Competitor Comparisons

Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly vs SolCrys (2026): 4-Way AEO Platform Comparison

As of September 2026, the 4 Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platforms compared here have 4 different shapes: Profound (enterprise AI marketing platform with agents, custom-priced, $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation on Sep 15, 2026), Peec AI (fast, affordable tracking with ranked actions, from $95/mo), Otterly (lowest entry price for SEO practitioners, from $29/mo), and SolCrys (governed AEO execution: Measure → Diagnose → Execute → Verify; Free $0, Starter $99/mo, Pro $399/mo).

Published 2026-05-22 · Updated 2026-09-26

Questions this guide answers

What's the difference between Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, and SolCrys?
Which AEO platform should I use in 2026?
Is Profound better than Peec AI?
How does SolCrys compare to Otterly?
Which is the best AI visibility platform?

Direct answer

As of September 2026, Profound is the enterprise AI marketing platform (custom-priced Enterprise plan, up to 9 answer engines, Agents and an AI Marketer that draft work; $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation on Sep 15, 2026), Peec AI is the fast, affordable tracker with ranked actions (Starter $95/mo, €85 in the EU), Otterly is the lowest-cost entry for SEO practitioners (Lite $29/mo), and SolCrys is governed AEO execution (Measure → Diagnose → Execute → Verify; Free $0, Starter $99/mo, Pro $399/mo).

Profound wins on engine breadth, enterprise readiness, and agent-drafted content at scale; Peec on time-to-value and price per prompt; Otterly on price-to-entry; SolCrys on governed execution with published pricing: recommendations grounded in your Corporate Context, human approval, and re-verification on a frozen prompt set. Choose by whether you need a dashboard, an enterprise agent platform, or a governed execution loop.

Why we wrote an N-way comparison

Most AI visibility platform comparisons on the web are 1:1 pages: "Profound vs Peec," "Peec vs Otterly," "Otterly vs SolCrys." We publish several ourselves. They're useful once a buyer has narrowed to 2 candidates, but most shortlists start with 3–5 vendors. The N-way matrix is what you need at the start of an evaluation.

So this article is the matrix view: 4 AEO vendors, 12 evaluation dimensions, one table, 5 "best for" scenarios, and a decision tree, so you can map your situation to a vendor without re-reading 48 cells.

Vendor bias disclosure. We're SolCrys. We sell into the same market as Profound, Peec, and Otterly, and we have a financial interest in you picking us. To partly counter that bias, we do 2 things: (1) every fact about the other 3 vendors comes from their own pricing, product, or documentation pages, or from named press coverage, as of September 2026, never our internal assessment; (2) every "best for" scenario names a non-SolCrys winner where one of the other 3 is the better fit. If you finish this article and SolCrys is the answer to every question, the comparison failed.

A note on selection. We left out AEO modules inside broader suites: Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit (Semrush has been part of Adobe since Apr 28, 2026), Conductor, and HubSpot AEO. They're useful if you already pay for the parent product, but the buying motion is different. We also left out Scrunch, which Sitecore acquired on Jun 3, 2026. We cover more of the field in Best AEO Tools for B2B Marketing Teams and the AI Visibility Platform Buyer's Guide.

If you'd rather get your own data first, Start Free: the free audit runs 10 buyer prompts through ChatGPT and returns your mention rate, competitor share of voice, and cited sources, with email verification and no card.

The 12 evaluation dimensions

We use 12 dimensions, adapted from the 10 questions in our AI Visibility Platform Buyer's Guide plus 2 pricing questions, grouped into 4 buckets. The buyer's guide explains why each one matters; here we list them, then answer them for each vendor.

Measurement (5 questions)

A platform that can't measure cleanly will give you a wrong execution plan, so this bucket is the gating filter.

1. Engines covered. Which AI engines does the platform run prompts against? The engines work differently: ChatGPT Search draws on third-party search providers, OpenAI's crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User), and on-demand page fetches; Perplexity, Claude's web search, and Gemini grounding retrieve in real time; Google AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's Search index and ranking systems, so AEO there is an operating layer on SEO foundations. For most B2B buyers, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews / AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude cover the surfaces that matter; Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek matter in some markets.
2. Prompt workflow. Can you build prompt sets by persona, journey stage, and competitor, or is the prompt list a flat keyword import?
3. Citation URL access. Does the platform show URL-level evidence of what the engine cited, or only a brand-mention string?
4. Refresh cadence. Daily, weekly, or on demand?
5. Regional coverage. How many countries and languages, and is the data collected in-market or just labeled with a locale?

Execution (3 questions)

These separate dashboards from execution platforms.

6. Close the loop? Does the platform tie a measured gap to a specific fix and a re-test on the same prompt set?
7. Recommendations? Does it produce actionable content, source, or PR recommendations, or only charts?
8. Action shipping? Can the platform ship the fix (publish a page, file a pull request, push an edit), or does it hand off to people?

Governance (2 questions)

As AI-drafted content compounds, governance is the quiet disqualifier in enterprise procurement.

9. Approved-claims layer? Is there a structured store of brand facts, proof points, and competitive framing that grounds every action, or is each fix grounded ad hoc?
10. Audit trail? Who approved what, when, and on which page?

Pricing (2 questions)

The hidden friction in vendor evaluation.

11. Public pricing? Listed on the site, or "contact sales"?
12. Scaling model? Per seat, per prompt, per project or workspace, or custom?

The 4-vendor matrix

Each cell comes from the vendor's own pricing, product, or documentation pages, checked Sep 26, 2026 (as of September 2026). Where a vendor's public pages don't answer the question, we say "not publicly documented." We don't score on opinion, and we update this page when we re-check; the date at the top is the last full check.

Three changes since we first published this matrix in May 2026. Profound's pricing page now lists a free 7-day trial and a custom Enterprise plan; the $99 and $399 tiers are gone. Peec's self-serve plans are $95, $245, and $495 a month (€85, €205, and €425) with 3 models of your choice and extra models as add-ons, and Peec has since added ranked Actions (February 2026) and an MCP server on all paid brand plans (April 2026). Otterly now sells Claude as an add-on alongside Google AI Mode and Gemini.

#	Dimension	Profound	Peec AI	Otterly	SolCrys
1	Engines covered	Enterprise: up to 9 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Exa Search); trial: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews	3 models of your choice on Starter, Pro, and Advanced; extra models are $35–$165/mo add-ons; Enterprise up to 13 models	ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot included; Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude are paid add-ons	Starter: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews; Pro: any 4 of the 5 (adds Perplexity and Claude); Custom: all 5
2	Prompt workflow	Tailored prompt tracking plan on Enterprise; Prompt Volumes for prompt-demand data	Projects with personas, tags, prompt suggestions, relative prompt volume (1–5), and intent classification	Prompt lists per workspace; AI Prompt Research Tool	Persona- and competitor-based prompt sets you control, per workspace
3	Citation URL access	Yes (Answer Engine Insights)	Yes: domain and URL level, with source classification and gap analysis	Yes: citation tracking	Yes: prompt-level evidence and cited URLs
4	Refresh cadence	Daily on Enterprise; daily for 7 days on the trial	Daily on self-serve plans; daily or weekly on Enterprise	Daily	Daily on paid plans; on demand on Free
5	Regional coverage	Tailored on Enterprise; 1 region and 1 language on the trial	Multi-country on higher tiers; Peec cites 80+ countries	Multi-country support (50+ countries)	Market location set per workspace
6	Close the loop?	Largely, on Enterprise: AI Marketer and Agents turn tracking data into drafted work, and tracking continues on the same prompts	Partial: ranked Actions from citation gaps, plus visibility impact and lift reports; Peec says it doesn't write or publish content	Partial: page audits with fix briefs alongside ongoing prompt tracking	Yes: Measure → Diagnose → Execute → Verify, with reruns of the same frozen prompt set and content re-audits
7	Recommendations?	Yes: Opportunities surfaced by AI Marketer	Yes: Peec Actions, ranked across owned pages, editorial coverage, reference sites, and communities	Yes: on-page GEO recommendations and fix briefs from page audits	Yes: Deep Analyses and Content Audits produce recommended actions grounded in your Corporate Context
8	Action shipping?	Agents draft content and run recurring workflows; per Profound's docs, they can push drafts or published items into about 10 CMSs after an approval step	No: Peec says it doesn't write or publish content	No	Human-approved Action Hub tasks; your team or agency ships the change, and an opt-in MCP permission can mark an approved task as published; no CMS publishing
9	Approved-claims layer?	Context Manager stores brand knowledge for AI Marketer	Brand facts you set; tracked answers are fact-checked against them	Not publicly documented	Corporate Context (organization-level) grounds recommendations; Answer Accuracy grades AI answers against it
10	Audit trail?	SSO/SAML and SOC 2 on Enterprise; approval workflow not publicly documented	Role-based permissions (full and read-only access)	Not publicly documented	Action Hub records who approved each task and when
11	Public pricing?	Free 7-day trial; Enterprise custom	Yes: $95 / $245 / $495 (€85 / €205 / €425); Enterprise custom	Yes: $29 / $189 / $489; Enterprise custom	Yes: Free $0, Starter $99, Pro $399; Custom from $2,000/mo
12	Scaling model	Custom Enterprise; an Agency Growth plan with credits per client workspace; full client workspaces listed as a $399/month add-on	Tiered by prompts and projects; agency plans priced in credits	Tiered by prompt count; unlimited workspaces from Standard	Tiered by prompts, engines, Deep Analyses, and Content Audits; Agency plans by client organization ($1,499 for 10, $4,999 for 25)

5 "best for" scenarios

The matrix is the data. This section is the recommendation: given your situation, which of the 4 fits best.

Best for enterprise AI marketing at scale: Profound

If you need the widest engine coverage in one contract, enterprise security (SSO/SAML, SOC 2), and agents that draft work across a large team, Profound is the strongest fit of the 4. Its Enterprise plan tracks up to 9 answer engines, Prompt Volumes adds prompt-demand data, and its AI Marketer and Agents turn tracking data into drafted content and recurring workflows. TechCrunch reported its $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation on Sep 15, 2026, with more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including Comcast, Estée Lauder, and Walmart. For procurement, that's a real vendor-viability signal.

Where it stops being the right answer: ongoing use is custom-priced Enterprise only, which is hard to justify for a small team. If you want to see it first, the free 7-day trial (50 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews) includes Agents with limited credits.

Best for fast mid-market tracking: Peec AI

Peec suits a marketing or SEO team that wants clean AI visibility data this week without an enterprise procurement cycle. Starter is $95/mo (€85 in the EU) for 50 prompts on 3 models of your choice, with unlimited users and daily tracking; Pro and Advanced add prompts and projects, and Advanced adds multi-country tracking and a Looker Studio connector. Peec Actions ranks what to do next across owned pages, editorial coverage, reference sites, and communities; its MCP server is on all paid brand plans; and it fact-checks tracked answers against brand facts you set. For European brands, EUR billing and Peec's stated in-country data collection (it cites 80+ countries) are practical advantages.

Where it stops being the right answer: Peec says, by design, it doesn't write or publish content, so the step from a ranked action to a shipped change is yours. And the 3-model rule matters: if you need ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity together, budget for an add-on model.

Best for SEO-led teams on a tight budget: Otterly

Otterly fits when one person on the SEO team owns AEO as an extension of keyword and content work, and the budget is tight. Lite is $29/mo for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot, with daily tracking and unlimited team members; Standard ($189/mo) adds 100 prompts, unlimited workspaces, and API and MCP access. Its page audits score crawlability and AI-readiness before you publish and come with a brief to fix what's broken, which is more than a pure dashboard offers.

Where it stops being the right answer: Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude are add-ons, so a Google-heavy engine set costs more than the headline price. Otterly doesn't publicly document a structured brand-facts layer or an approval workflow, so if you need governed claims across many brands, it's the wrong shape.

Best for governed execution with published pricing: SolCrys

This is where our bias shows, so here is the specific criterion. If you already know what's broken and the question is "can the platform turn a gap into a specific, approved change, then check whether the answer moved?", SolCrys is built around that loop: Measure → Diagnose → Execute → Verify. Deep Analyses and Content Audits produce recommended actions grounded in your Corporate Context (organization-level brand facts, proof points, and positioning). Your team approves them as Action Hub tasks and ships them. SolCrys then reruns the same frozen prompt set on the same engines and re-audits the page. Answer Accuracy grades AI answers against the same Corporate Context. Pricing is published: Free $0, Starter $99/mo, Pro $399/mo.

Where it stops being the right answer: if you don't have someone (in-house, agency, or freelance) to ship approved changes, an execution platform is overkill; a dashboard plus a writer is cheaper. If you need Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok, or Meta AI, Profound and Peec cover more engines. And before-and-after results are observations, not proof of cause.

Best for agency multi-tenant deployment: Peec AI (with SolCrys as the close second)

For agencies whose deliverable is visibility reporting across many clients, Peec is the most ready-made fit: dedicated agency plans priced in credits, unlimited users, per-client projects, pitch workspaces, and a Looker Studio connector on higher tiers. Otterly's Standard and Premium tiers also include unlimited workspaces and work well for a small client roster.

SolCrys is the better fit when the agency sells execution, not just reporting. Agency ($1,499/mo, 10 client organizations) and Agency Pro ($4,999/mo, 25) keep each client in a separate organization with its own prompts, Deep Analyses, and Content Audits, and MCP access lets the agency's own tools pull results. White-label reporting is delivered as a service. Profound sells an Agency Growth plan with credits per client workspace and lists full client workspaces as a $399/month add-on.

Decision tree

If matrix reading isn't your thing, walk these 5 questions in order. They compress the 12 dimensions into a 30-second decision. For a side-by-side test of 2 or more vendors on the same prompt set, see the AEO Platform Pilot Playbook.

1. Is your annual AEO budget under $10K? Yes: Otterly Lite ($29/mo) for a solo marketer, Peec Starter ($95/mo) for a small team, or SolCrys Free ($0, ChatGPT only) or Starter ($99/mo; ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) if you want the execution loop at an entry price. Stop here. No: go to question 2.
2. Do you need to ship fixes, or only measure? Only measure: go to question 3. Ship governed, human-approved fixes and re-verify them: SolCrys (stop here). Agent-drafted content at enterprise scale: Profound (stop here).
3. Do you need 6 or more engines, including Copilot, DeepSeek, or Grok? Yes: Profound (up to 9 engines on Enterprise) or Peec (up to 13 models on Enterprise, or add-on models on self-serve plans). No: go to question 4.
4. Are you an agency with 10 or more client workspaces? Yes: Peec AI for reporting-led retainers, SolCrys for execution-led retainers. No: go to question 5.
5. Does the SEO team own AEO as a tactical extension? Yes: Otterly. No: Peec AI for a dashboard-first team, SolCrys for a governed execution workflow.

Next step

If you want to compare these 4 vendors against your own brand's AI answers rather than in the abstract, Start Free. The free audit runs 10 buyer prompts through ChatGPT and returns your mention rate, competitor share of voice, and cited sources. Use it to evaluate SolCrys, or to sanity-check what Profound, Peec, or Otterly show you in a trial.

For a guided walkthrough of how SolCrys handles a real gap on your prompt set, talk to sales. If you're at the start of an evaluation, the AI Visibility Platform Buyer's Guide is the 10-question framework this matrix builds on.

Related 1:1 comparisons:

SolCrys vs Profound: enterprise AI marketing platform vs governed execution with published pricing.
SolCrys vs Peec AI: fast tracking with ranked actions vs a closed, human-approved execution loop.
SolCrys vs Otterly: budget SEO-practitioner tracking vs the full Measure → Diagnose → Execute → Verify loop.

Sources

FAQ

Which one does SolCrys see as its strongest competitor?

Profound. It leads on enterprise adoption and engine breadth, and TechCrunch reported its $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation on Sep 15, 2026. Peec is the strongest mid-market competitor, with self-serve pricing from $95/mo and a $21M Series A in November 2025. Otterly serves a different buyer, SEO practitioners on a tight budget, so it overlaps with us less.

Are these the only AEO platforms?

No. Dozens of vendors operate in this space in 2026, including Scrunch (acquired by Sitecore on Jun 3, 2026), Brandlight, Evertune, AthenaHQ, and Bluefish, and Gartner published its first Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools on Mar 9, 2026. We picked these 4 because they span the main shapes: enterprise agent platform, mid-market tracker, budget tracker, and governed execution loop. We cover more of the field in Best AEO Tools for B2B Marketing Teams 2026.

What about Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush, Conductor, HubSpot, and Brandlight?

We left them out deliberately. Ahrefs Brand Radar (AI Visibility Index from $199/mo), Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit ($99/mo; Semrush is part of Adobe since Apr 28, 2026), Conductor, and HubSpot AEO ($50/mo) are AEO modules inside broader SEO, content, or CRM suites, so the buying motion is "expand an existing contract" rather than "evaluate a new AEO platform." Brandlight is a dedicated AEO vendor but publishes no pricing, which puts its evaluation path closer to Profound's.

What happened to Profound's $99 and $399 plans?

As of September 2026, they're no longer on Profound's pricing page. It lists a free 7-day trial (50 prompts run daily on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, with limited AI Marketer credits) and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. We don't publish an estimated Enterprise price because we can't verify one; ask for a quote scoped to your prompts and engines.

Can I use two of these platforms at once?

Yes. A broad tracker for category benchmarking plus an execution platform for the loop is a reasonable pairing. But the data overlaps, since these vendors query many of the same engines, and the cost roughly doubles. For most teams, one platform plus a content or agency function is the better cost-to-value trade.

How long until we see results from any of these platforms?

There's no reliable benchmark. Tracking shows your baseline in week one. Changes to your content and third-party sources take time to be crawled, retrieved, and cited, and answers vary from run to run, so judge movement on repeated runs of a frozen prompt set over weeks, not on single checks. Treat any vendor's before-and-after as an observation, not proof of cause. We walk through the planning in AEO ROI: Building a CFO-Ready Business Case.

Do any of these platforms guarantee AI citation lift?

No, and you should walk out of any vendor call that claims one. None of the 4 controls the engines: ChatGPT Search draws on third-party search providers, OpenAI's crawlers, and on-demand page fetches; Perplexity, Claude's web search, and Gemini grounding retrieve in real time; and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's Search index and ranking systems. A vendor can help you change the inputs (your content, your presence in third-party sources, your structured claims), not the model's output. The same goes for llms.txt, AI-only schema, and other tactical shortcuts; we unpack that in Why llms.txt Is Not a Strategy.

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