AEO Tools for Answer Engine Optimization: Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch (Official)
What each AEO vendor officially sells, read from its own site and published pricing, and why we run client answer engine programs on Promptwatch.
When a client sends us a shortlist of AEO tools, it is usually the four names in this title, with a request for a recommendation by Friday. We answer it the same way every time. We read what each vendor officially sells, on its own site, at its own published price. Then we ask one question: can this product run an answer engine optimization program, or can it only report on one?
That question matters more than the logo. Answer engine optimization is the work of getting a brand named and cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and the rest. Monitoring is step one. A real program also has to know whether the AI crawlers can read your pages, which sources the engines lean on, whether any of it sends visitors, and who writes the page that closes the gap.
Below is our read in the order we would evaluate these tools for a client. The platform we run client programs on is Promptwatch, so it goes first. We explain why instead of assuming it.
How we read an official vendor page
We ignore the hero copy and go straight to the pricing page. The plan a client can actually afford decides which engines they get, how many prompts they can load, and whether anything beyond a dashboard is included. A vendor that lists ten engines on the homepage and one on the entry plan is selling the entry plan.
We also note what the page does not say. If a crawler log, a conversion report or a publishing workflow is not on the official site, we treat it as absent until the vendor shows us otherwise.
Promptwatch: the program, not only the report
Promptwatch positions itself as an AI search visibility and GEO platform built around agents that monitor, optimize and publish. The pricing page backs that up with numbers. Essential is $95 a month with a 7-day trial: 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, 200K visitor events and 5 AEO articles. Professional is $245 a month and is the first brand plan with crawler logs, 25M of them, plus 150 prompts across 2 projects. For our own roster we use the agency plans, starting with Kick-off at $199 a month for unlimited projects and prompts and 10 seats.
What we actually open during a program:
- Prompt tracking with search volumes, difficulty scores and query fan-outs, so we prioritize questions people ask instead of guessing.
- Citation analytics at page and domain level, including Reddit, YouTube and offsite mentions.
- Agent Analytics, the AI crawler log, which shows whether the bot fetched the page we want cited.
- Visitor analytics through a script or GTM template, so AI-referred sessions and conversions sit next to the prompt data.
- Content Agents, which draft and publish to Webflow or Framer with a review inbox.
Monitoring runs on the real interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and the others, plus Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, rather than an API sample. That is the answer a buyer sees, which is the answer we want to measure.
Scrunch AI: monitoring plus pages served to crawlers
Scrunch AI officially pairs multi-engine visibility monitoring with an Agent Experience Platform that serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to LLM crawlers without changing the human site. That is a genuine optimization lever, and it is why Scrunch ranks second on our list.
Published pricing starts at $250 a month billed annually ($300 monthly) for Starter, with 3 seats and 350 custom plus 1,000 industry prompts. Growth is $417 a month annually ($500 monthly). Engine coverage scales up to nine on Enterprise, which is custom priced. What the official materials do not publish is visitor analytics that tie AI-referred traffic to conversions, or a CMS content workflow. If a client already owns Scrunch, we keep it and add the measurement layer beside it.
Profound: marketing agents with AI search as one channel
Profound still runs scheduled prompts and reports citation share and share of voice. Its current official pitch is broader, though: marketing agents covering AEO and SEO, content and demand, and PR.
The published ladder is the catch. Starter is $99 a month billed yearly and covers ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and 1 seat. Growth is $399 a month yearly for three engines and 100 prompts. The full agent suite, the wide engine list (up to 10), the Prompt Volumes dataset and API access sit on Enterprise, which starts around $40k a year. A mid-market brand evaluating Profound for answer engine work is really evaluating that Enterprise contract.
Otterly.AI and Peec AI: entry trackers
Otterly.AI Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts on four base engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Gemini, Claude and AI Mode are paid add-ons from $9 to $149 a month depending on tier. Standard is $189 a month for 100 prompts.
Peec AI Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts, 3 models and 1 project. Extra models cost $35 to $165 a month each, and Claude and DeepSeek are Enterprise-only.
Both are honest monitoring products. Neither publishes an AI crawler log, AI-referred conversion analytics or content publishing. For an AEO program that makes them the first of several tools a client would need.
Side by side, from the official pages
| Vendor | Published entry price | Beyond monitoring, per official pages |
|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Free Explore; Essential $95/mo | Crawler logs (Professional up), visitor conversions, Content Agents |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo annual | Agent Experience Platform for crawlers |
| Profound | $99/mo annual, ChatGPT only | Marketing agents on Enterprise |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | Monitoring and GEO audits |
| Peec AI | $95/mo, 3 models | Monitoring |
How we choose for a client
If the brief says "tell us whether we appear," any of these can answer it, and the cheapest one that covers the right engines is a fair pick. Most briefs do not stay there. Within a month the questions become why a competitor gets the citation, whether ChatGPT's crawler ever fetched the page we rewrote, and whether the traffic converts.
Those questions need the crawl, the citation and the visit in one place. The deciding factor for us is usually the crawler logs and the visitor analytics, because the trackers on this list do not publish them and we cannot run a program without them. That is why our client work runs on Promptwatch. If you want us to run the program itself, write to hello@1001seomedia.com with your shortlist and five prompts your buyers ask.