AI visibility tools compared: Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch, Semrush, Ahrefs — and us

Name: BusinessMCP
Brand: BusinessMCP

Seven ways to learn whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI recommend you: every price checked on 2026-09-15, and where each tool loses, us included.

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Price: Otterly from $29 · Semrush toolkit $99 · Peec from €70 · Profound $99–$399 · Ahrefs Brand Radar from $199 · Scrunch from $250 · BusinessMCP grounded from $79, free recall
Switching gets you: BusinessMCP: up to 5 grounded engines with 95% intervals, cited domains, crawler hits and the AI channel in your own analytics + CRM, month-to-month.
Stay with AI visibility tools if: You need daily data, 7–9 engines, prompt-volume estimates, hundreds of prompts or an SEO suite around it; a specialist or a suite add-on fits better.

Feature comparison — pricing verified September 2026. Sources: public pricing pages + published teardowns.
	BusinessMCP	Profound	Peec AI	Otterly.AI	Scrunch AI	Semrush / Ahrefs add-ons
Entry price	Free (recall); $79/mo grounded	$99/mo yearly	€70/mo annual	$29/mo	$250/mo annual	$99/mo (Semrush) · $199/mo (Ahrefs)
Engines measured	Up to 5	1 / 3 / up to 9	3 of 7 (add-ons extra)	4 (+3 add-ons)	7	4 (Semrush) · 7 (Ahrefs)
Cadence	Weekly, multi-sample	Daily (Growth+)	Daily	Daily	Daily	Daily (Semrush) · index-based (Ahrefs)
Confidence intervals on every rate	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Prompt-volume estimates	No	Conversation research	No	No	Industry prompts	Yes (475M-prompt index at Ahrefs)
Cited third-party domains list	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
AI-crawler hit tracking	Yes	Higher tiers	No	No	Yes	No
Bundled with analytics + CRM	Yes	No	No	No	No	SEO suite, no CRM
Contract	Monthly	Yearly	Annual (monthly +~20%)	Monthly	Annual (monthly +20%)	Annual (Semrush) · monthly (Ahrefs)

The full picture

A year ago "AI visibility" meant a spreadsheet and a lot of pasting into ChatGPT. Now there is a category: standalone trackers (Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch AI) that probe the answer engines on a schedule and report mentions, citations, position and sentiment, plus add-ons from the SEO suites (Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar) that lean on their prompt databases. Prices run from $29 to enterprise custom, and the differences that matter are which engines are included, how often they run, how many prompts you get, and whether the statistics are honest about sample size.

BusinessMCP belongs in the comparison because it measures the same thing — grounded probes across Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude — but as one module of a first-party analytics + CRM platform, weekly rather than daily, with a 95% confidence interval on every rate. Below is what each tool costs today, what it covers, and where each one, including us, is the wrong choice.

The tools, honestly assessed

Choose Profound if…

You are mid-market or enterprise, want up to nine platforms, daily runs, agent credits and an SLA, and can commit to $399 per month billed yearly or a custom contract. It is the deepest standalone product.

Choose Peec AI if…

You want a clean, EU-built standalone dashboard with a choice of three engines from seven (Copilot and Grok included), multi-country tracking, and agency workspaces, from €70 per month billed annually.

Choose Otterly.AI if…

You want the cheapest credible start: $29 per month for 15 prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, daily, with Gemini and AI Mode available as add-ons and API/MCP access on paid tiers.

Choose Scrunch AI if…

You want breadth on a self-serve card: seven platforms including Claude and Meta AI, 350 custom plus 1,000 industry prompts, and crawler analytics, from $250 per month billed annually ($300 monthly).

Choose Semrush or Ahrefs if…

You already live in one suite. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 per month per domain billed annually (25 prompts, daily) and is bundled into Semrush One from $199; Ahrefs Brand Radar starts at $199 per month and ranks prompts by estimated volume from a 475M-prompt index — the one number none of the standalones give you.

Choose BusinessMCP if…

You want visibility measured with confidence intervals, next to the crawler hits and AI-referral traffic it should eventually produce, in the same tool as your analytics, CRM and AI business analyst — and you can live with weekly cadence, five engines and 15–40 questions.

Real data, not a mockup

What it looks like in BusinessMCP

Recorded on our own site, PII scrubbed — the same product you get on the free plan.

app.businessmcp.com/insights

Today's insights

4 from the daily analysis · Sep 22

Risk

Visitors are getting frustrated on /

17% of clicks on / are rage or dead clicks (32 of 184, 6 people) — a sign of broken, unresponsive or misleading UI.

Ask the analyst

Opportunity

18 "striking distance" keywords to win

You rank on page 1–2 (pos 5–20) for 18 queries with real impressions — e.g. "skills directory" at position 11. Small on-page moves could push these into the top 3.

Opportunity

HubSpot is cited 26 points more often than you

Across your tracked prompts, AI answers name HubSpot in 48% of grounded answers vs your 22% — and 1 other tracked brand also out-rank you. The sources those answers cite are the fastest lever.

Anomaly

Visitors jumped 58%

visitors moved from 118 to 186 week-over-week.

Runs every morning, on every plan. Real cards from our own workspace.

Side-by-side pricing (verified 2026-09-15)

Plan	Price	Notes
Profound	$99 / $399/mo billed yearly; enterprise custom	1 engine (Starter) or 3 (Growth); up to 9 on enterprise; daily
Peec AI	€70 / €180 / €360/mo billed annually	€85 / €205 / €425 monthly; 50 / 150 / 350 prompts; choose 3 engines; extras are add-ons
Otterly.AI	$29 / $189 / $489/mo; enterprise from $1,000	15 / 100 / 400 prompts; 4 engines; Gemini, AI Mode, Claude as add-ons; daily
Scrunch AI	$250 / $417/mo billed annually ($300 / $500 monthly)	350 / 700 custom prompts; 7 platforms incl. Claude and Meta AI; enterprise custom
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit	$99/mo per domain billed annually	25 prompts, daily; ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity; also inside Semrush One from $199/mo
Ahrefs Brand Radar	From $199/mo ($398 select / $699 all platforms on the product page)	prompt volume from a 475M-prompt index; core plans from $129 include 5–20 prompts
BusinessMCP	Free (recall) · $79 / $199 / $499/mo grounded	2 / 4 / 5 engines included; 15 / 25 / 40 questions; weekly with intervals; analytics + CRM included

Peec and Otterly render pricing client-side, so their figures are cross-checked against published August 2026 teardowns. Ahrefs publishes two different Brand Radar entry prices on two pages; both are listed. All engine counts are the vendors’ own claims.

Where BusinessMCP is NOT the right choice

An alternatives page you can trust has to cut both ways. Honestly:

We measure five answer engines at most (Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude). Profound’s enterprise tier tracks up to nine platforms and Scrunch adds Meta AI; nobody, including us, can probe Copilot or Bing since Microsoft retired those APIs in 2025.
We measure weekly, not daily. Profound Growth, Otterly and Semrush’s toolkit re-run prompts every day. If you need to see a change within 24 hours of shipping a page, they are faster.
Sample sizes on the cheaper plans are small, so the intervals are wide. Zero mentions in five Gemini answers still leaves a 95% upper bound near 28% — we print that interval instead of a false-precision "0%", which some people find less satisfying than a single number.
We do not estimate prompt volume. Ahrefs Brand Radar ranks prompts against a 475M-prompt database and Semrush ships prompt research; we tell you whether you are cited for the questions you chose to track, not how often people ask them.
There is no AEO content writer or page-recommendation engine here. We surface the third-party domains the engines cite so you know where to earn placements; writing the content is on you.
Free and Starter measure AI recall only — whether a model knows the brand from training data — because those plans include no web-grounded engine. A grounded citation rate starts on Growth, or on any plan once you connect your own OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic key.
API answers are not what a person sees in the chat UI (published overlap studies put brand agreement well under 100%). Every tool in this category has that caveat; we label the numbers directional rather than pretend otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?

Otterly.AI Lite at $29 per month (15 prompts, four engines, daily). BusinessMCP’s free plan measures AI recall at no cost but includes no web-grounded engine; Semrush’s toolkit is $99 per month per domain billed annually.

Which tool tracks the most engines?

Profound’s enterprise tier claims up to nine platforms; Scrunch AI lists seven on self-serve including Claude and Meta AI; Ahrefs indexes seven; Peec offers seven but includes three per plan. BusinessMCP measures five at most (AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude) and skips Copilot and Grok deliberately.

Do any of these tools show confidence intervals?

Of the seven compared here, only BusinessMCP prints a 95% Wilson interval on every rate. The others report point estimates, which is fine at high prompt volume and misleading at fifteen prompts checked once.

Is a daily cadence better than weekly?

Daily gives faster feedback after a change; weekly with several samples per engine gives a more reliable estimate for the same budget. If you ship content and want to see the effect tomorrow, pick a daily tool. If you want to know whether visibility genuinely moved this month, sample size matters more than frequency.

Do API answers match what people see in ChatGPT?

Not fully. Published overlap studies show brand agreement between API responses and the chat UI well below 100%, and every tool on this page — BusinessMCP included — measures through APIs or a data vendor. Treat all of these numbers as directional; your first-party AI-referral traffic is the audited figure.

Other honest alternatives

Profound alternative (deep dive)

What $99 and $399 billed yearly buy, and where enterprise lands.

Compare

Peec AI alternative (deep dive)

The post-August-2026 EUR ladder and the three-engine cap.

Compare

Otterly.AI alternative (deep dive)

The $29 entry point and its add-on engines.

Compare

Sources & verification

Every price on this page traces to a public source, last verified September 15, 2026. Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll re-verify.

Keep reading

AI visibility: what we measure and how Generative engine optimization (GEO), explained AI visibility metrics that actually mean something Prompt research: finding the questions buyers ask Grade your site’s AI readiness (free tool)

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