AEO Tools for Answer Engine Optimization: Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch (Official)
What Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI and Scrunch officially sell for answer engine optimization, what each costs on its own pricing page, and why we evaluate Promptwatch first.
Searching for the "official" version of an AEO tool usually means one thing: you are tired of affiliate summaries and want to know what the vendor itself puts on the box. Fair enough. This guide sticks to each vendor's own site, its stated positioning, and the plans it publishes, then tells you which one we would trial first and why.
A quick definition so the comparison holds together. Answer engine optimization is the work of getting your brand named, and ideally linked, inside answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews. A tool for that job needs to show you three things. Were you mentioned? Which source did the engine cite? And what should you change? Most products in this category answer the first question well. Fewer get to the second. Very few touch the third.
We cover the four vendors named in the search, plus Promptwatch, because a buyer guide that skips the platform we would start with is not much of a guide. The order below is our ranking, not the order of the title.
The official pitch, vendor by vendor
1. Promptwatch
Official site: promptwatch.com. Promptwatch calls itself an AI search visibility and generative engine optimization platform, and the product backs up the wider label. Prompt tracking is one layer. On top of it sit citation analytics (page, domain, Reddit, YouTube and offsite mentions), Agent Analytics for AI crawler logs, visitor analytics that tie AI-referred sessions to conversions, and Content Agents that plan, write and publish pages to Webflow or Framer through a review inbox.
Monitoring runs on the real product interfaces across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral and Copilot, plus Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. That matters because an API response and the answer a user actually sees in the app are not always the same thing.
Published pricing: Explore is free with 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. Essential is $95/mo with a 7-day trial, 50 prompts, 6,000 responses and 200K visitor events. Professional is $245/mo and is the first brand plan with crawler logs (25M). Agencies start on Kick-off at $199/mo with unlimited projects and prompts.
2. Scrunch AI
Official site: scrunchai.com. Scrunch pairs multi-engine monitoring with its Agent Experience Platform, which serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to LLM crawlers while the human-facing page stays as it is. That serving layer is the most original idea of the four. It also needs real engineering work at the CDN or edge.
Published pricing: Starter is $250/mo billed annually ($300 monthly) with three seats, 350 custom prompts and 1,000 industry prompts. Growth is $417/mo annual ($500 monthly). Enterprise is custom. Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, so the roadmap now sits inside a DXP vendor.
3. Profound
Official site: tryprofound.com. Read Profound's current pages and AI search tracking is one channel among several. The product is sold as marketing agents covering AEO and SEO, content and demand, and PR. Scheduled prompts still report citation share and share of voice by prompt cluster.
Published pricing: Starter is $99/mo billed yearly, ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, one seat. Growth is $399/mo yearly for three engines and 100 prompts. The wide engine list, the full Prompt Volumes dataset, the agents and the API sit on Enterprise, which starts around $40k a year. So when people talk about "Profound", they usually mean a contract most small teams will never sign.
4. Otterly.AI
Official site: otterly.ai. Otterly sells itself as an accessible tracker for brand mentions and citations, with a GEO audit that grades 25+ on-page factors. Lite is $29/mo ($25 annual) for 15 prompts on four base engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Gemini, Claude and AI Mode are paid add-ons priced from $9 to $149 a month depending on tier. Standard is $189/mo and Premium $489/mo. Our listing notes monitoring data can be up to seven days old, and there is no traffic or revenue attribution.
5. Peec AI
Official site: peec.ai. Peec positions itself as prompt-level visibility tracking with screenshot audit trails. Starter is $95/mo for 50 prompts, three models and one project, with unlimited seats. Each extra model costs $35 to $165 a month. Claude and DeepSeek sit on Enterprise. It is a clean tracker. It stops at "where do we appear".
Published entry points side by side
| Tool | Official positioning | Lowest published paid plan | What it adds beyond mentions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | AI search visibility and GEO platform | Essential $95/mo (Explore free) | Citation analytics, crawler logs (Professional), visitor conversions, Content Agents |
| Scrunch AI | Monitoring plus Agent Experience Platform | Starter $250/mo annual | AI-optimized page serving to crawlers |
| Profound | Marketing agents for AEO, content and PR | Starter $99/mo annual (ChatGPT only) | Agents and Prompt Volumes on Enterprise |
| Otterly.AI | Accessible AI visibility tracker | Lite $29/mo | GEO audit |
| Peec AI | Prompt-level visibility tracker | Starter $95/mo | Screenshot audit trails |
How to read the official pages without getting fooled
Sticker prices in this category rarely describe the plan you will end up on. Three things move the real number.
Engine coverage is the first. Profound's cheapest plan watches one engine. Otterly's headline list includes engines that cost extra. Peec includes three models and charges for each additional one. Before comparing $29 to $95, write down the engines your buyers actually use and price every tool with those engines switched on.
Next comes what happens after the mention. A tracker can tell you that a competitor got cited for "best accounting software for freelancers". It usually cannot tell you whether an AI crawler ever fetched your comparison page, or whether the three visitors ChatGPT sent you last week bought anything. Those are the questions that turn a dashboard into a work plan.
Then the people cost. Scrunch's serving layer and Profound's Enterprise agents both need an owner and setup time. That is fine for a large content team and a poor fit for a two-person marketing function.
Which one to evaluate first
Scrunch is worth a look if you have a big content library and engineers who can wire up the serving layer. Profound makes sense for enterprise teams that want marketing agents across PR and demand and have the budget for an Enterprise contract. Otterly is a cheap way to prove AI mentions exist at all. Peec is a tidy tracker if screenshots are what your stakeholders want.
For most teams buying their first serious AEO tool, though, the deciding factor is what sits underneath the mention count. That is why we start with Promptwatch. A missing citation on Essential can be traced to the page the engine preferred through citation analytics, and the query fan-outs show which sub-searches the model ran before it chose that page. Move to Professional and Agent Analytics adds the crawler side: whether ChatGPTBot or PerplexityBot fetched the page, and whether it hit an error. The visitor analytics script closes the loop by showing which AI-referred sessions converted. None of the four named vendors publish that full chain on the pages we sourced for their listings.
Start on Explore with your ten most commercial prompts on ChatGPT. If the gaps look real, the Essential trial gives you seven days on the paid engines before you commit. Our ranking method explains how we weigh the rest of the tools list.