A new category of software has shown up over the past couple of years, built to track how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews mention a brand by name. Vendors call this AI visibility monitoring, or sometimes GEO, short for generative engine optimization. Before spending money on any of it, it is worth knowing what these tools actually measure, what they cost, and whether your business is even at the size where the spend makes sense.
Profound: Built for Large Brands With Budget
Profound tracks how a brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, showing mention frequency, sentiment, and which competitors and sources show up around your name. It raised a large funding round in early 2026, which tells you where its pricing sits: entry plans are reported around $99 to $399 a month, but its main pitch is aimed at enterprise accounts, with real-world deployments reportedly running into the thousands per month once seats and platform coverage scale up. Profound does not publish a plain price list, so any number here should be confirmed directly with them before you factor it into a budget.
Peec AI: Broad Coverage, Simple Seat Pricing
Peec AI monitors brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, and shows which prompts trigger a mention, how a brand ranks against named competitors, and which sources keep getting cited. One detail that stands out against much of this category: Peec does not charge extra for additional countries, languages, or users, which matters if you sell internationally and would otherwise pay per market. It still runs on a tiered plan structure from a starter level up to enterprise, so confirm current pricing directly.
Otterly.AI: The Most Transparent Pricing in the Category
Otterly is one of the few tools in this space that publishes its pricing outright rather than routing everyone through a sales call. Its entry Lite plan runs around $29 a month and covers a limited set of prompts and engines along with a chunk of country-level tracking. Standard and Premium tiers step up from there, into the low hundreds per month, adding more prompts, more engines, and deeper competitive tracking. For a smaller business curious about this category without committing to a large contract, Otterly's entry tier is the easiest one to actually try.
Scrunch AI: Enterprise Features, Uncertain Future
Scrunch built its name on brand mention tracking plus a few features aimed specifically at bigger organizations, including tools meant to catch cases where an AI model misrepresents a brand and features aimed at security-conscious enterprise buyers. Worth flagging plainly: Scrunch was acquired in mid-2026 by a larger digital experience company, and its tooling is reportedly being folded into that company's broader platform. That makes Scrunch worth watching rather than betting on right now, since its shape as a standalone product may not last.
HubSpot's Free AEO Grader: The Best Starting Point
HubSpot released a free, one-time diagnostic that scores how a brand comes across across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, covering recognition, sentiment, and share of voice against named competitors, no account or credit card required. It is not an ongoing monitoring tool, since it runs once rather than tracking change over time, but as a first look at where you currently stand, free is hard to beat. HubSpot also sells a paid ongoing version of the same idea for a reported $50 a month if the free snapshot leaves you wanting continuous tracking.
Comparing the Five
| Tool | What it does | Rough price |
|---|---|---|
| Profound | Enterprise-grade tracking across major AI engines | Reported from around $99/mo, enterprise pricing custom |
| Peec AI | Broad engine coverage with unlimited countries and users | Tiered, confirm directly |
| Otterly.AI | Transparent, self-serve visibility tracking | From around $29/mo |
| Scrunch AI | Enterprise tracking plus misrepresentation detection | Custom, future uncertain post-acquisition |
| HubSpot AEO Grader | One-time free brand snapshot | Free; paid ongoing option reported around $50/mo |
How These Tools Actually Gather Their Data
Worth understanding before any of these platforms feel worth paying for: most of them work by running a large, repeated batch of prompts against each AI engine, then parsing whether and how your brand shows up in the responses. That is why prompt volume and engine coverage tend to be exactly what separates the entry tier of a tool from its enterprise tier, since more prompts and more engines means a fuller, more statistically reliable picture rather than a handful of one-off checks. It also explains why none of these tools can promise a fixed, repeatable number: the same underlying AI engines answer the same question differently across attempts, so every platform in this category is really reporting a pattern across many samples rather than a single definitive score.
Most Small Local Businesses Do Not Need Any of These Yet
Here is the part worth saying plainly: if you run a single location without a marketing team behind it, a paid AI visibility tool is probably premature. These platforms earn their price when you are tracking dozens of prompts across multiple markets and need a dashboard rather than a spreadsheet to keep up. Most small local businesses are not there.
What actually works at small scale takes barely any time at all. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, and type in the exact phrasing a customer would use, like "best plumber in your city" or "who is a good dentist near me." Write down which businesses get mentioned by name, including yours if it shows up, then repeat the same exercise a few weeks out. That manual pass will not hand you a dashboard or a trend line, but for a single business it surfaces almost everything a paid tool would, for a fraction of the setup these platforms otherwise assume you are ready to take on.
The moment worth paying for a tool is when manual checking becomes genuinely too slow, usually once you are tracking many product categories or several markets at once. Until then, HubSpot's free grader plus a recurring manual check covers the actual need.
Not sure whether your business is at that stage yet, or want someone else running the manual checks for you on a schedule? Take a look at our AI search visibility service.