Profound if you want monitoring plus agents that act on what the tracking finds, analytics on AI-referred traffic to your own site, and you are buying an enterprise contract: it no longer sells a self-serve plan to brands. AirOps if visibility is the front end of a content production line; it publishes no plan prices, so budget for a conversation. Peec if you want citation and share-of-voice tracking at a published, self-serve price, now with recommended actions on top.
Engine coverage is tier-gated on all three, and the gap between the logo row and the plan you would actually buy is the single most expensive detail on this page. On Peec’s self-serve plans you pick three engines, and Perplexity is a paid add-on.
How this was checked. Prices, plan names, prompt counts and engine lists come from each vendor’s own pricing page, read on October 2, 2026 and linked in each section. This is a documentation-based comparison, not a controlled test: I have not run the same prompt set through all three and measured the results against each other, so nothing here ranks them on accuracy.
Disclosure. I take no affiliate commission and no payment from any of these companies. I sell an AI visibility audit, which competes for the same budget, so the comparison sticks to what their own pages state, and the recommendation at the end includes the case for buying none of them.
Peec, Profound and AirOps get named together constantly, which suggests they are alternatives to each other. They are not. Peec is citation and share-of-voice tracking at a published, self-serve price. Profound is monitoring plus agents that act on what the monitoring finds, plus analytics on AI-referred traffic to your own site, sold to brands as an enterprise contract. AirOps treats visibility as the front end of a content production line. The expensive mistake is buying the one whose shape does not match the job you actually have. Here’s what each one’s own pricing and product pages say it does.
01: Quick comparison: Profound vs AirOps vs Peec
02: Peec: what it is and what it measures
What it tracks: Peec is an AI search analytics platform built for marketing teams and SEO agencies. It tracks how often your brand is cited and mentioned when AI systems answer buyer questions, with visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice tracked daily against named competitors. On the self-serve plans you choose three engines from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. Perplexity is not in that pick list: it is sold as an add-on model, or included on Enterprise.
What changed: this section used to say Peec shows the problem but not the fix. Its pricing page now lists gap analysis (sources that name competitors but not you), recommended actions ranked by opportunity, and agent actions generated from your data. Whether those recommendations are any good for your situation is not something a pricing page can tell you, but the claim that it offers none is no longer true.
Pricing: $95 a month Starter (50 prompts, 3 models, 1 project), $245 Pro (150 prompts, 3 models, 2 projects), $495 Advanced (350 prompts, 3 models, 5 projects, multiple countries). Those are monthly-billing prices; Peec’s FAQ gives 15% off for annual billing. Enterprise is custom and reaches up to 13 models. Agencies have a separate pricing page. Peec pricing, read 2026-10-02.
Best for: Marketing teams and SEO agencies that want systematic AI share-of-voice tracking and competitor benchmarking without enterprise overhead. Good starting point for teams new to dedicated AI visibility monitoring.
Verdict: Of the three, Peec is the only one where a brand can sign up today at a published price and start tracking. That alone makes it the default starting point for most small and mid-sized teams. The three-engine limit on self-serve plans is the constraint to price carefully, especially if Perplexity matters to your buyers.
03: Profound: what it is and what it measures
What it tracks: Profound runs a prompt set on a daily schedule and reports mentions, citations, sentiment and competitive presence. Its distinctive pieces are Agents (which draft and optimise content from what the tracking finds), Prompt Volumes, and Agent Analytics, which tracks AI-referred traffic arriving at your own domain rather than what the engines say.
The big change: until recently Profound sold two self-serve brand plans, a $99 Starter tracking ChatGPT and a $399 Growth plan tracking three engines, and this page was built around them. Both are gone. For brands, Profound’s pricing page now offers a free trial (50 prompts run daily for 7 days, on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with prompts you cannot customise) and then Enterprise at a custom price. Enterprise covers up to nine engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search.
For agencies: the agency tab is where Profound still publishes a price. Agency Growth is $99 a month with 10 pitch workspaces a month for auditing prospects; each full client workspace is $399 a month on top, and five extra trial workspaces are $199 a month. Agency Enterprise is custom.
An earlier correction still stands: this article once said Profound covers “10+ engines”. Its own page says up to nine, on Enterprise only. Funding and customer-logo claims that used to sit here were removed too: they were not sourced, and they were never a reason to buy a tool.
Data quality: I have no way to rank these three on accuracy, and neither does anyone without running the same prompt set through all three and comparing against a ground truth that does not exist. The earlier version of this page called Profound “the strongest” on accuracy; that was an impression, not a measurement, so it is gone. What is checkable is on the pricing pages: engines, prompt counts, refresh frequency.
Pricing: brands: free 7-day trial, then Enterprise at a custom price. Agencies: $99 a month plus $399 a month per client workspace, as above. Profound pricing, both tabs, read 2026-10-02.
Best for: companies ready for an enterprise contract that want tracking, agents that act on it, and analytics on AI-referred traffic in one place; and agencies that want to run prospect audits under a known monthly price.
Verdict: for a brand, Profound is now a sales conversation rather than a signup, so it only belongs on your shortlist if you are buying at enterprise scale. For an agency, the published Agency Growth price makes it the easiest of the three to cost out per client.
04: AirOps: what it is and what it measures
What it tracks: AirOps calls itself a “growth platform for AI search and AEO.” It combines two functions that most tools treat separately: visibility tracking (called Insights) and content operations (AI-powered content creation and publishing workflows). The Insights feature tracks how your brand appears across answer engines, with competitor, sentiment and prompt-volume data alongside.
What it doesn’t track: The catch is the tier split, not a price cliff: AirOps publishes no plan prices at all, and its FAQ says pricing is set by task volume and requirements. Solo covers ChatGPT only, for a single user. Pro covers seven or more answer engines (OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, Google AI Studio, Claude, Copilot and Grok) with unlimited seats. If you need anything beyond ChatGPT, Solo will not do it, and since Pro carries no published price, you cannot size that step without talking to sales.
Pricing: Not published. You can start for free, and AirOps’ own FAQ states pricing is based on task volume and requirements. Solo includes 35,000 tasks, with overage at $0.025 per task; Pro includes 100,000. Prompt counts for Solo and Pro used to be stated and no longer are, so they have been taken out of this page rather than carried over. The $200 and $2,000 figures this article once quoted appear nowhere on AirOps’ site and were removed earlier. AirOps pricing, read 2026-10-02.
Best for: Content teams that want to track AI search visibility anduse that data to drive content production in one platform. AirOps makes the most sense when you’re already running a structured content operation and want to align it with AI search performance, not just see a dashboard.
Verdict: AirOps is the right choice if you need both tracking and content operations in one workflow. If you only need tracking, Solo is too narrow at ChatGPT alone, and Pro is hard to justify unless you are also using the content workflow: you would be paying for a production system to get a dashboard. Of the three, only Peec publishes what brand tracking costs; AirOps and Profound both ask you to talk to sales.
05: How these compare to broader AI visibility suites
BrightEdge
BrightEdge positions itself on data accuracy: it is one of the few enterprise SEO platforms with dedicated generative search tracking built into a mature analytics suite, including Google AI Overviews. This page used to add that “the claim holds”. Nothing here measured it, so that judgement is gone and the positioning is reported as BrightEdge’s, not as a finding. The honest limitation is access: BrightEdge publishes no pricing at all, so any figure you see quoted for it (including the “$2,000+/month” this page used to state) comes from someone other than BrightEdge. It is an enterprise contract, which for most teams comparing the three tools above puts it in a different category entirely.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
This section used to say Semrush was strong for Google AI Overviews but “weak for Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Gemini.” That is no longer true and the correction matters, because it was being used to push readers toward the paid tools above. Semrush’s AI Visibility toolkit starts at $99/month and covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, with share-of-voice and sentiment tracking, competitor comparison against up to four rivals, and a prompt research database. The free plan surfaces AI mentions, citations and a visibility score. Semrush’s own documentation, read 2026-10-02. The real decision point is packaging: Google and AI Overviews tracking is available on any plan including the free one, while the other engines need Semrush One or the AI Visibility toolkit.
Gaio.tech
This entry has been removed. It carried specific figures (120+ query variations per brand term, 300+ scraped industry sources, named API integrations) that I could not trace to any source. Repeating a vendor’s own numbers as if they were findings is exactly what the rest of this page is trying not to do.
06: Head to head
Profound vs AirOps: which is better?
For tracking alone, the honest answer is now about how you buy rather than what you get. Peec sells three engines of your choosing from $95 a month, self-serve. Profound sells brand tracking only as an Enterprise contract after a 7-day trial, and AirOps prices Pro, the tier with more than ChatGPT, on request. At the top end, Peec’s Enterprise reaches up to 13 models, Profound’s nine and AirOps’ Pro seven or more.
Profound earns its price somewhere else: Agents that draft and optimise content from what the tracking finds, and Agent Analytics, which measures AI-referred traffic arriving at your own domain. That second one is worth more than an extra engine to most businesses, because it is the only number in this whole category that connects to revenue.
Profound vs AirOps: monitoring platform or content operation?
Both go beyond reporting, in opposite directions. Profound starts from monitoring and adds agents that produce content. AirOps starts from a content production system and adds visibility insights to point it. If you already have a content team and want to know what to brief them on, Profound fits. If your bottleneck is producing the content at all, AirOps is built for that and Profound is not.
Practical difference when you go to buy: neither publishes a brand price any more. Budgeting for either means a sales conversation, about seats and engines with Profound, about task volume with AirOps.
Peec vs AirOps: tracking only, or tracking plus execution?
This is the cleanest comparison of the three, because the tools barely overlap. Peec tells you where you stand across up to three engines on a self-serve plan and now suggests actions, but it does not produce content. AirOps tracks a narrower set on its entry tier (ChatGPT only on Solo) and spends the rest of the product on producing and publishing content.
Choose Peec if you have the content capability and need measurement. Choose AirOps if measurement is not the constraint and output is.
07: Which tool should you choose?
The clearest decision framework:
- You primarily need Google AI Overviews tracking → Semrush, if you’re already a subscriber
- You need multi-platform citation tracking at SMB budget → Peec
- You are buying at enterprise scale and want agents on top of tracking → Profound
- You need citation tracking AND a content production workflow → AirOps Pro, once you have a quote and can weigh it against the content-operations value
- You are an agency costing AI visibility tracking per client → Profound Agency Growth has a published per-client price; check Peec’s agency plans against it
- You don’t yet know which platforms matter for your business → skip the tool subscription for now
That last point is worth expanding. Buying a tracking platform before you understand your AI visibility baseline is like buying a gym membership before you’ve had a health assessment. The tool will give you numbers. Without context, you won’t know which numbers matter or what to do about them.
For a full ranked review of AI visibility platforms including pricing, platform coverage, and use case, see the full AI visibility tools rankings.
08: What none of these tools tell you
Every tool in this comparison has the same fundamental gap: some are more honest about it than others.
None tell you why you’re missing. A tracker can show you that a competitor is cited far more often than you, or that you are absent from most of your tracked prompts. Gap reports, including Peec’s, go further and show which sources cite competitors and not you. What none of them can settle from outside your site is whether the cause is technical (your pages are not crawlable or render empty), structural (your content is not extraction-ready), or authority-based (nothing outside your site vouches for you).
None show you exactly what to change. Profound’s agents draft content from citation gaps, Peec ranks recommended actions, and AirOps generates optimisation opportunities. None of that replaces a diagnosis of what is actually causing the gap, and the diagnosis is where most of the leverage is.
What they recommend doesn’t know your constraints. All three now produce recommendations, so “tools only show you data” is not true and this page used to overstate it. The narrower, still-true version: a list of forty suggested changes is not a plan until someone knows which three you can actually ship this quarter, with the team and budget you have.
Which is also the honest case for buying one of these instead of hiring anyone. If you know what your gap is and just need to watch it move, buy the tool. The diagnosis is what is worth paying a person for.
Need direction, not just data?
Still deciding between tools and an audit? See AI visibility tools vs. a professional audit for a direct comparison, or book an audit to get a prioritized fix plan first.
Book an AI Visibility Audit →09: Frequently asked questions
Is Peec or Profound better for AI visibility tracking?
They are now sold to different buyers. Peec publishes self-serve plans: $95, $245 and $495 a month for 50, 150 and 350 prompts, each tracking three engines you choose, with Enterprise reaching up to 13 models. Profound no longer sells a self-serve plan to brands: you get a free 7-day trial on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, then an Enterprise contract covering up to nine engines. If you want to start tracking this month at a known price, that is Peec. If you want agents that act on what tracking finds and can negotiate an enterprise contract, look at Profound. Figures read from both pricing pages on October 2, 2026.
Does AirOps track AI citations?
Yes, through Insights, and the tier decides the engines. Solo covers ChatGPT only; Pro covers seven or more answer engines, including Google, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot. AirOps still publishes no plan prices: its FAQ says pricing is based on task volume and requirements, and you can start for free. Solo includes 35,000 tasks a month and Pro 100,000. If tracking is all you need, Peec publishes its numbers and you can compare them directly.
What's the cheapest AI visibility tool?
Of the three here, AirOps and Profound both let you start free, but neither publishes the price of what comes after; Peec's cheapest paid plan is $95 a month for three engines. Outside this comparison, Semrush's free plan shows AI mentions, citations and a visibility score, and its AI Visibility toolkit starts at $99 a month. Cheapest and sufficient are different questions: check the engine list and prompt count on the specific tier you would buy, not the headline price.
How much does Profound cost for an agency?
Profound's agency tab is the only place it still publishes a price: Agency Growth is $99 a month, which includes 10 pitch workspaces a month for auditing prospects, and each full client workspace is an add-on at $399 a month. Five extra trial workspaces are $199 a month. Agency Enterprise is custom. Read from Profound's pricing page on October 2, 2026.
Is Semrush good for tracking AI visibility?
Better than this article used to say. It previously described Semrush as strong for Google AI Overviews but weak for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini; that is out of date. Semrush's AI Visibility toolkit starts at $99/month and covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, with share-of-voice and sentiment tracking and competitor comparison. What decides it is packaging: Google and AI Overviews tracking is on any plan including the free one, while the other engines require Semrush One or the AI Visibility toolkit.
Do I need a tool or a consultant for AI visibility?
Most businesses need both, in sequence. An audit first: to establish baseline, diagnose the problem, and build a prioritized fix plan. Then a tracking tool: to measure progress after you've implemented changes. Buying a tool before doing an audit gives you data without context; you'll watch a dashboard for months without knowing which numbers to act on.
For the full ranked list of AI visibility tools including broader category options, see the best AI visibility tools in 2026.
For the comparison of tools vs. a professional audit, see AI visibility tools vs. a professional audit.
Hami Tahm is an AI visibility consultant based in Toronto.