Key takeaways
- Citations.io runs four tiers, Starter $39/mo, Growth $69/mo, Pro $99/mo, and a custom Agency plan, with a 5-day trial for $5 rather than a free trial.
- Every Citations.io tier includes all four tracked engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude), which is unusual: Peec AI charges roughly $35/mo per extra model beyond its base three.
- The catch is tracking frequency. Citations.io runs one monthly AI visibility scan per plan, while Peec AI and Promptwatch both track daily.
- Neither Citations.io nor Peec AI generate or publish content. Promptwatch's Professional tier ($245/mo) adds AEO article generation and crawler-log analysis that neither competitor offers at any price.
- If you just want a monthly mention count across four engines cheaply, Citations.io's $39 Starter plan is hard to beat on price. If you need daily tracking or want the visibility data turned into published content, look at Peec AI or Promptwatch.
Why Citations.io's pricing page looks different from the rest of the category
Most AI visibility tools price around daily tracking. Peec AI, Promptwatch, Profound, they all assume you want to know what ChatGPT said about your brand today, not last month. Citations.io breaks from that. Every plan, from the $39 Starter to the $99 Pro tier, gets exactly one AI visibility scan per month. That's a genuinely different product decision, and it explains why the entry price looks so low next to Peec AI's $95 Starter or Promptwatch's $95 Essential plan.
It also means the comparison isn't really "which tool is cheaper." It's "do you need daily signal, or is a monthly snapshot enough." A brand tracking a handful of prompts to see general trend direction can live with monthly. A brand trying to catch a citation drop the week it happens, or feed a content team a live to-do list, cannot.
Citations.io pricing, tier by tier
Citations.io's live pricing page lists four tiers, and the thing that stands out immediately is that all four engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) ship on every paid plan, including the cheapest one. No per-model upsell, which is the opposite of how Peec AI prices things.
| Plan | Price/mo | Prompts tracked | Analysed answers/mo | Competitors tracked | Implementation packs | Seats | API/Slack |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $39 | 25 customer + 25 benchmark | 1,000 | 5 | 3/mo | 3 | Neither |
| Growth | $69 | 75 + 75 | 3,000 | 10 | 10/mo | 10 | Slack only |
| Pro | $99 | 150 + 150 | 6,000 | 25 | 25/mo | 50 | Both |
| Agency | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Both, plus SSO |
A few things worth flagging line by line. The "implementation packs" are Citations.io's answer to turning a visibility gap into an action, content, PR, or schema recommendations bundled monthly, but this is guidance, not generated content or CMS publishing. API access doesn't show up until the $99 Pro tier, which is a real gap if you wanted to pull the data into your own dashboard on Growth. And every tier is capped at one scan a month, so upgrading buys you more prompts and competitors, not more frequent checks.
Citations.io is a young company, backed by Google for Startups Cloud Program and the NatWest Accelerator, and it doesn't have much of a third-party review trail yet. That's not disqualifying, but it's worth knowing you're an early adopter here, not buying into a platform with years of G2 reviews behind it.
Peec AI pricing: broader features, narrower default engine set
Peec AI takes the opposite approach on engines. Every plan defaults to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, but only three of those are active at once on the Starter, Pro, and Advanced brand tiers, you choose which three. Want more, or want Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Qwen, or Mistral added? That's an add-on, roughly $35/mo per extra model on Starter and scaling up on higher tiers.
| Plan | Price/mo | Prompts | Models included | Projects | Tracking frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $95 | 50 | Choose 3 | 1 | Daily |
| Pro | $245 | 150 | Choose 3 | 2 | Daily |
| Advanced | $495 | 350 | Choose 3 | 5 | Daily |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | All models | Unlimited | Daily or weekly |
Where Peec AI pulls ahead of Citations.io is depth: crawlability checks against 40+ named AI bots, server-log crawl insights, AI Shopping tracking for ecommerce catalogs, query fanout analysis, and an MCP server for querying the data conversationally from Claude or Cursor. None of that shows up on Citations.io's pricing page. What Peec AI still doesn't do, by design, is write or publish content. Its own comparison material says as much, flagging that AI-generated content carries sourcing and uniqueness risk it doesn't want to own.
Where Promptwatch fits
Promptwatch starts at the same $95/mo price point as Peec AI's Starter and Citations.io's Pro-adjacent tier, but the structure is different again. Every Promptwatch plan, Essential ($95), Professional ($245), Business ($579), tracks four models per prompt from a pool of eight (OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Claude, Gemini, Meta, DeepSeek, Grok), and every tier includes API and MCP access, which is something Citations.io gates behind its $99 Pro tier and Peec AI gates behind its custom Enterprise plan entirely.
| Plan | Price/mo | Prompts | Responses/mo | AEO articles | Crawler logs | API/MCP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $95 | 50 | 6,000 | None | No | Included |
| Professional | $245 | 150 | 18,000 | 5/mo | Yes | Included |
| Business | $579 | 350 | 42,000 | 10/mo | Yes | Included |
The practical difference from Citations.io isn't just price, it's what happens after you see a gap. Citations.io hands you implementation packs, recommendations you act on yourself. Promptwatch's Content Agents draft AEO articles from real citation data and publish them straight to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress starting on the Professional tier. Agent Analytics, Promptwatch's crawler-log feature, also shows you whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot actually visited a page before it got cited, something neither Citations.io nor Peec AI's base tiers surface.
Side-by-side: all three on the plan most teams would actually buy
Comparing entry tiers alone is misleading since Citations.io's $39 plan and Peec AI's $95 plan aren't solving the same problem. Here's the closer comparison, at the price point where each tool starts to feel complete.
| Citations.io Pro ($99) | Peec AI Starter ($95) | Promptwatch Essential ($95) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engines included | 4, no add-ons | 3 of 6, add-ons for more | 4 of 8, no add-ons |
| Tracking frequency | Monthly | Daily | Daily |
| API access | Included | Enterprise-only | Included |
| Content generation | Implementation packs only | Not offered | Not on Essential (5/mo from Professional) |
| Crawler-log analysis | No | Volume metrics only | No (from Professional) |
| Free/paid trial | 5-day trial for $5 | 7-day free trial | 7-day free trial |
A couple of things jump out. Citations.io's Pro tier undercuts both rivals on API access, which is genuinely useful if you just want raw data in your own BI tool. But the monthly scan cadence is a real ceiling, month-over-month citation drift across major LLMs has been estimated at 40-60%, so a single snapshot per month risks catching a swing rather than a trend. Peec AI and Promptwatch both track daily, which smooths that noise out.
Which one should you actually buy
If your budget is genuinely tight and you just need a monthly gut-check on whether ChatGPT and Perplexity mention your brand at all, Citations.io's $39 Starter plan is the cheapest way into the category by a wide margin, and getting Gemini and Claude bundled in at that price is rare.
If you need daily tracking, competitive benchmarking, and features like crawlability audits or AI Shopping tracking, and you're comfortable paying for extra models as you need them, Peec AI's tiering gives you more surface area, provided you budget for add-ons if your category spans more than three engines.
If the point of tracking visibility is to actually fix what's wrong, not just report it, Promptwatch is the one built around that loop: crawler logs that explain why a page isn't getting cited, content agents that draft the fix, and CMS publishing that ships it, all with API and MCP access included from the first paid tier. For teams with someone on staff who'll act on a content gap report, that closes a loop the other two leave open.
Agencies evaluating any of these three should also check the broader field. The GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com and the rank-tracking listings at ai-rank-tools.com cover a wider set of vendors than fit in one pricing comparison, useful if none of these three quite match your prompt volume or budget.
A note on trial structures
One detail easy to miss: Citations.io doesn't offer a standard free trial. Its "5-day trial for $5" is a priced trial, you pay a small fee upfront rather than entering a credit card for a free period. Peec AI and Promptwatch both run 7-day free trials with no credit card required on their lower tiers. If you're evaluating quickly and don't want to commit even $5, that's a minor but real point in the other two tools' favor.
Bottom line
Citations.io wins on headline price and on bundling all four engines without add-on fees, but it caps you at one scan a month and gates its API behind the $99 tier. Peec AI wins on feature depth for pure monitoring, crawlability, AI Shopping, query fanouts, but its per-model add-on pricing can push a full-coverage setup well past its advertised entry price. Promptwatch's advantage is that it doesn't stop at the report: crawler logs, content generation, and CMS publishing are baked into the same monthly price that gets you basic tracking elsewhere. Which one to pick comes down to whether you're buying a scoreboard or a system that plays some of the game for you.