Profound vs Peec AI: Why the $95 Tracker Wins in 2026

The short answer: buy Peec AI unless you are buying Enterprise

If you have roughly $100 a month to spend on AI visibility tracking, Peec AI is the pick. For about $95 a month you get 50 prompts tracked across three engines of your choice, daily refreshes, and unlimited seats. Profound is the deeper platform and the stronger enterprise product, but its famous $99 starter tier tracked ChatGPT only, and its live pricing page now leads with a free trial plus custom Enterprise pricing rather than a published starter price. At starter money, Peec gives you three engines where Profound used to give you one, and today Profound may not sell you a starter plan at all. Everything below is the evidence for that verdict, including the pricing change you need to know before you trust any older comparison.

What each tool actually does

Profound is an enterprise AI visibility platform built in New York in 2024. It tracks how brands appear in AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and more, and it is best known for one asset no rival can copy easily: a dataset of real user conversations, now cited at more than 1.5 billion prompts, which powers its Prompt Volumes feature. Instead of guessing which questions buyers ask, Profound shows you questions real people actually typed, then tracks how your brand shows up in the answers. It also tracks AI crawler and referral traffic to your own site through Agent Analytics, and it has moved from measurement into action with content briefs built from the same data.

Peec AI is a Berlin-based tracker built for speed. It tracks brand mentions, position, sentiment, and citations across the engines you pick, refreshes daily, and adds two features I rate highly for working teams: tracking at the level of specific model versions, so you see the effect the day a new model ships, and a clear split between sources an AI answer used and sources it actually cited. That split matters because a source can shape an answer without ever getting a visible citation, and only the citation earns you the link. Peec also runs prompt discovery, which surfaces questions you had not thought to track, and an AI shopping module for e-commerce teams that tracks visibility per product from a Shopify or CSV catalog.

The difference in one sentence: Profound sells depth and data you cannot get elsewhere, Peec sells a fast, usable tracker at a price a small team can approve without a procurement meeting.

The price table, with the catch stated plainly

Two warnings belong right under that table. First, Profound's $99 and $399 tiers are the prices cited across 2026 comparisons, but a pricing check on October 22, 2026 found those tiers no longer listed on Profound's pricing page, which now leads with a free trial and custom Enterprise pricing. Treat $99 as the historical starter price, not a price you can click and buy today. Second, Peec prices in euros on its own site, around 85 to 89 euros a month for Starter, which converts to roughly $95 depending on the exchange rate and whether you pay monthly or annually. Annual billing cuts about 15 percent. If you are budgeting in dollars, confirm the converted charge in checkout before you commit.

The honest read of the table: Peec is the only one of the two with a starter plan you can clearly buy today at around $95. That fact alone decides this comparison for most readers.

The starter-tier trap: one engine is not a program

Profound's old Starter plan is the most misleading price in this category. Ninety-nine dollars sounds like an entry point into GEO tracking, but it bought ChatGPT only and 50 prompts. If your buyers also ask Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and most buyers do, you learned nothing about two of the three places that shape their decisions. The moment you wanted Perplexity coverage, you were at the old $399 Growth tier. That is a 4x jump from the headline price, and it is the number you should have budgeted from day one.

Peec's Starter has the opposite shape. About $95 buys 50 prompts across three engines you choose, from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, and Naver AI. Cost per engine works out near $32, against $99 for Profound's single engine. The catch is the add-on structure: Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode cost extra per engine per month on Peec, so a team that needs all six engines pays meaningfully more than the headline. Do the add-on math for your exact engine list before you sign, on either tool.

Prompt count is the other trap. Fifty prompts sounds small until you write the list: 10 to 20 buyer-intent questions, your brand and product names, and your top three competitors. Most small teams land under 50. If your list runs past 50, Peec Pro at about $245 for 150 prompts is still cheaper than Profound's old Growth tier, and it keeps the three-engine shape. If your list runs past 150, you are no longer a starter buyer on either platform, and the conversation becomes an enterprise negotiation.

Engine coverage: where each tool actually looks

Profound wins the coverage count at the top end: seven engines on its main platform and up to 10 on Enterprise, including Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek territory that Peec reserves for Enterprise. Peec wins the coverage count at starter money: three engines you choose beats one engine you are given. Neither tool covers everything at its entry price, and any comparison that lists "10 engines" next to a $99 price tag is mixing an enterprise feature with a starter price. Read the tier column, not just the engine column.

Depth against speed: what you get for the money

Profound's depth shows up in four places. Its Conversation Explorer and Prompt Volumes turn real user questions into a prompt set grounded in behavior, not guesswork. Its citation data comes with screenshots for audit, so you can verify a citation instead of trusting a dashboard number. Its refresh cadence on Growth was hourly, against Peec's daily refresh, so a fast-moving story shows up sooner. And its enterprise tier carries SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO and SAML, API access, and dedicated support, which is what regulated buyers and large marketing teams actually need from a vendor.

Peec's speed shows up in different places. Onboarding takes under an hour for most teams, against a Profound setup that reviewers put at hours per brand profile. Unlimited seats and unlimited countries sit on every Peec tier, so a five-person team in three markets pays the same as a solo user, where seat-based tools punish growth. Daily refreshes are slower than Profound's hourly cadence but fast enough for weekly content decisions, which is how most small teams actually work. And the Looker Studio connector on Advanced plugs Peec into reporting stacks agencies already use.

My judgment on this trade: depth only pays when someone on your team acts on it weekly. A real-user prompt dataset is worth a premium if it changes which pages you write. It is worth nothing if it sits in a dashboard nobody opens. Speed pays immediately: a tracker your team actually checks every Monday beats a deeper tracker that needs a training session to read.

What neither tool does for you

Both tools are measurement products. They show you the gap between your brand and your competitors inside AI answers. They do not close it. The content work stays yours: pages that answer the exact questions your buyers ask, written so an AI engine can extract a clean answer and cite your page for it. If you want the strategy behind that work, my guide to getting cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity covers it in full, and it costs nothing.

That point also sets the budget priority. If you have $95 a month and no pages worth citing, spend it on content first and track manually: run your key prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews once a week and record whether your brand appears. Manual tracking breaks down past a dozen prompts, and that is the moment a tracker earns its fee. Buying a tracker before you have citable pages is paying to watch an empty scoreboard.

Which buyer should pick which tool

Pick Peec AI if you are a solo creator, a small team, or an agency running a handful of clients on starter budgets. You get three engines, 50 prompts, daily data, and unlimited seats for about $95 a month, with a seven-day trial that needs no credit card. Pick Peec Pro at about $245 when your prompt list passes 50 or you manage multiple projects, and Advanced at about $495 when you need the Looker Studio connector and weekly reporting. E-commerce teams with a catalog should test the AI shopping module before anything else, because product-level visibility is a feature neither Profound nor most rivals offer at this price.

Pick Profound if you are a mid-market or enterprise brand that needs real-user prompt data, citation audits with screenshots, hourly refreshes, or compliance paperwork your procurement team demands. Budget for a custom Enterprise conversation, not a $99 checkout, and ask for the trial first: 50 prompts across three engines for seven days. Also pick Profound if your prompt list runs into the hundreds and you need segmentation by market, language, and competitor across 10 engines in one contract. At that scale, Peec's per-engine add-ons and project caps stop being the cheaper path.

If your budget is tighter than $95, neither tool is the answer. Otterly AI's Lite plan at $29 a month covers 15 prompts across four engines, and my Scrunch alternatives post covers the free routes in full. A $29 tracker you check weekly beats a $95 tracker you cancel in month two.

My verdict: what I would pick, and why

I would pick Peec AI. The deciding factor is not that Peec is slightly cheaper on paper. It is that Peec is the tool a small team can actually buy, set up in an afternoon, and check every week at starter money, with three engines instead of one. Profound is the better platform in absolute terms: better data, deeper analytics, stronger enterprise story. But a better platform you cannot buy at your budget is not a better purchase, and Profound's move upmarket means the $99 comparison that fills so many roundups no longer describes a checkout page.

The verdict flips in three cases. If you need real-user prompt volumes to decide what to write, Profound's dataset is the only one of its kind here. If your compliance team requires SOC 2, SSO, and a contractual relationship, Profound Enterprise is built for that conversation. If you track hundreds of prompts across 10 engines, Profound's enterprise tiers scale cleaner than Peec's add-on ladder. Outside those three cases, take Peec's seven-day trial, run your real prompt list through it for a week, and only pay when the data changes a content decision. That is the test every GEO tool should pass before it takes your money.

Tools mentioned

If you want help turning GEO data into pages that actually get cited, I take on freelance AI-visibility and content projects. Reach me through the contact section on the homepage and tell me which engines your buyers use. I will tell you honestly whether a tracker is worth paying for yet, or whether your money belongs in content first.

FAQ

Is Profound or Peec AI cheaper?

Peec AI is cheaper at the starter level in practice. Its Starter plan runs about $95 a month for 50 prompts across three engines. Profound's widely cited $99 Starter covered one engine only, and Profound's live pricing page now leads with a free trial and custom Enterprise pricing instead of a published starter price.

How many AI engines does Peec AI track?

Peec AI's standard plans let you pick three engines from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, and Naver AI, with up to 13 models on Enterprise. Extra engines are paid add-ons, so count the add-on cost before you compare headline prices.

How many AI engines does Profound track?

Profound tracks seven engines on its main platform, including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Grok, with up to 10 on Enterprise plans. Its old Starter tier tracked ChatGPT only, which is why the $99 headline price misled so many buyers.

Does Profound offer a free trial?

Profound's current pricing page offers a free trial covering 50 prompts across three engines for seven days. Peec AI offers a seven-day free trial with no credit card required, so you can run both trials on the same prompt set before paying either vendor.

Which GEO tracker should a small team pick?

Peec AI, in most cases. For about $95 a month you get three engines, 50 prompts, daily refreshes, and unlimited seats and countries. Pick Profound when you need real-user prompt data, enterprise compliance, or tracking at a scale where a custom Enterprise contract makes sense.

Do GEO trackers improve your AI visibility by themselves?

No. A tracker shows you where your brand appears in AI answers and which sources get cited. The visibility gain comes from the content work that follows: pages that answer the exact questions your buyers ask, structured so AI engines can extract and cite them.