Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI and AthenaHQ all sell the same promise — measuring how often AI search engines mention your brand. What they actually charge for is not the same thing at all: tracked prompts, AI engines, countries, or raw credits. This guide lines up the four pricing models so the headline prices stop being misleading.
Lite, monthly billing ($25/mo billed annually). 15 prompts across 4 included engines.
Starter, monthly billing (about $80/mo billed annually). 50 prompts, any 3 of 6 models.
Starter ($245/mo billed annually), 3,600 credits a month across 11 models. Free tier available.
Free 7-day trial, then Enterprise by quote. No published brand price.
| Profound | Peec AI | Otterly.AI | AthenaHQ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Enterprise brands buying compliance, agents and support | Marketing teams that want prompt volume and engine choice | Small teams and agencies that want every price published | Teams that want broad model coverage plus action workflows |
| What you pay for | A tailored plan set by the vendor (quote-based) | Tracked prompts × 3 models you choose | Tracked prompts, each run on 4 included engines | Credits — 1 credit = 1 AI response |
| Free option | 7-day trial: 50 vendor-chosen prompts, daily, 3 engines; no exports or API | No free tier published — paid plans with demo / trial routes | Free trial offered (vendor FAQ); entry plan is cheap enough to test directly | Essential free: 300 credits, one-time grant, 5 models |
| Entry paid price | Not published — Enterprise is custom-quoted | Starter $95/mo monthly billing (≈$80/mo annual) | Lite $29/mo monthly billing ($25/mo annual) | Starter $295/mo monthly billing ($245/mo annual) |
| Prompts at entry | Trial: 50 prompts for 7 days only | 50 prompts (Pro 150, Advanced 350) | 15 prompts (Standard 100, Premium 400) | Unlimited prompts — capped in practice by 3,600 credits/month |
| Engines included | Trial: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews. Enterprise: up to 9 | Choose 3 of: ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Naver AI. Extra models $30–$140/mo each; up to 13 on Enterprise | 4 included: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot. Gemini / AI Mode $9–$149/mo each, Claude $29–$439/mo, by tier | Starter: 11 models incl. ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral |
| Countries / languages | Trial: 1 region, 1 language. Enterprise: tailored | Starter 1 country, Pro / Advanced 3. Languages unlimited | Unlimited countries & languages on published plans | Starter: single country & language. Multi-region is Enterprise |
| Reporting / extras | API, CSV/JSON exports, ChatGPT Shopping tracking on Enterprise | Visibility, position, sentiment, share of voice; Looker Studio on Advanced; API from Pro | Citation tracking, GEO audits (1,000–10,000/mo), API from Standard | Action Center and content optimization agent; ACE Citation Engine is Enterprise-only |
| Trade-off to know | You cannot budget it from the website — the price conversation is the product's front door | Perplexity is not among the 6 selectable models on self-serve plans, and a 4th model costs extra | Prompt steps are coarse: 15 → 100 → 400, and Claude as an add-on gets expensive fast | "Unlimited prompts" still burns credits per answer — broad tracking exhausts 3,600 credits quickly |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026. Older third-party articles still list superseded Profound tiers ($99 / $399 self-serve plans) and older Peec AI euro prices; the vendors' current pricing pages — used here — no longer show them. Plans in this category change frequently: confirm the current price, prompt definition and engine list on the vendor's site before you buy.
Headline prices can't be compared directly, because a "prompt" means something different at each vendor. So we fixed one tracking job and priced it from the published rates. This is arithmetic on public prices — not a measurement result — and it is the fastest way to see how the models behave.
Job A — 100 prompts × 3 engines × daily for a month (9,000 AI answers), one country, one language:
Job B — starting small: 50 prompts × 3 engines × daily (4,500 AI answers): Peec AI Starter fits exactly at $95/mo. Otterly.AI still needs Standard ($189/mo) because Lite stops at 15 prompts. AthenaHQ needs about 900 credits beyond the included 3,600 — roughly $395/mo on the same add-on assumption. Profound's free trial runs exactly this job — 50 prompts, 3 engines — but only for 7 days, with prompts Profound chooses.
The pattern matters more than the exact figures: the cheapest tool changes with your prompt count. Small and specific favours Peec AI, mid-size prompt sets favour Otterly.AI, very wide engine coverage points to AthenaHQ if you watch credit burn, and Profound is chosen for enterprise features rather than price transparency. One more caution that applies to every tool here: AI answers vary from run to run, so a visibility score is a trend indicator. No measurement on this page — and no tool — guarantees a ranking, a mention, or traffic.
Profound is the most enterprise-leaning platform of the four: answer-engine insights, agent workflows and a strong compliance story (SSO/SAML, SOC 2). Its current public pricing page is unusually short. Brands get a free Trial — 50 prompts chosen by Profound, run daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, in one region and one language, with no exports, API or history — and an Enterprise plan priced by quote, covering a tailored prompt plan on up to nine answer engines (adding Perplexity, AI Mode, DeepSeek, Claude, AI Overviews, Exa Search and Muse Spark). Agencies are the exception: third-party reporting puts a client workspace at $399/month for 100 prompts on three engines. If you see $99 "Starter" pricing quoted elsewhere, that reflects an older page — it is not on the current pricing page.
Peec AI is an AI-search analytics platform for marketing teams, and its model is the easiest to reason about after Otterly's: you buy prompts, and each prompt is tracked daily on three models you choose from six — ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. Its own FAQ defines the unit plainly: AI answers = prompts × models × days. Starter ($95/mo monthly billing, about $80/mo annual) covers 50 prompts, 1 project and 1 country; Pro ($245/mo, about $205 annual) covers 150 prompts and adds API access; Advanced ($495/mo, about $420 annual) covers 350 prompts and Looker Studio reporting. Extra models cost $30 / $70 / $140 a month depending on tier, and the custom Enterprise tier opens up to 13 models. Two details are easy to miss: Perplexity is not one of the six selectable self-serve models, and all plans include unlimited users.
Otterly.AI is the transparency benchmark in this category: its pricing page publishes every tier, every prompt count and every add-on price. All plans track four engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot — daily, with unlimited team members and, per the vendor, unlimited countries and languages. Lite ($29/mo, $25 annual) covers 15 prompts and 1,000 GEO URL audits a month; Standard ($189/mo, $160 annual) covers 100 prompts, unlimited workspaces and API access; Premium ($489/mo, $422 annual) covers 400 prompts. The add-on menu is where budgets move: Gemini and Google AI Mode cost $9 / $59 / $149 a month by tier, Claude costs $29 / $109 / $439, and 100 extra prompts cost $99 a month on Standard and above. A free trial is offered, so the entry tier is easy to validate with your own prompts.
AthenaHQ, a GEO platform built by a team with Google Search and DeepMind roots, takes the opposite approach to engine gating: the Starter plan ($295/mo, $245/mo billed annually) includes 11 AI models from day one — ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral — plus an Action Center that turns findings into content tasks. The catch is the meter: pricing runs on credits, where 1 credit = 1 AI response. Starter includes 3,600 credits a month (with a one-month rollover), and prompts and topics are listed as unlimited — but 100 prompts across 6 engines daily would consume roughly 18,000 credits a month, so the credit pool, not the prompt count, is your real limit. The Essential tier is free with a one-time 300-credit grant across 5 models — a test drive, not a standing monitor. Starter is single-country and single-language; multi-region tracking, the ACE Citation Engine, SSO and audit logs are Enterprise features at custom pricing.
Write down the buyer questions you actually care about, per market and language. 20 prompts and 200 prompts lead to different tools: Peec AI's 50-prompt entry fits the first case, Otterly.AI's steps fit the second, and AthenaHQ's credits must be multiplied out either way.
If Perplexity matters, note that it is included by Otterly.AI and AthenaHQ but is not a selectable self-serve model on Peec AI. If Claude matters, compare Otterly's add-on price against AthenaHQ's included coverage and Peec's Enterprise tier.
Use the formula prompts × engines × days. Convert credits (AthenaHQ), add extra models (Peec AI) and add-on engines (Otterly.AI) before comparing monthly figures — and if a vendor can't be priced from its website (Profound), get the quote before you build reporting around it.
Run your own prompts through Profound's 7-day trial, AthenaHQ's 300 free credits and Otterly.AI's trial. Check day-to-day stability of the mention rate, whether cited sources are shown at URL level, whether your country and language are supported, and what you can export. Averages over a week tell you more than any single day's score.
Per the vendors' own descriptions, these tools run a fixed set of prompts — the questions buyers ask AI assistants — against AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on a schedule, then record whether your brand is mentioned, in what position and sentiment, which competitors appear, and which sources the answers cite. It is monitoring of AI answers, not a ranking tracker in the traditional SEO sense.
Because the word covers different bundles. At Otterly.AI one prompt is tracked on four included engines. At Peec AI one prompt is tracked on three models you choose. At AthenaHQ prompts are uncapped but every single answer burns a credit. At Profound the prompt plan itself is designed with the vendor. Normalise with prompts × engines × days before comparing any two prices.
No tool can promise that, and neither do we. AI answers are generated fresh and vary between runs, so a visibility score shows a trend, not a guaranteed position. These platforms measure mentions and citations and suggest actions; whether mentions or traffic follow depends on the underlying content and sources, and is not guaranteed by measurement itself.
Partly. Profound offers a 7-day trial (50 vendor-chosen prompts, 3 engines, no exports). AthenaHQ's Essential tier is free with a one-time 300-credit grant. Otterly.AI offers a free trial and a $29/mo entry plan. Peec AI publishes no free tier — its entry is the $95/mo Starter plan. Free tiers are best used to check measurement quality with your own prompts where the tool allows it, not as standing monitors.
On published prices, Otterly.AI Lite at $29/mo is the cheapest entry, but it caps you at 15 prompts. If your real prompt set is around 50, Peec AI Starter at $95/mo is the cheapest plan that actually fits. The right comparison is always the smallest plan that covers your prompt count, engines, country and language — the worked examples above show how the answer flips with volume.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published specifications and pricing pages, not from testing we haven't done. We have not run these tools on live brand campaigns, so we don't present scores as if we had. Where a judgment appears — for example, that a credit pool can be exhausted quickly — it is arithmetic on the published numbers, shown next to it so you can check it yourself.