Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI is the cheapest credible entry point at $29/month (Lite, 15 prompts, 4 engines), but Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode cost extra on top.
- Peec AI starts around €85/month (about $92), includes unlimited seats on every tier, and lets you choose 3 models at that price, with up to 13 on Enterprise.
- Scrunch AI now runs a self-serve Core plan at $250/month after being acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 for a reported $225M, and it's the only one of the three with site audits and an Agent Experience Platform.
- For a strict dollar-for-dollar comparison at similar prompt volumes, the order is Otterly Standard ($189/mo, 100 prompts) < Peec Pro (€205/mo, 150 prompts) < Scrunch Core ($250/mo, 125 prompts).
- None of these three tools generate or publish content for you. If you want monitoring plus an execution layer that writes and ships AEO content, that's a different category of product.
Why startups even need to think about this now
Here's the thing that should worry any founder still treating this as optional: roughly 80% of citations in ChatGPT and Perplexity don't overlap with Google's top 100 results for the same query, according to the 2025 AI Visibility Report cited by Otterly.AI. That means ranking well on Google tells you almost nothing about whether ChatGPT or Perplexity mentions you when a prospect asks a buying question. Ahrefs-sourced data puts it even more bluntly: only about 12% of URLs cited by AI assistants also rank in Google's top 10.
So if you're a startup and you've never actually looked at what ChatGPT says about your category, you're flying blind on a channel that's already shaping purchase decisions. The good news is you don't need an enterprise budget to start watching this. Three tools consistently show up in every "affordable AEO" comparison for 2026: Peec AI, Otterly.AI, and Scrunch AI. This guide walks through what each one actually costs right now, what you get at each tier, and where the real tradeoffs are.
The quick comparison table
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts included | Engines at entry | Seats | Action layer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo (Lite) | 15 | 4 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot); Claude/Gemini/AI Mode cost extra | Unlimited | No |
| Peec AI | 50 | Choose 3 of up to 13 | Unlimited | No (prioritized "Recommended Actions" only) | |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo (Core) | 125 | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot); Claude/Gemini/Meta AI/Grok are Enterprise-only | 5 | Yes, site audits + AXP (Enterprise) |
Pricing changes often enough in this category that it's worth re-checking vendor pages before you commit. These figures reflect what's live on each site as of this writing.
Otterly.AI: the cheapest way to start watching
Otterly.AI was built by marketers, and it shows in the pricing page, it's one of the few tools in this space that's genuinely transparent about costs instead of hiding everything behind "book a demo."
The Lite plan is $29/month ($25/month if you pay annually) and covers 15 search prompts across four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. That's a real starting point, not a watered-down trial. ChatGPT Ads tracking is included even at this tier, which is a nice touch given how often sponsored placements are showing up in AI answers lately.
The catch is that Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons, ranging from roughly $9 to $149 a month depending on which ones you bolt on. If your customers are asking Gemini or Claude about your category (and plenty are), you'll end up paying more than the headline $29 suggests.
Standard jumps to $189/month ($160 annual) for 100 prompts and adds API access, MCP access, Agent Analytics, and a Google Looker Studio connector. Premium is $489/month for 400 prompts. Enterprise is custom, starting around 1,000 prompts with SSO and a dedicated CSM.
Otterly has no content or action layer. It tells you where you stand, not what to publish next.
Peec AI: unlimited seats, tighter engine choice
Peec AI, founded in Berlin in February 2025, has raised about $29M in under a year and crossed $4M+ ARR in ten months with customers like Chanel, ElevenLabs, and Wix. That kind of growth usually means the product works for a real range of company sizes, not just one niche.
The Starter plan runs €85 to €89 a month (roughly $92-95), covering 50 prompts and letting you pick 3 models from its library. Pro is €205/month for 150 prompts, still 3 models at a time. Advanced is €425/month for 350 prompts, 5 projects, multi-country tracking, and Looker Studio integration. Enterprise is custom and annual-only, unlocking up to 13 LLMs including Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral.
What makes Peec genuinely different from Otterly and Scrunch is unlimited seats and unlimited countries and languages on every single tier, including Starter. If you're a small team spread across a few markets, that's worth real money, since most competitors charge per seat or paywall geography.
The downside is the "choose 3 models" cap below Enterprise. If you want to track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews simultaneously on a budget plan, you can't, you have to pick three and live with the gap. Like Otterly, Peec offers no content generation or publishing workflow, just prioritized recommended actions.
Scrunch AI: pricier, but it does more than watch
Scrunch AI is the odd one out here, and not just on price. Sitecore acquired Scrunch on June 3, 2026, reportedly for $225M, about two and a half years after the company was founded. Scrunch had previously raised $26M total, including a $15M Series A in July 2025 from Decibel, Mayfield, and Homebrew.
The Core plan is $250/month (self-serve, 7-day free trial) and includes 125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses a month, 5 site audits a month, 1 brand workspace, and 5 user licenses across four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot. Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, and Google AI Mode are locked behind the Enterprise tier, which also unlocks the Agent Experience Platform (AXP), a layer that serves AI-optimized versions of your pages directly to bots. That's a feature almost nobody else in this price range offers; Adobe's LLM Optimizer is the closest comparable, and that's an enterprise product priced accordingly.
So Scrunch costs more than Peec Pro for a comparable prompt count (125 vs 150), but it bundles site audits and bot-traffic tracking that neither Otterly nor Peec offer at any self-serve tier. The tradeoff is real: you're paying for an action layer, not just a dashboard.
One thing worth flagging for a startup-focused buyer: now that Scrunch sits inside Sitecore, its roadmap will likely bend toward Sitecore's enterprise CMS customer base over time. That doesn't make it a bad fit today, but it's a trend worth watching if you're planning to stay on the platform for years, not months.
What similar money actually buys you
If you line up roughly comparable prompt volumes, the picture gets clearer:
| Tool | Plan | Monthly price | Prompts | Engines included at this price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Standard | $189 | 100 | 4 base engines, Gemini/Claude/AI Mode cost extra |
| Peec AI | Pro | ~$220 (€205) | 150 | 3 chosen models |
| Scrunch AI | Core | $250 | 125 | 4 base engines, Claude/Gemini/Meta AI/Grok Enterprise-only |
Otterly wins on raw price for the same rough prompt count. Peec wins on seats and geography. Scrunch wins on site audits and the action layer. None of them is objectively "best," they're optimized for different jobs.
There's a data point worth keeping in mind when you're deciding which engines actually matter for your plan: Promptwatch's research on citation volume shows ChatGPT cites around 5 sources per web-search response on average, while Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite closer to 10 each (https://promptwatch.com/data/average-sources-per-response). Fewer citation slots means a smaller, less-authoritative domain has a narrower shot at showing up in ChatGPT specifically. If your startup doesn't yet have deep domain authority, tracking AI Overviews and Perplexity alongside ChatGPT gives you a more realistic read on where you're actually getting cited, not just where you're hoping to.
Common mistakes startups make when picking one of these
A few patterns show up again and again in how teams get this wrong:
- Measuring visibility on a tiny set of hyper-relevant prompts, then assuming that's representative of how customers actually ask about your category. It usually isn't.
- Treating the dashboard as the deliverable. Tool sprawl is real in this space; teams buy a tracker, check it twice, then let it become "another report" nobody acts on.
- Ignoring that technical SEO fundamentals (schema, crawlability, backlink credibility) still shape what AI systems can retrieve in the first place. A tracker can't fix a site AI can't crawl.
- Expecting attribution to work like paid search. Citation and visibility metrics don't map cleanly to leads the way a click on a Google ad does.
Before signing up for any of these, bring 10 of your own real customer-style prompts to a demo and run them across two or three tools side by side. Vendor sample prompts are cherry-picked; yours aren't.
Where to go if you outgrow pure monitoring
All three tools here are, at their core, monitors. They tell you where you stand. None of them writes content, publishes it to your CMS, or tells you in priority order what to fix first and why, beyond Scrunch's audits and Peec's recommended actions list.
If you get to the point where tracking alone isn't moving the needle, tools like Promptwatch are built around a different premise: instead of just answering "was I mentioned," it tries to answer "why wasn't I, and what do I do about it." That means crawler logs showing exactly when AI bots hit your pages, citation trends across Reddit and YouTube (channels Otterly, Peec, and Scrunch don't track at all), and Content Agents that can actually draft and publish AEO content to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress on a schedule.
For a startup still finding product-market fit, that might be more platform than you need on day one, Otterly's $29 entry point exists for a reason. But it's worth knowing the ceiling exists before you lock into a 12-month contract with a pure tracker.
If you want to browse the wider field beyond these three, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists dozens of options across price points, and ai-rank-tools.com is useful if you're narrowing in specifically on rank-tracking style platforms.
Bottom line
If your budget is genuinely tight and you just need a first read on whether ChatGPT and AI Overviews mention your brand at all, start with Otterly's $29 Lite plan and add engines as you need them. If you're running a lean team across multiple markets and want unlimited seats without per-user fees, Peec's €85 Starter plan is the better fit, just accept the 3-model cap. If you have the budget and want site audits plus a path toward an action layer, Scrunch's $250 Core plan earns its higher price, though it's worth watching how Sitecore's ownership shapes the roadmap over the next year.
Whichever you pick, the real cost isn't the subscription, it's what you do with the data once you have it.