Profound vs Peec AI: Which AI Visibility Tool Should You Pick?

Profound and Peec AI show up on almost every "best AI visibility tools" list for the same reason: they're the two names marketing teams actually mention when they talk about tracking how often ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Overviews cite their brand. We've reviewed both separately before. This is the direct comparison people actually search for once they've narrowed it down to these two and need to pick one.

Something changed since our last check on Peec specifically. As of this month, Peec publishes real self-serve pricing with exact numbers, where it used to be a "contact us" situation like Profound still mostly is. That shift alone answers a chunk of the "which one should I pick" question before getting into features, because it changes who can even seriously consider each tool: one is now a credit-card purchase, the other is still a sales conversation for almost everyone except agencies on its Agency Growth plan.

At a glance

How we evaluated these

We pulled every figure in this piece directly from each vendor's own pricing page, checked in late October 2026, not from a sales call or a reseller's claim. We weighed engine coverage at the entry tier (since that's what most teams actually use day to day), how much is gated behind "contact sales," and whether the self-serve numbers, where they exist, scale sensibly with team size. Neither of us has an active paid account with either tool, so take the feature claims here as documented, not hands-on tested; our Peec AI review and Profound alternatives roundup go deeper into each one individually if this comparison doesn't answer the specific question you came in with.

Why the two companies sell so differently

The pricing gap isn't an accident, it tracks how each company is funded and who it's chasing. Profound raised a $96 million Series C in February 2026 at a $1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins returning, bringing its total raised to $155 million in about 18 months. That's unicorn money aimed at Fortune 100 marketing budgets, and a sales-led, demo-first motion is exactly how a company with that kind of backing and that kind of target customer typically sells. Peec, by contrast, raised a $21 million Series A in November 2025, a fraction of Profound's war chest, on the back of annual recurring revenue that TechCrunch reported had grown past $4 million in its first 10 months, largely from smaller companies and agencies rather than enterprise logos. A self-serve, published-pricing model is the more sensible way to grow a customer base that size quickly, without hiring a large sales team for every deal.

That difference in scale is worth keeping in mind when reading feature comparisons between the two. Profound's 9-engine Enterprise tier, SOC 2 compliance and dedicated support exist because its target buyer, a brand's VP of marketing signing off on a six-figure platform, expects those things as table stakes. Peec's transparent four-tier pricing exists because its target buyer wants to swipe a card and start seeing data the same afternoon. Neither approach is wrong; they're built for different budgets and different buying processes.

Pricing: the real difference

Profound's path to a paid plan is still mostly sales-led. The free trial covers 7 days, 50 prompts a day, and three engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews), with unlimited seats and domains even at that stage, which is generous for a trial. Past that, Profound's public self-serve option is its Agency Growth plan, priced around $99 a month per client workspace on a credit system (reported at roughly 400 credits a month), aimed specifically at agencies managing several client brands rather than a single in-house team. Everything past that, meaning the plan most enterprise brand teams actually end up on, is custom pricing behind a demo.

Peec now publishes four tiers with real numbers: Starter at $95 a month (50 prompts, 3 active models, about 4,500 monthly AI answers tracked, 1 country, 1 project), Pro at $245 a month (150 prompts, 3 models, around 13,500 answers, 3 countries, 2 projects), and Advanced at $495 a month (350 prompts, 3 models, roughly 31,500 answers, 3 countries, 5 projects). Enterprise above that goes custom and unlocks unlimited prompts and projects plus extra models like Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-5 Search, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Meta Spark on top of Perplexity. For a team that wants to see an exact number before requesting a demo, that's a meaningfully different buying experience than Profound's.

Engine coverage

Profound's trial covers three engines: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. That's the three that matter most for a lot of brands, but the real expansion, up to nine engines including Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot and Exa Search, sits behind Enterprise. Peec's base tiers already include ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI (useful if any Korean market exposure matters to the brand), with the long tail of extra models, Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-5 Search, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Meta Spark and Perplexity, reserved for Peec's own Enterprise tier. In practice, Peec simply ships a wider engine list at every price point than Profound does below its Enterprise tier.

Seats, data and access

Profound's trial allows unlimited seats and domains, which is unusual for a trial tier and worth using fully before deciding anything. It doesn't allow data history, exports or API access until Enterprise, though, so a team evaluating it on the trial is working blind on anything that requires exporting data or integrating with another tool. Peec's access to data and API scales more gradually with its paid tiers instead of gating everything behind a single top tier, which matters if the plan is to pipe AI-visibility data into a dashboard or a report a client actually sees on a schedule.

What "tracking AI visibility" actually measures

Both tools work on roughly the same principle, even if the dashboards look different: a set of prompts, questions real customers might plausibly ask an AI assistant, gets run against each tracked model on a schedule, and the tool logs whether and how a brand gets mentioned, cited or recommended in the answer. That's why "prompts" is the billing unit on Peec's plans rather than seats or page views; the number of prompts you can track each month is effectively the size of the net you're casting across ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest. Profound's trial caps this at 50 prompts a day, which is generous for testing but not necessarily representative of the volume a real program needs once you're tracking competitors and multiple product lines, not just your own brand name.

This also explains why neither tool's numbers will match what you'd see manually typing a question into ChatGPT yourself. AI answers aren't static, the same prompt run twice can return a different answer, mention different sources, or skip a citation it included an hour earlier. Both platforms run prompts repeatedly and report on patterns and share of voice over time rather than a single snapshot, which is also why a short free trial (Profound's 7 days) gives a weaker read on real visibility trends than a month or more of data would.

Who actually fits each one

Profound is built, priced and sold for a brand or marketing team that's already decided AI visibility is a budget line item and wants the deepest engine coverage, dedicated support, SSO/SAML and SOC 2 compliance that Enterprise unlocks. If a team is at the stage where a vendor's security questionnaire actually matters, Profound's Enterprise tier is doing a different job than anything Peec currently sells. The Agency Growth plan is the one real self-serve-ish option, and it's explicitly for agencies juggling several client brands, not a single company tracking its own name.

Peec fits a narrower, more common situation: an SEO lead, a content team, or a small agency that wants to start tracking AI visibility this week without a sales call, and is comfortable picking a tier based on prompt volume rather than a custom quote. The jump from Starter to Advanced is steep in absolute dollars ($95 to $495), but it's transparent, which is the thing a lot of buyers in this category are actually asking for when they search "Profound vs Peec AI" in the first place.

Three specific cases make the choice easier than the feature tables suggest. A solo consultant tracking one client's brand has no real reason to even look at Profound; Peec's Starter tier alone covers that job for a tenth of what a Profound Enterprise deal would cost, if Profound's sales team would even take the call for an account that small. A mid-size SaaS company with its own marketing team and a handful of competitors to watch sits in Peec's Pro or Advanced range comfortably, and would only outgrow it if it specifically needs Claude or Perplexity tracking that those tiers don't include yet. A large, multi-brand enterprise with a procurement process, a security review, and a marketing budget line already approved is the one case where Profound's Enterprise tier is worth the sales cycle, because the compliance and coverage it offers aren't really available anywhere else at any price from Peec today.

The honest limitation on each side

Profound's limitation is straightforward: if the budget or the sign-off process can't survive a sales conversation, most of what makes Profound worth considering (the 9-engine coverage, the API, the compliance credentials) is simply not reachable. The trial is good for kicking the tires, not for running a real program.

Peec's limitation is coverage depth at the lower tiers. Six models is a reasonable starting line, but the engines that show up in that Enterprise-only extra list, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Qwen, Mistral, are each growing their own slice of AI search traffic, and a team that specifically cares about one of those from day one will hit Peec's ceiling faster than the sticker price suggests.

If neither one fits your budget yet

Both of these are mid-market-and-up tools even at their cheapest published tier. If $95 a month is still more than the budget allows, or the Enterprise sales process isn't worth starting for a team of two, it's worth checking the wider field before settling for either. Our best AI visibility tools roundup covers the cheaper end of this category, including options with published pricing well under Peec's Starter tier, and our AI visibility metrics and KPIs guide walks through what to actually track by hand (spot-checking prompts yourself across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule) if no paid tool fits the budget yet. Manual spot-checking won't give you the volume or the historical trend lines either platform offers, but it's a real zero-cost way to start before committing to either one.

It's also worth sitting on a decision for a month rather than signing an annual contract immediately. Both companies have changed their pricing and packaging within the past year, Peec moving from unpublished to published tiers, Profound raising at a $1 billion valuation and presumably still iterating on what Enterprise actually includes. A monthly plan, where either vendor offers one, costs more over a year than an annual contract, but it keeps you free to switch if the other one changes its offer in a way that suits you better six months from now.

So which one should you pick

If the company already has an actual budget conversation happening with a vendor, and the buyer cares about the widest engine coverage and compliance checkboxes, start the Profound demo and don't bother comparing further; the two tools aren't really competing for that buyer. If the goal is to get a real number on a credit card this week and start tracking ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Gemini mentions without a sales cycle, Peec's Starter tier is the more realistic first move, and Pro is where most SEO and content teams end up once they've proven the basic tracking is useful. Either way, check pricing directly on Peec's pricing page and Profound's pricing page before deciding, since both of these tiers have changed once already this year and will likely change again.

Does Profound have a cheaper self-serve plan than Agency Growth?

Not published as of October 2026. Agency Growth, aimed at agencies, is the only self-serve-style option; everything else for a single brand runs through the free trial and then a custom Enterprise quote.

Why did Peec AI switch to published pricing?

Peec hasn't said publicly, but the shift from "contact us" to four named tiers with exact dollar figures lines up with a broader trend in this category: as AI-visibility tracking becomes a normal line item rather than a novelty, buyers expect to compare options the way they'd compare any other SaaS tool, not book a demo first.

Can you track Perplexity on either tool's entry-level plan?

No, on both. Peec adds Perplexity at Enterprise alongside Claude, DeepSeek and the rest; Profound's trial doesn't include it either, and it's part of the up-to-9-engine Enterprise tier. If Perplexity citations specifically are the priority, check Otterly.AI, which includes it at a published, lower-tier price.

Is Peec AI or Profound better for a solo consultant or freelancer tracking one client's brand?

Peec's Starter tier at $95 a month fits that case better: a published price, one project, and enough prompt volume to track a single brand's visibility without committing to Profound's sales process or Enterprise pricing built for teams managing multiple domains.

Will Profound ever offer self-serve pricing for a single brand, not just agencies?

There's no public sign of it as of October 2026. A company that just raised at a $1 billion valuation selling to Fortune 100 marketing teams has little incentive to undercut its own Enterprise sales motion with a cheap, self-serve single-brand tier, so don't wait for one before picking a tool that fits the budget you actually have today.