Peec AI is a standalone AI visibility tracker with wider engine choice, deeper data and agency packaging, and it does not write content. HubSpot AEO is a low-cost three-engine beta, and its content generation and CRM-based prompts only work inside Marketing Hub. DeepSmith tracks AI answers and produces the publish-ready articles in one self-serve plan, with no marketing-suite subscription.
If you are choosing between Peec AI vs HubSpot AEO, the first thing to settle is what you want the tool to do after it tells you where you stand. Peec AI stops at tracking and recommendations. HubSpot AEO goes further, but only for teams that pay for Marketing Hub, which starts at $800 a month billed annually. DeepSmith sits beside both as a platform that tracks and writes on its own plans.
Peec AI vs HubSpot AEO: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and article production in one self-serve plan, from $99 a month, with publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
- Choose Peec AI if you only need tracking, you want more engine choice and data such as position and query fan-out, or you run several client brands.
- Choose HubSpot AEO if you want the cheapest entry point ($50 a month) for three engines, or you already pay for Marketing Hub and want content drafts inside HubSpot.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Peec AI | HubSpot AEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $95/mo (Starter) | $50/mo (standalone) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | $80/mo (seen Sept 4, 2026) | $45/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 50 | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 3 of your choice | 3 (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 13 (Enterprise) | 3 |
| Free trial | 7 days | Yes, length not listed | 28 days, no card |
| Position tracking | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Writes full articles | Yes | No | Partial, Marketing Hub only |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes, five CMSs | Not listed | Partial, HubSpot blog only |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Multiple brands in one account | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| SOC 2 report | Yes | No | Yes, platform-wide |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.4/5 on G2 |
Pricing and features as of October 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Peec AI
Peec AI is a Berlin-based AI search analytics tool founded in January 2025. It runs your tracked prompts through AI engines every day and reports visibility, position, sentiment, share of voice and the sources each answer cites. Peec says it collects answers by scraping the consumer interfaces of the engines, with infrastructure in each country, and it stores the raw answers so you can read them. It is built for SEO and content teams and for agencies, and it is the stronger pick of the two when you want depth.
The standout is how much sits on the entry plan. Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts, three active models and unlimited users, and it already includes query fan-out, source analytics, AI shopping, an ads view, crawler analytics and an MCP server. Agencies get their own plans, starting at $245 a month with a shared credit pool and unlimited client seats.
The real limitation is that Peec has no content creation inside the product. Its own Actions FAQ says you still create the content yourself, and rewriting a page is only described through an outside assistant connected over MCP. Self-serve plans also cap you at three active models, and Perplexity costs an add-on. Peec also has no SOC 2 report that we could verify.
Reviewers like it. G2 shows 4.8/5 from 20 reviews as of late September 2026, with praise for the interface, quick setup and support. A few reviewers describe the recommendations as generic, and 20 reviews is a small base.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot launched HubSpot AEO in April 2026, after acquiring XFunnel in December 2025, and it still carries a beta label. It runs a set of tracked prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and reports a brand visibility score, sentiment on a scale of -100 to +100, share of voice, and citations at domain and URL level, including which of your own pages get cited. Recommendations come with a priority and a projected citation lift, and a site audit checks structured data, canonicals and crawlability.
The standout is the price and the low barrier. The standalone product is $50 a month ($45 billed annually) with no other HubSpot subscription needed, and the 28-day trial needs no card. Reviewers on G2 call it easy to set up and use.
The real limitations are scope and packaging. It covers three engines, includes 25 prompts, and supports one domain per setup, so each extra brand needs another $50 a month instance. HubSpot does not document agency features, crawler analytics, query fan-out or shopping tracking. The pages also do not say how answers are collected or which model versions run.
G2 lists HubSpot AEO at 4.4/5 from 145 reviews as of September 30, 2026. Reviewers mention the 25-prompt cap, the missing Claude coverage and recommendations that read as generic.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes without a marketing suite
Neither tool in this pair gives you a self-serve path from a visibility gap to a published article. Peec AI has no content creation at all. HubSpot AEO can draft a blog post from a recommendation, but only on Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, and the draft opens in the HubSpot blog editor. If your site lives somewhere else, you copy and paste it. DeepSmith closes that gap on its own plans.
DeepSmith is an AI search analytics and content production platform in one. The AEO module checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a competitor leaderboard, per-prompt answer history and a Pages view that shows which of your pages AI actually cites. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, and each idea carries the data point that justifies it. The ideas move through New Ideas and Planned Content into the Writer, which produces a researched, internally and externally linked article with a cover image and publish-ready metadata.
The output is publish-ready, and every article is grounded in Deep IQ, where your company, products, personas, brand voice, visual guidelines and content types are stored once and used by every run. Autowrite can write an article on its scheduled date with nobody in the app. From Produced Content you publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks. Repurpose adds the social posts and channel versions, so distribution is part of the same flow.
DeepSmith also gives developers read access, with a REST API and an MCP server that works with Claude, Claude Code, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor and others. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2. Multi-Workspace runs multiple brands or clients from one account, each with its own context.
Plans start at $99 a month (Pro: 20 articles, 50 prompts, 5 seats, ChatGPT), then $199 (Grow: 40 articles, 100 prompts, ChatGPT and Perplexity) and $399 (Scale: 90 articles, 200 prompts, adds Gemini), with annual billing at $80, $160 and $299. Enterprise covers all ten engines. Every plan has a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
Engine coverage
Peec AI has the wider coverage between the two. Its self-serve plans let you pick three active models from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, and Enterprise adds Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and more, with Perplexity as a paid add-on ($30, $70 or $140 a month billed annually) on the lower plans. The Enterprise plan card says up to 13 models.
HubSpot AEO tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on every plan, and nothing else. Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot and Claude are not listed, and G2 reviewers ask for Claude. If your buyers use Google's AI surfaces, that is a real gap, though the three engines it does cover are among the most used.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises with the plan. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten.
Tracking depth and data method
Peec AI wins on depth. It reports average position inside an answer, shows the sub-queries engines ran through its Query Fanouts page, stores raw answers in a Chats table, and separates sources that were used from sources that were cited. It also tracks AI shopping and ads (the ads view is ChatGPT only for now), and Agent Analytics reads AI bot visits from log sources such as Cloudflare, Vercel and AWS. HubSpot AEO documents none of position, fan-out, shopping, ads or crawler analytics.
HubSpot AEO does cover the core metrics well: visibility, sentiment, share of voice, competitor comparison and citations down to your own pages. Its limit is transparency. The pages do not say whether answers come from model APIs or consumer interfaces, or how long answers are kept, and HubSpot tells users to treat the first few weeks as directional. AI answers vary from run to run, so a short history is worth reading with care for any tool.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and visibility trend, keeps full answer history per prompt, and shows which of your pages earn citations and which competitor pages win them. Because the same data feeds Opportunity Agents, the gaps it finds turn into ideas with evidence attached.
Agency and multi-brand setups
Peec AI wins here, clearly. Its agency plans use a credit pool shared across client projects, give unlimited client seats with consolidated billing, and let you run free 7-day pitch projects to audit a prospect. The agency tiers run from $245 to $795 a month, and brand plans include one to five projects before Enterprise goes unlimited.
HubSpot AEO supports one owned domain per setup. More brands mean prompt groups, the Brands add-on or another $50 a month instance, and HubSpot documents no client workspaces, white-label reporting or agency program for AEO.
Pricing and value
HubSpot AEO vs Peec AI on price is a split result. HubSpot has the lower entry price at $50 a month against $95, and a longer trial. Peec gives you more for its money at the same level, with 50 prompts and 4,500 monthly answers against HubSpot's 25 prompts and 2,500 answers, so the cost per prompt is close to even. More HubSpot capacity costs $20 a month for each 10 prompts.
The bigger number sits behind the content features. Blog generation and CRM-based prompt suggestions need Marketing Hub Professional, at $800 a month billed annually ($890 monthly) plus a $3,000 one-time onboarding fee, or Enterprise from $3,600 a month plus $7,000. Each generated post also uses 1,000 HubSpot Credits. Peec's cost is the tracking plan plus whatever you spend on writing the content somewhere else.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes its prices and puts tracking and production on the same plan. Pro at $99 a month includes 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, and Scale at $399 includes 90 articles and 200 prompts. There is no onboarding fee, no marketing-suite subscription and no long-term contract.
From insight to action
This is where the question in the title gets answered. Peec AI vs HubSpot AEO without Marketing Hub is a comparison of two trackers that hand you recommendations and stop there. Peec's Actions rank on-page and off-page tasks by a relative opportunity score, and HubSpot's recommendations carry a priority and projected citation lift. In both cases you take the next step yourself.
With Marketing Hub, HubSpot adds a real path: a recommendation becomes a researched blog draft in your brand voice, plus CRM-based prompt suggestions. For HubSpot AEO this is the only route to content, so the answer to the title is yes, you need Marketing Hub for the content features. Peec has no equivalent at any price, and both tools can feed an outside assistant, Peec through its MCP server and HubSpot through its connector for Claude and ChatGPT.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith moves from the gap to the published page inside one product. An Opportunity Agent finds the gap and attaches the evidence, the Writer produces the article grounded in Deep IQ, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS. Repurpose then turns the article into LinkedIn posts, newsletter emails and other channel versions in the same voice.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams and agencies that want one platform to see where they appear in AI answers, decide what to write from that evidence, and publish the articles that close the gaps, without buying a marketing suite first.
- Peec AI fits teams that already have a content process and want the deepest tracking for the money, such as position, fan-out and crawler data, and agencies that need client workspaces and pitch projects.
- HubSpot AEO fits a team that wants a cheap first look at three engines, and Marketing Hub customers who want drafts and CRM-based prompts inside HubSpot.
Peec AI or HubSpot AEO comes down to whether you need depth and agency features, which points to Peec, or the lowest price and a HubSpot-native workflow, which points to HubSpot.
Start a free trial of DeepSmith at app.deepsmith.ai and see tracking and writing run from the same data.
