Search for “Peec AI vs Profound” and almost every result on page one is written by another AI visibility vendor. That is a strange place to make a buying decision. This page compares Peec AI, Profound and AthenaHQ using only their own pricing pages, documentation and press releases, and it says plainly where the vendors leave a gap.
Why Compare Peec AI, Profound and AthenaHQ
All three tools answer the same question: when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews about your market, does your brand show up? That question now has a budget line. In a July 2026 survey of 602 US marketing and PR professionals, 82% said AI search visibility is a top priority for the next 12 months, yet only 45% were testing brand visibility across AI platforms (Scribewise and Scrunch, via MarTech Series). Scrunch sells an AI visibility platform itself, so read that as a vendor survey.
Profound, Peec AI and AthenaHQ are three of the names that come up most when teams move from “we should check this” to “we need a tool.” They are also three of the hardest to compare. Many ranking pages are written by Profound AI competitors and Peec AI competitors with a product of their own to sell. Prices on those pages contradict each other, and some still quote plans that the official pricing pages no longer list.
So what can you trust? The vendors’ own pages, read on the same day, with every number tied to a link. That is what this comparison does. Where a vendor only says “talk to sales,” we say that too, instead of filling the cell with someone else’s guess.
Key Takeaways
Peec AI’s Starter plan costs $95/month for 50 prompts on 3 AI models of your choice (Peec AI pricing), the only paid brand plan of the three listed under $100. Profound offers a free 7-day Trial and then a custom Enterprise plan. AthenaHQ has a free Essential tier and a $295/month Starter plan that covers 11 models through a shared credit pool.
Quick Verdict: Peec AI, Profound or AthenaHQ?
Peec AI is the most transparent of the three, with brand plans from $95/month to $495/month on its pricing page (Peec AI pricing), while Profound publishes no price for ongoing brand tracking and AthenaHQ sits in between. The table below is our reading of the official pages, not a test result.
| If you want… | Pick | Why, from the official pages |
|---|---|---|
| A public price and a self-serve start | Peec AI | Starter $95/month, Pro $245/month, Advanced $495/month, unlimited users on every plan |
| The widest engine list on a self-serve plan | AthenaHQ | Starter lists 11 models, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral |
| A free plan that never expires | AthenaHQ | Essential is listed as free, with 300 credits and 5 engines |
| An enterprise platform with agents and paid-ads tools | Profound | AI Marketer, Agents and Ads Studio; Enterprise tracks up to 9 answer engines |
| Agency pitch audits | Profound or Peec AI | Profound’s Agency Growth includes 10 pitch workspaces a month; Peec’s agency plans include pitch projects |
Does “most transparent” mean “best”? Not on its own. A large brand that needs SSO, many markets and an account team may never look at a self-serve price. The rest of this page shows what each vendor commits to in writing, so you can match it to your own list.
How We Compared Them, and Why We Did Not Test These Three
We read each vendor’s pricing page, product pages, documentation and press releases on October 23, 2026, with a US English browser, and every price we quote appeared in US dollars with no regional offer. We did not open accounts on Profound, Peec AI or AthenaHQ.
Why not? These three were not part of our hands-on round, which covered trackers we could put through one fixed task list on a small marketing website our own team runs. Profound’s Trial also would not have fit that list: its pricing page says Trial users “receive a recommended prompt set based on their industry and cannot customize their prompts” (Profound pricing). Our task list depends on running our own five prompts, so a Profound trial could not have been compared like for like.
Here are the ground rules we used instead:
- Only first-party sources: the vendor’s own pricing page, docs, legal pages and press releases.
- No numbers from third-party comparison pages. Many are written by competing vendors, and their prices contradict each other.
- When a page does not publish something, the cell says so.
- Anything first-person on this page comes from our own test records for other trackers (Otterly.AI, Writesonic and SE Ranking), never from these three.
A note on money: Indie Stack Lab may add affiliate links to some tools later. Affiliate links are labeled, and they do not change what we read or what we wrote down.
Profound at a Glance: Funding, AI Marketer and Who It Is For
Profound is the best-funded of the three: it raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation on September 15, 2026, less than seven months after a $96 million Series C (Profound newsroom). The same release says Profound serves over 1,000 enterprise brands, including more than one third of the Fortune 100.
That money shows in the product direction. Profound started as an analytics tool for AI answers. Its Series C post, dated February 24, 2026, introduced Profound Agents, with Lightspeed Venture Partners leading the round (Profound blog). The Series D release then centers on AI Marketer, an agent that “scans your brand’s data, analyzes AI answers, surfaces critical opportunities, and deploys sub-agents to do the work,” plus Ads Studio for AI search ad campaigns.
What the tracking side includes
The tracking product is called Answer Engine Insights. Profound’s glossary says it runs your prompts daily and turns the answers into seven metrics: Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Average Position, Citation Share, Citation Coverage, Sentiment Score and Accuracy Score (Profound glossary). A related feature, FactCheck, pulls the claims an answer engine makes about your brand and checks them against your own knowledge base.
Profound also sells Prompt Volumes, a dataset of real prompts users send to answer engines. The glossary says the data comes from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, anonymized and aggregated. The Trial includes 5 Prompt Volumes searches; Enterprise is custom.
Plans for brands and agencies
For brands, the pricing page shows only two plans: a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan. Enterprise lists a “Tailored prompt tracking plan,” “Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked,” dedicated support and SSO/SAML with SOC 2 compliance (Profound pricing).
Agencies get a separate tab. Agency Growth includes 10 pitch workspaces a month, each tracking 25 prompts for 7 days, and full client workspaces as an add-on at $399/month each. A client workspace tracks 100 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and includes 400 agent credits a month. Five more pitch workspaces cost $199/month, and the plan includes 5 agency seats (Profound blog, November 11, 2025).
Who is Profound for, then? Large marketing teams that want tracking, content agents and paid AI search ads in one contract. A small team that wants a dashboard and a monthly bill will find no self-serve brand plan to buy.
Peec AI at a Glance: Prompts, Models and Add-Ons
Peec AI is the self-serve option: its pricing page lists three brand plans with public prices, $95, $245 and $495 a month, each with unlimited users and daily tracking (Peec AI pricing). The company behind it is Peec AI GmbH in Berlin, per its legal imprint, and the pricing page says it is “Trusted by 3500+ brands and agencies.”
How Peec collects answers
Peec’s documentation is unusually direct about method. It says Peec “uses UI scraping technology to interact with AI platforms exactly as real users do,” through their web interfaces rather than official APIs (Peec AI docs). The docs add a useful detail: for most platforms, the platform itself decides which model to use and whether to run a web search, “the reality for a logged-out user.”
Why does that matter? Because an API answer and a chat-window answer can cite different sources. If you care about what a typical logged-out visitor sees, that is Peec’s stated design goal. If you need a specific model version, its API reference separates “model channels” from model IDs so history does not break when a model changes.
Plans, models and the add-on math
Each brand plan lets you “Choose 3 models.” The list on the pricing page includes ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. Perplexity appears in the add-on model list. Here is what each plan adds:
- Starter, $95/month: 50 prompts, 1 project, 4,500 AI answers a month.
- Pro, $245/month: 150 prompts, 2 projects, 13,500 AI answers a month.
- Advanced, $495/month: 350 prompts, 5 projects, 31,500 AI answers, multi-country tracking and a Looker Studio integration.
- Enterprise, custom: “Up to 13 LLM models tracked,” API access, SSO and daily or weekly tracking.
Those answer counts follow Peec’s own formula: prompts times active models times days. A fourth model costs $30/month on Starter, $70 on Pro and $140 on Advanced, on annual billing. Peec’s FAQ also offers 15% off for annual billing and says extra countries and languages cost nothing extra.
Agencies get a credit system instead: 1 prompt on 1 model for 1 day is 1 credit (Peec AI docs: Understanding credits). Agency plans run $245/month for 10,000 credits, $495/month for 25,000 and $795/month for 65,000.
AthenaHQ at a Glance: Plans, Credits and Enterprise Features
AthenaHQ prices everything in credits, where “1 credit = 1 AI response,” and its plans page lists a free Essential tier with 300 credits and a Starter plan at $295/month with 3,600 credits (AthenaHQ plans). Annual billing is advertised at 17% off.
The company signs its pages “Forged in San Francisco.” Its about page says the team was “built by leaders from Google Search, DeepMind, and ServiceNow,” with CEO Andrew Yan described as a former Google Search product manager (AthenaHQ about). The platform page claims more than 300 global brands as customers.
What the credits buy
Credits are where AthenaHQ differs most. The credit calculator says ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot cost 1 credit per response. Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral are “heavier so they cost 5 credits per response” (AthenaHQ credit calculator). An optional prompt expansion runs 3 rephrasings of every prompt, which makes each response count 4 times.
The calculator’s formula is prompts × locations × credits per response × days per week × 4.33 weeks. In plain terms, a free Essential account with 300 credits covers 10 prompts across its 5 engines about 6 times, by our arithmetic. That is enough to look around, not to track a trend.
Starter versus Enterprise
Starter lists “Visibility across 11 models,” unlimited topics and prompts, unlimited competitors, country-level support and CSV export. API access and extra credits are paid add-ons on top of the subscription, and the page says to contact AthenaHQ for their price.
Enterprise is custom. These are the AthenaHQ enterprise features the plans page lists:
- Knowledge Base and claim review, plus “Oracle discrepancy detection.”
- The Athena Citation Engine (ACE), marked as a new feature, and the Athena Recommendation Engine.
- SAML and OIDC SSO, and an organization activity audit log.
- Multi-region and multi-language support, plus persona targeting.
- An executive dashboard with BI tool support (Tableau, Power BI, Looker).
- White-glove setup and enablement, plus custom credits, websites and access controls.
The enterprise page also lists a SOC 2 Type II audit dated June 2026 and GDPR compliance (AthenaHQ enterprise). Is AthenaHQ the middle ground, then? On price, yes: a public $295 plan with a wide model list, and a sales-led tier above it.
AI Engines Covered, Side by Side
AthenaHQ’s Starter plan lists the most engines at a public price, 11 models for $295/month, while Peec AI’s self-serve plans track 3 models you pick and Profound’s Enterprise plan tracks “up to 9 Answer Engines” (AthenaHQ plans, Profound pricing). The table shows what each vendor names on its pricing page.
| AI engine | Profound | Peec AI | AthenaHQ |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Trial and Enterprise | One of your 3 picks | Essential and Starter |
| Google AI Overviews | Trial and Enterprise | One of your 3 picks | Essential and Starter |
| Google AI Mode | Enterprise | One of your 3 picks | Starter |
| Gemini | Trial and Enterprise | One of your 3 picks | Essential and Starter |
| Perplexity | Enterprise; agency workspaces | Add-on model or Enterprise | Essential and Starter |
| Microsoft Copilot | Enterprise | One of your 3 picks | Essential and Starter |
| Claude | Enterprise | Enterprise (marked API) | Starter, 5 credits per response |
| DeepSeek | Enterprise | Enterprise (marked API) | Starter, 5 credits per response |
| Grok, Meta AI, Mistral | Not listed | Enterprise (marked API; Meta’s model listed as Meta Spark) | Starter, 5 credits per response |
| Naver AI | Not listed | One of your 3 picks | Not listed |
| Exa Search | Enterprise | Not listed | Not listed |
“Marked API” matters. On Peec’s Enterprise column, Claude Sonnet 4, Grok, DeepSeek and others carry an “API” label, while the docs describe the core method as reading the web interface. So the same engine may be collected two different ways depending on the plan.
Which engines should you pay for? Start with where your buyers already ask questions. In our own Otterly.AI test on five prompts, ChatGPT produced 130 of 244 citations, more than half. A tracker that leaves ChatGPT out would have missed most of that picture. Each engine also picks sources its own way: see how ChatGPT search finds the sources it shows, how Google AI Overviews choose who gets cited and what gets a site cited in Perplexity answers.
Pricing and Prompt Limits Compared
Public entry prices range from $0 for AthenaHQ Essential to $95/month for Peec AI Starter and $295/month for AthenaHQ Starter, while Profound lists no public price for ongoing brand tracking at all (Peec AI pricing, AthenaHQ plans). Here is everything the three pricing pages commit to.
| Profound | Peec AI | AthenaHQ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free option | Trial: 50 prompts daily for 7 days | “Start free trial” button; terms not on the pricing page | Essential: free, 300 credits |
| Entry paid plan | No public brand price | Starter: $95/month, 50 prompts, 3 models | Starter: $295/month, 3,600 credits |
| Higher self-serve tiers | None for brands | Pro $245 (150 prompts), Advanced $495 (350 prompts) | None |
| Top tier | Enterprise, custom | Enterprise, custom | Enterprise, custom |
| Agency pricing | Client workspace $399/month each | Agency plans $245 to $795/month | Not listed on the plans page |
| Seats | Unlimited | Unlimited users | Unlimited |
| Annual discount | Ask sales | 15% | 17% |
| Tracking frequency | Daily | Daily (weekly on Enterprise) | 1 to 7 days a week in the calculator |
What does the same workload cost? Take 50 prompts on 3 standard engines every day. This is our arithmetic, from the vendors’ published formulas:
- Peec AI Starter: exactly that workload, 4,500 AI answers a month, for $95.
- AthenaHQ Starter: the calculator formula gives about 4,547 credits a month, more than the 3,600 included. Starter alone covers about 39 prompts on 3 standard engines every day.
- Profound: the Trial runs 50 prompts on 3 engines for 7 days at no cost; after that, the price comes from sales.
Per answer, Peec Starter works out to about 2 cents ($95 for 4,500 answers) and AthenaHQ Starter to about 8 cents per standard response ($295 for 3,600 credits). AthenaHQ’s number buys a wider engine list, though, and Peec’s price rises once you add a fourth model.
A word on third-party prices. Several comparison pages still quote a self-serve Profound plan for brands. The Profound pricing page we read on October 23, 2026 showed only Trial and Enterprise for brands, so treat any lower Profound brand price as out of date until a sales rep confirms it.
Free Trials and Demos: What You Can Try Before Paying
Profound is the only one of the three that publishes its trial terms in full: 50 prompts run daily for 7 days, across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with limited AI Marketer credits (Profound pricing). The other two are vaguer in different ways.
Profound Trial. Setup is listed as “Instant.” The catch is the prompt set: Trial users get prompts chosen for their industry and cannot edit them. History, exports and the API show “None” on the Trial column. You see what Profound measures, but not your own questions, and you keep nothing when it ends.
Peec AI trial. Every pricing page has a “Start free trial” button, and agency plans add “Or start trial directly.” The pricing pages do not state a length or whether a card is needed. Peec’s terms of use say free or trial access lasts “the period designated by Peec (or if not designated, 30 days)” (Peec AI terms of use). Check the sign-up screen before you assume either number.
AthenaHQ Essential. This is a free tier, not a countdown. It includes 300 credits and 5 engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. AthenaHQ’s terms add that when a subscription includes a trial, “the trial length, price after the trial, and deadline to avoid a charge will be shown before you enroll” (AthenaHQ terms).
What about demos? All three push larger buyers toward a call: Profound’s “Get a Demo,” Peec’s “Talk to Sales” and AthenaHQ’s “Book a Demo.” If you book one, bring your own prompt list. A demo built on the vendor’s sample brand tells you how the dashboard looks, not how your market looks.
How Each Tool Defines Visibility
Profound and Peec AI both report a “Visibility Score,” but they divide by different numbers: Peec divides responses that mention your brand by all responses (Peec AI docs), while Profound divides by responses that mention at least one brand (Profound glossary). The same data can give two different scores.
Here’s a quick example with made-up numbers. Say a tool runs 10 answers, 4 of them name no brand at all, and your brand appears in 3:
- Peec AI’s formula: 3 of 10 responses, so 30%.
- Profound’s formula: 3 of the 6 responses that mention any brand, so 50%.
Neither is wrong. So which one should you trust? Both, as long as you know what each one measures. Peec’s tells you how often a buyer sees you at all. Profound’s tells you how you do when the answer recommends someone. Just never put the two numbers side by side in a report as if they meant the same thing.
Share of voice differs too. Profound’s glossary defines it as responses mentioning your brand divided by total brand mentions across all responses. AthenaHQ’s plans page lists “real-time brand sentiment intelligence” and competitor benchmarking, but the pages we read did not publish a formula. Ask for it in the demo.
What a Tracker Report Looks Like: Lessons From the Trackers We Did Test
Our own first reports, from Otterly.AI and Writesonic on October 21, 2026, both showed a 0% score for our small site, and neither held more than one day of data. We did not test Profound, Peec AI or AthenaHQ, but these lessons apply to any tracker you trial.
Setup rules can force your prompt list. When we tested Otterly.AI, onboarding would not continue until exactly 15 prompts were selected, even though the page only said it “recommends” 15. We kept our five and added ten suggestions. Writesonic had no minimum but pre-selected 24 suggested prompts that we had to clear by hand. Profound’s Trial goes further and picks the prompts for you.
The first report takes a while. Otterly’s pages said “Today’s data is still processing” for several minutes before the first report appeared. Peec’s own quickstart gives similar advice: “Let your prompts run for a couple of days before diving deep into analysis” (Peec AI quickstart).
Trial reports can be partial. Writesonic’s onboarding report showed only one full AI answer before a “View Plans” button. Read the trial column of any pricing page closely: Profound’s Trial lists no history and no exports.
A 0% score is a starting line. Otterly counted 244 citations across our five prompts, and none pointed to our site. Writesonic ranked us 6th of 6 brands. One detail made us smile: tryprofound.com was among the pages Writesonic saw cited for our GEO prompts. The vendors themselves write a lot of the content these engines quote.
Will a paid enterprise tool behave differently? The dashboards look richer, but the first-week limits are the same: one day of data shows a level, never a trend. The full prompt-by-prompt counts are in our side-by-side test of Otterly.AI and Writesonic.
Which One Fits Which Team: Agencies, Brands and Startups
The fit follows the pricing model more than the feature list: Peec AI starts at $95/month with self-serve plans, AthenaHQ adds a free tier and a $295 plan, and Profound reserves ongoing brand tracking for Enterprise contracts (Peec AI pricing, AthenaHQ plans, Profound pricing). The matches below are our judgment from those pages.
Agencies pitching new clients. Profound’s Agency Growth gives 10 pitch workspaces a month and charges $399/month per live client workspace. Peec’s agency plans use one credit pool across clients, from $245/month, and include pitch projects. If you manage many small clients, Peec’s pooled credits are easier to budget. If your clients are large brands that already know Profound, its agency mode may help you win the pitch.
Brands with an enterprise buying process. Profound fits when you need SOC 2, SSO, an account team and agents that produce content. AthenaHQ Enterprise covers similar ground, with BI dashboards, audit logs and white-glove setup. If your shortlist is AthenaHQ vs Profound, ask both for a pilot on your own prompts. Plan for a sales cycle with either.
Startups and small marketing teams. Peec AI Starter or AthenaHQ Essential is the realistic start. Peec gives you 50 daily prompts on 3 models for $95. AthenaHQ gives you a free look across 5 engines, then $295 for 11 models.
Teams that care about a specific engine. Check the engine table first. Naver AI is only on Peec’s list, Exa Search only on Profound’s, and Grok, Meta AI and Mistral only reach a self-serve plan at AthenaHQ.
Still unsure which camp you are in? Count your prompts. Under 50, any of the three is overkill on paper, and a cheaper tracker may do.
Cheaper Profound AI Alternatives We Tested, and Profound vs Semrush
If you mainly want Peec AI alternatives or Profound AI alternatives at a smaller price, the trackers we did test start lower: Otterly.AI Lite is $29/month for 15 prompts, and Writesonic’s Starter is $79/month billed annually for 50 prompts. Our comparison of four AI search visibility tools lines up their engines, trials and per-prompt costs, and our list of AI SEO tools worth paying for, and the ones to skip covers audit and writing tools beyond tracking.
Here is what each one showed us on a small marketing website our own team runs:
- Otterly.AI: a 7-day trial with no card and 50 prompts, plus ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot in the base product.
- Writesonic: a 7-day trial of the paid Starter plan, no card, tracking ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Our review of Writesonic’s AI search tracking covers the trial’s automatic-upgrade banner.
- SE Ranking: a 14-day trial with no card and 20 tracked AI prompts next to 750 keywords. Project setup would not launch without at least one prompt. See what SE Ranking’s 14-day trial includes, and SE Ranking’s Core and Growth plans and trial limits for the prices after it.
What about Profound vs Semrush? Semrush’s knowledge base says Prompt Tracking for ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Gemini needs the AI Visibility Toolkit (Semrush KB: Prompt Tracking), which costs $99/month for 25 prompts and “does not currently offer a free trial” (Semrush KB: AI Visibility Toolkit). On our free Semrush account, ChatGPT and Gemini appeared in the Position Tracking engine picker, but prompt tracking stayed behind the paid toolkit. Our overview of Semrush’s AI features explains where that toolkit sits.
So Semrush suits teams that already pay for it and want AI prompts next to keyword data. Profound suits teams that want AI visibility to drive agents and content. They answer different budgets more than different questions. And if you are new to the whole field, start with our guide to generative engine optimization, then come back.
Before You Book a Demo: A Short Checklist
Before you talk to any of these vendors, write down your prompts, your engines and your budget, because those three numbers decided every row of the comparison tables above and they will decide the quote you get. Peec AI’s own quickstart asks new users to start with 10 prompts (Peec AI quickstart), which is a sensible first list size.
Take these questions into the call:
- Which engines are in my plan, and which cost extra? Get the list in writing, including whether each one is read from the web interface or an API.
- How is Visibility calculated? Ask for the formula, then compare it with the two definitions on this page.
- What happens when the trial ends? Ask about history, exports and whether a card is charged.
- Can I use my own prompts from day one? Profound’s Trial says no; ask whether a paid pilot can.
- What does one more market cost? Peec says extra countries cost nothing; AthenaHQ’s calculator multiplies credits per location.
Want to know what to do once the tracker shows a gap? Our guide on how to rank in ChatGPT covers the content side, and our guide to what to check before you hire a GEO agency helps if you would rather hire the work out.
References
- Profound: Pricing
- Profound: Agencies, launch your AEO practice with Profound
- Profound: Series C announcement
- Profound: Series D press release
- Profound: Glossary
- Peec AI: Pricing for brands
- Peec AI: Pricing for agencies
- Peec AI docs: Welcome to Peec AI
- Peec AI docs: Quickstart guide
- Peec AI docs: Visibility
- Peec AI docs: Understanding credits
- Peec AI: Terms of use
- AthenaHQ: Plans and pricing
- AthenaHQ: Credit calculator
- AthenaHQ: About
- AthenaHQ: Platform
- AthenaHQ: Enterprise
- AthenaHQ: Terms of service
- Semrush KB: Prompt Tracking
- Semrush KB: AI Visibility Toolkit
- MarTech Series: Scribewise and Scrunch 2026 AI search survey