a seed round backed by 20VC and Antler, bringing total funding to $29M, and reportedly hit $10M ARR within sixteen months of launch with customers including Chanel, Wix, and ElevenLabs.
Peec documents its data collection method more openly than most of this list: UI scraping of the chat interfaces for its core engines, with API access layered on for extra models like Claude and DeepSeek on Enterprise. That transparency is worth something. Compare it to Otterly or Scrunch, neither of which publishes how it actually pulls its numbers.
Peec is explicit about staying in its lane. It's analytics-only, by its own description, no content generation, no site auditing, no revenue attribution. Its AI Shopping Analytics (launched June 2026) tracks SKU-level win rate, position, and buy-box ownership, which is the strongest product-level reporting in this particular four-way comparison, but it still doesn't write anything back to a live catalog or CMS.
Otterly.AI: the one with nothing to hide on price, but nothing documented on method
Otterly is refreshingly simple to check. Its pricing page lists Lite at $29/mo, Standard at $189/mo, Premium at $489/mo, and a custom Enterprise tier, with annual billing knocking about 15% off each. Four engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot) are included on every paid tier; Claude, AI Mode, and Gemini are paid add-ons across the board, which is worth knowing before you sign up expecting full coverage at the entry price.
Otterly earned a real third-party validation point: it was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the October 2025 "Cool Vendors for AI in Marketing" report, one of just five vendors featured. That's an independent analyst house putting its name on the tool, which counts for more than a vendor's own case study page.
The gap is methodology disclosure. Otterly doesn't publicly document how it actually collects its citation data, unlike Peec's open UI-scraping admission. The company is also inconsistent about its own customer count, I've seen "15,000+ marketing professionals" on one page and "40,000+" on another, which is the kind of detail that makes you want a methodology page, not a marketing page.
What Otterly does well beyond basic monitoring: Agent Analytics tracks AI crawlers hitting your site via log upload, webhook, or a Cloudflare/WordPress integration, an MCP server, and a Looker Studio connector on higher tiers. No content generation, though, so you're still doing the fixing yourself.
Scrunch AI: real acquisition, real new pricing, but still no documented method
The single biggest fact missing from most "Scrunch AI 2026" content online is that Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore on June 3, 2026. Sitecore's own press release frames it as combining Scrunch's AI visibility data and its Agent Experience Platform with Sitecore's existing digital experience platform. Scrunch now describes itself as operating "as a standalone product, now as a Sitecore company."
That acquisition also coincided with a pricing change worth flagging: Scrunch now has a public Core tier at $250/mo (125 prompts, 5,000 responses/mo, 4 engines) alongside a custom Enterprise tier with nine engines including Claude, Gemini, and Grok. Older articles describing Scrunch as "custom pricing only" are simply out of date.
Scrunch's differentiator is architectural rather than analytical. Its Agent Experience Platform (AXP) serves a parallel, AI-optimized version of your site directly to bots, a feature competitors frequently point to as one of only two in the whole category, alongside Adobe's LLM Optimizer. Scrunch cites a customer case study claiming Akamai saw a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts after deploying it. That's a vendor-published number from a single case study, worth noting with appropriate skepticism rather than repeating as an industry benchmark.
The honest downside: Scrunch doesn't publicly document its data collection method either, and building a parallel AI-facing site is a real engineering commitment, not something you turn on and cancel quietly if it doesn't work.
So which one is actually "official enough to trust"
None of these four tools are frauds. They're all funded, all have real customers, and all measure something true about how AI answers describe your brand. But "trust" in this category breaks down into two separate questions, and conflating them is how buyers end up disappointed.
The first question is whether the vendor is financially and operationally real. On that axis, all four pass: Profound's Series D, Peec's Series A and reported ARR, Otterly's Gartner recognition, and Scrunch's Sitecore acquisition are all independently verifiable events, not marketing copy.
The second question is whether you can trust the number the dashboard shows you on any given Tuesday. That's where the gap opens up. Peec documents its UI-scraping method openly. The other three don't publish how they collect data at all, which means you're trusting a vendor's internal process you can't inspect. Given how fast citation patterns actually move, this matters more than most buyers realize. Promptwatch's own data on ChatGPT's citation share by domain rank found that domains in the DR 91-100 bucket fell from roughly 7% to 3% of citations in a single week in August 2026, the same week Reddit's ChatGPT citation share collapsed. A tool that runs one query per prompt per day and doesn't tell you its sampling method could easily mistake that kind of week-over-week swing for a trend, or miss it entirely.
If you want to sanity-check any of these tools before committing budget, there's a simple test: pick ten prompts relevant to your brand, run them manually in the actual ChatGPT and Perplexity interfaces, and compare against what the tool reports for the same window. If the numbers are wildly off, that's your answer about whether a vendor's "proprietary methodology" is actually proprietary insight or just an API call dressed up as one.
A practical shortlist by situation
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fortune 500, dedicated AEO team, six-figure budget | Profound Enterprise | Deepest prompt-volume data, SOC 2 Type 2, agent-based publishing |
| Agency managing multiple client brands | Peec AI | Unlimited seats on brand tiers, documented UI-scraping method, agency bundles |
| Solo marketer or small team, first real look | Otterly.AI Lite | Published $29 entry price, four engines included, no sales call required |
| Enterprise already running Sitecore, or chasing agent-facing site architecture | Scrunch AI | AXP is a genuinely rare feature; now backed by Sitecore's infrastructure |
| Not sure you even have a visibility problem yet | A free one-off check | HubSpot's AI Search Grader or a manual ten-prompt test across ChatGPT and Perplexity |
If you're weighing a GEO platform that goes further than monitoring, where the tool also plans, writes, and publishes content to close the gaps it finds, that's a different bracket entirely from the four above. Promptwatch is built around that full loop: crawler logs showing exactly when AI bots read your pages, citation analytics across Reddit and YouTube as well as the mainstream engines, and Content Agents that draft and publish GEO-optimized pages to your CMS on a schedule you set. It's used by 1,840+ brands including Duolingo and Yelp, and it's rated 4.7/5 on G2.
For a wider shortlist beyond these four, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com is a reasonable next stop, and the AI rank tracking category at ai-rank-tools.com covers the budget end of the market this article didn't have room for.
The honest bottom line
Price volatility across third-party roundups isn't a conspiracy, it's a symptom of a category that's still re-pricing itself every quarter. Profound dropped its self-serve tiers while tripling its valuation. Peec's Series A money is still finding its pricing floor. Scrunch's acquisition reset its entire go-to-market. Otterly is the only one of the four holding a stable, published price through all of it, which is itself a kind of trust signal, even if its methodology page is thinner than Peec's.
Don't pick based on which blog ranked which tool #1. Open the vendor's own pricing page, run a manual spot-check against the dashboard before you sign a contract, and budget for the fact that whatever number you see today will probably be different in six months.
If you'd rather not do this evaluation alone, 1001 SEO Media works with brands on exactly this kind of AI search visibility and GEO strategy, pairing the audit work with the content production needed to act on what the data shows.