Peec.ai vs Profound: pricing, coverage, and the gap neither one fills

For a single brand, these two cost within four dollars of each other — and at that price Profound tracks ChatGPT and nothing else, while Peec lets you pick three engines. That's the comparison, in one line, for most people who type it into a search bar.

For an agency it's a different question with a worse answer: neither company publishes a price for running twenty client brands. Both send you to a custom quote, which is the part these comparisons never mention.

Here's the rest of it — what each one actually measures, which suits what, what the cheaper options are, and the thing neither of them does.

I've put our own tool in the third column of the table below, because leaving it out would be coy rather than neutral. Profound wins rows in there that we don't, and the disclosure's at the bottom.

Peec is the simpler of the two and it's built for people who want an answer this week rather than a platform.

It works by driving real browser sessions at the AI engines rather than calling their APIs, which is a defensible choice — the argument being that you see what an actual user sees rather than an API-sampled response that may behave differently. Whether that difference is material is genuinely arguable, but it's a real engineering position rather than marketing.

The ladder runs $95 for Starter, $245 for Pro, $495 for Advanced, then a custom Enterprise tier. What moves between them is prompt volume — 50, then 150, then 350 a month — and how many separate brands you can track: one, two, then five.

The bit worth reading twice is engine coverage, because it doesn't move at all. Every self-serve tier lets you choose three models from a pool of six. Paying $495 instead of $95 buys you more prompts and more projects, not more engines. If you want a fourth engine you buy it as an add-on, and the add-on price climbs with your tier — $35 a month on Starter, $85 on Pro, $165 on Advanced. The nine or twelve engines you'll see on the marketing pages live on the custom Enterprise plan, several of them via API.

Seats are unlimited on every self-serve tier, which is unusual in this category and quietly generous — most of the market meters per person.

Profound is the deeper and more corporate of the two, and it's doing something Peec isn't doing at all.

Alongside reading AI answers, it ingests your own web server logs — so it can tell you which AI crawlers actually came to your site, which pages they took, and how often they came back. That isn't a feature difference. It's a different measurement entirely: Peec tells you what the engines say, Profound also tells you which bots turned up. If you've read how often a brand's own site refuses a machine reader, you'll see why that data has value.

It also leans hard on a large dataset of real user prompts for demand modelling. I'm not quoting a size for it — the figures in circulation disagree by more than a billion. Check their own page and note the date.

Pricing is $99 for Starter, $399 for Growth, custom above that — and Starter is the one to be careful with. It tracks ChatGPT only, on one seat. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews arrive at Growth, which is a four-fold jump in price for the second and third engine. The nine-engine coverage on the marketing pages is Enterprise, along with SOC 2 and SSO.

Worth knowing: Profound only started publishing dollar figures at all in June 2026. Any comparison written before that describes it as quote-only, which was true then and isn't now.

Mine, so weigh it accordingly. It's one of thirty-six tools on the same $79 plan, and it's built so the audit is something you bill for rather than a dashboard you log into.

A run is fifty buyer questions across all five engines — 250 live answers in about three minutes, with Google's AI Overview a full engine rather than a bolt-on panel. You approve every question, the pack locks so next month is a comparison, and share of voice is scored against up to twelve competitors your client names.

Then it opens the cited pages and reads them, in five lanes. Per page: who wrote it and when, every brand named on it, and exactly where your client sits — item 16 of 20, roughly 5% of the page is a real line from the published Gymshark run. Threads come back with their whole comment tree; videos are watched and their transcripts print in full.

Every lane closes with named actions split between what the agency does and what the client fixes, and the run writes a corrective llms.txt aimed at the questions being lost. The report is white-labelled, runs to two hundred pages, and its actions page detaches so you can hand over findings without the work order attached.

Where it doesn't compete: no server-log crawler data, so Profound has GPTBot's visits and this doesn't. No published compliance certifications. And it's a platform rather than a point tool — if all you want is a mention count on a chart, buy one of the cheaper ones further down.

One brand, least money, broadest look — Peec. Three engines beats one engine at effectively the same price, and it isn't close.

In-house, and you own the website — Profound. It measures something Peec structurally cannot, and that's worth the premium. Knowing GPTBot visited your pricing page nine times last month is a different kind of fact from knowing you were mentioned in an answer.

An agency selling the audit itself — the third column. Unlimited brand kits on every tier, all five engines on every run, and a report with your own mark on it that a client pays for as a deliverable rather than a dashboard you're paying to keep open.

That last one needs a caveat about access, because it decides more than the price does. Server logs live with the client's hosting, so Profound's best feature is a separate conversation with a separate IT department for every account — twenty clients, twenty negotiations. A GA4 connection is a link the client clicks once on a property they already own. That's the difference between a capability you can sell across a book of business and one you can sell to whoever gives you server access.

And the published pricing stops being useful the moment you have a client list. Peec's $495 Advanced covers five projects sharing one 350-prompt pool, which works until two of them want proper coverage. Twenty clients has no published answer on either side — stack twenty Peec Starters and you're at $1,900 a month, which nobody would pay and no vendor would charge. Profound doesn't tier multi-brand at all. So both are a phone call rather than a checkout, and when you compare anything in this category, the number of brands you can run without a sales call is the first spec to check, not the last.

Here's the thing that struck me hardest, and it applies to almost every tool in this category rather than these two in particular.

They both tell you where you stand. Neither of them goes and reads the pages behind the answer.

Profound does more than diagnose, to be fair to it — its no-code agents will research competitors, refresh content, write AEO FAQs and publish new articles to your CMS, and its own comparison page leads on precisely that: Peec tells you where you stand, Profound hands you tools to change it. Peec does less of it and charges more for what there is — article and brief generation sit on its higher tiers, and an independent review describes the entry product plainly as a diagnostic that can't produce or restructure content to win the citations it finds missing.

But notice where those actions point. Every one of them is work on your own website — write a page, refresh a page, publish a page. And the whole finding of the study underneath this article is that a brand's own website is barely on the engines' reading list at all. On our published Gymshark run, inside the unbranded buying-intent answers, Reddit was cited 102 times against the brand's own site at 36 — third place, behind a retailer. Generating another page for the surface you control is a fine thing to do; it just isn't where most of the deciding happens.

That matters more than it sounds, because when I ran fifty buyer questions past five engines for ten national brands and sent a reader at 2,357 of the cited pages and got into 1,884 of them, the citation count turned out to be the least interesting number in the file. A brand "mentioned" on a page can be the whole subject of it, or item sixteen of twenty at roughly 5% of the content, or — this actually happened — sitting inside a section headed "Nonstick pans we don't recommend." All three register identically as a citation. Only one of them is worth anything and one of them is costing money.

A dashboard that counts mentions will report all three as a win. To know which you've got, somebody has to open the page and read it, note where the brand sits, who wrote it, when it published, and which rivals share the page. That's the work order — and it's the difference between a monitoring subscription and something a client will pay a retainer for.

Neither vendor claims to do this, to be fair to both. It just doesn't come up in the comparison posts, because the comparison posts are written from feature grids.

If you landed here searching for alternatives rather than a verdict, the entry price in this category runs a long way below either of these.

Rankscale starts around $20 a month on a credit model that scales in small steps rather than tier jumps — the lowest published entry price I could verify. Otterly is $29 for fifteen prompts, which is a taste rather than a baseline, and watch the engine add-ons: a Claude add-on has been reported at nearly the cost of the base plan. AthenaHQ is the only one here with a genuinely free tier, which makes it the cheapest way to see what this kind of tracking even looks like before you spend anything. Scrunch starts at $250 for a single brand but covers four engines out of the gate and — unusually — publishes an actual agency tier at $500 with a partner programme, which is more than either of the two tools in the headline will tell you. And Semrush bundles AI visibility into its higher SEO plans — from about $165 a month for the tier that includes it — which is the sensible move if you already pay them and aren't going to run a dedicated tool properly.

Two of these publish an agency price. Neither Peec nor Profound does.

Be careful what you read about this category, mine included.

Every comparison-format source I found while writing this was either published by one of the vendors or sat on a site with an affiliate relationship to one of them. Both companies run their own "us vs them" pages, both are perfectly polite, and both are self-favouring by construction — Peec's comparison page quotes lower Profound prices than Profound's own pricing page does. That isn't dishonesty, it's a snapshot taken on a different day in a different currency. It's still not a number I'd put in a client deck.

Prices in this category move fast, too. Profound published no figures at all until June. So: Peec's and Profound's figures were checked on 6 September 2026, and the alternatives between 19 July and 6 September. Check the vendor's own page before you buy, and treat any comparison that doesn't tell you when it was checked as fiction.

Full disclosure — StyleForge builds an AI visibility tool of its own, so I'm hardly neutral here. I've tried to be straight about what these two do well, and everything above is from their own pricing pages rather than mine.

How much does Peec.ai cost?

Peec.ai's published tiers, checked 6 September 2026, are Starter at $95/month for one project and 50 prompts, Pro at $245 for two projects and 150 prompts, Advanced at $495 for five projects and 350 prompts, and a custom Enterprise tier. Every self-serve tier lets you track three engines chosen from a pool of six; extra models are add-ons priced from $35 to $165 a month depending on your tier. Seats are unlimited on all paid plans.

How much does Profound cost?

Profound's published tiers, checked 6 September 2026, are Starter at $99/month for one seat and 50 prompts tracking ChatGPT only, Growth at $399 for three seats and three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), and a custom Enterprise tier covering up to nine engines with SOC 2 and SSO. Profound published no prices at all before June 2026, so older comparisons describing it as quote-only are out of date.

Which is better for agencies, Peec.ai or Profound?

Neither publishes a usable agency price. Checked 6 September 2026: Peec.ai's Advanced tier at $495/month covers five projects sharing one 350-prompt pool; beyond five clients there is no published self-serve option. Profound doesn't tier multi-brand at all — "multiple companies tracked" appears only under its custom Enterprise plan. Scrunch AI is one of the few tools in this category publishing a dedicated agency tier, at $500/month.

Is there a free alternative to Profound?

AthenaHQ publishes a free Essential tier that includes a starting credit allowance — the only genuinely free plan among the tools checked for this comparison in September 2026. Neither Peec.ai nor Profound offers a free tier. Rankscale is the cheapest paid entry point at around $20/month on a credit model, and Otterly's Lite plan is $29/month for fifteen prompts.

Does Profound track more than ChatGPT?

Yes, but not on its entry plan. Checked 6 September 2026, Profound's $99 Starter tier tracks ChatGPT only. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews arrive at the $399 Growth tier, and full coverage of up to nine engines is on the custom Enterprise plan. This is the single biggest practical difference against Peec.ai, whose $95 entry tier already lets you choose three engines.

What do these tools not tell you?

Neither one opens the cited pages and reads them. They report that a brand was mentioned, not where on the page it sits, what the page says about it, who wrote it, when it published, or which competitors share it. In StyleForge's field study of 21,213 AI citations, a "mention" ranged from being the entire subject of a round-up to appearing as item sixteen of twenty — and in one case to being listed in a section headed "Nonstick pans we don't recommend." All three count identically in a citation total.

• Part Two · The Source Study — every page behind the answers, what it is, how old it is, and whether it opens.
• Your client isn't in the AI answer — the diagnostic, cheapest checks first.
• How to make money with AI visibility — what to sell once you've bought a tool, and who'll pay for it.
• GEO vs SEO: what the hell is the difference? — why the pages that decide this aren't yours.