Peec vs Otterly: Which Lightweight AEO Tracker Wins?

Two products come up repeatedly when a content team decides to start measuring AI search visibility without signing an enterprise contract. Peec sells prompt-led analytics for marketing teams and agencies, starting at $95 per month. Otterly sells monitoring of brand mentions and cited links, starting at $29 per month. The peec vs otterly decision is usually framed as a price question, and that framing hides the more useful distinction: the two products measure different things, and each entry plan buys a different amount of room to work in.

This peec alternative comparison examines both on entry price, prompt capacity, engine coverage, analytics depth, agency reporting, and what happens after the dashboard reports a gap. It also places DeepSmith beside them, because a lightweight AEO tracker answers a question that most teams cannot act on without a second system.

The three options at a glance

What a lightweight AEO tracker actually measures

A lightweight AEO tracker answers four practical questions without an implementation project: which buyer prompts were monitored, whether the brand was named, which pages or domains were used as sources, and how that performance moved against competitors. The two products weight those questions differently, so the comparison only becomes clear once the terms are separated.

A mention records that the brand appeared in an AI answer. A citation records that a page or domain was used as a source for that answer. A brand can be mentioned without its site being cited, and a site can be cited without holding the first link position. Sentiment asks whether the answer described the brand enthusiastically, with caveats, or dismissively. Share of voice compares visibility against a named competitor set. A GEO audit is a diagnostic on a page's retrievability, not evidence that the page will be cited.

The buying question is therefore not which product lists more engines. It is whether the team needs a cheap monitoring net, a deeper analytics and reporting workflow, or a loop that runs from measurement through to published content.

Peec: prompt-led analytics for brands and agencies

Peec positions itself as AI search analytics for marketing teams and agencies, and its workflow is organized around prompts rather than keywords. A user adds or discovers prompts that represent real questions in the category, tags them, adds the brand and its competitors, selects the models to run against, and then reads visibility, position, sentiment, and sources over repeated runs. AI-suggested prompts and search-volume information are offered to help prioritize which questions are worth tracking.

Peec runs those prompts daily and analyzes them over time on the stated reasoning that answers vary from one day to the next. Collection uses interface scraping and browser automation rather than model APIs alone. The rationale Peec gives is that a logged-out user sees the interface, not the API, and that some systems expose little or no public API at all. That methodology is a genuine differentiator, and it carries its own caveat: measurements should be read as repeated observations of a user-like experience, not as a fixed ranking, since interfaces and access conditions change.

Starter is $95 per month for 50 prompts, one project, one country, unlimited users, daily tracking, and a choice of three models. Pro is $245 per month for 150 prompts, and Advanced is $495 per month for 350 prompts. Annual billing is advertised as saving about 15 percent, though the current pricing page does not expose the resulting dollar figures. Additional models are sold as an add-on at $35 per month on Starter, $85 on Pro, and $165 on Advanced.

Peec's agency side is a separate product architecture rather than a relabeled brand plan. Agency plans are sold in credits, where one credit is one prompt tracked on one model for one day, with published allocations of 10,000 credits on Essential, 25,000 on Growth, and 65,000 on Scale. Weekly tracking consumes roughly a third of what daily tracking consumes, and the agency material states a minimum of 900 credits per project. The agency pages describe unlimited seats, client projects, branded read-only dashboards, Looker Studio, CSV, API, and MCP workflows. The dollar prices for those agency plans are not displayed on the current page, which is worth knowing before an agency builds a budget around them.

Otterly: mention, citation, and link monitoring at the lowest entry price

Otterly positions itself as AI search monitoring and optimization, and its emphasis is surveillance rather than interpretation. It researches prompts from a keyword, brand name, or URL, tracks brand mentions, tracks every cited domain and URL including changes in link position, benchmarks the brand against competitors through Brand Reports and domain ranking, analyzes sentiment, and runs GEO audits with crawlability and content checks. Link and URL citations are checked daily, and the product supports more than 65 countries and languages.

Lite is $29 per month, or $25 per month billed annually, and that price buys 15 search prompts, four included engines, unlimited team members, one workspace, three recommendations per week, 1,000 GEO audits per month, daily tracking, and detailed reports with export. Standard is $189 per month, or $160 annually, for 100 prompts, unlimited workspaces and recommendations, 5,000 GEO URL audits, the Looker Studio connector, 2,000 API requests, 2,000 MCP requests, and 200,000 Agent Analytics events per month. Premium is $489 per month, or $422 annually, for 400 prompts and higher allowances across the same features. Enterprise is custom, starting from $1,000 per month in the published material.

The entry price is the lowest in this comparison by a wide margin, and the constraint that bounds it is capacity. Fifteen search prompts is a narrow window on a category, and the plan cannot be extended: the 100-prompt add-on batches, priced at $99 per month, are available on Standard and Premium only. The four engines included at Lite are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini are sold as add-ons, at $9 per month on Lite for the Google AI Mode and Gemini package and $29 per month for Claude. API access, MCP, Looker Studio, and Agent Analytics all begin at Standard.

Entry price against prompt capacity

Otterly wins the price comparison outright. Lite at $29 per month sits well below Peec Starter at $95, and no reasonable reading changes that. The qualification that matters is what each plan measures. Otterly Lite covers 15 search prompts; Peec Starter covers 50. A team tracking one product against two competitors on a tightly defined question set can work inside 15 prompts. A team trying to cover a category across awareness, consideration, and decision-stage questions will exhaust that allowance quickly, and the next step up is Standard at $189 per month, which is a larger jump than the gap between Lite and Peec Starter.

The honest way to read the peec ai vs otterly ai price comparison is therefore per unit of coverage rather than per month. At $95 for 50 prompts, Peec Starter costs less per tracked prompt than Otterly Lite at $29 for 15. Otterly still wins on absolute outlay, which is the number that decides a first purchase on a constrained budget.

Engine coverage, counted honestly

Neither product wins engine coverage cleanly, and the published counts invite misreading. A peec ai vs otterly ai engine tally is the single easiest thing to get wrong in this category. Otterly's product pages list seven major AI search engines, but Lite includes four and treats the other three as paid add-ons. Peec's brand page lists six default surfaces, but Starter, Pro, and Advanced each allow the buyer to choose three models, so six listed engines is not six included runs on a subscription.

Any peec alternative comparison that settles engine coverage by counting logos will mislead on this point. The useful comparison is against the engines a specific buyer needs. A brand whose buyers research in ChatGPT and Perplexity is well served by either entry plan. A brand that needs Gemini or Claude coverage should price the Otterly add-on or the Peec model add-on into the monthly figure before comparing anything, because both change the effective entry cost.

Sentiment, position, and source intelligence

Peec carries the stronger documented analytics story. Position and sentiment are explicit parts of the product rather than a secondary readout, and source discovery surfaces the kinds of sites AI engines lean on when discussing a category, including review sites, discussion communities, and editorial publications. Repeated daily runs are what make those readings usable, since a single observation of a variable system is close to noise.

Otterly is not a mention-only tool, and describing it that way would be inaccurate. It documents sentiment, domain ranking, share of voice, prompt-level results, and recommendations. The fair distinction is one of emphasis: Peec foregrounds the interpretation of prompt performance and brand framing, while Otterly foregrounds the surveillance of links and mentions plus the audits that follow from them. A team that wants to know which domains AI cites and where those links sit will find Otterly the more direct answer. A team that wants that citation data read alongside position, sentiment, and competitor movement will find Peec the more complete one.

Agency reporting and multi-client work

Peec has the more explicit agency architecture. Separate agency plans, credit-based multi-client tracking, branded client dashboards shared as read-only links, CSV and API feeds into analytics stacks, and MCP-driven summaries are documented as an agency offer rather than assembled from brand-plan features. The tradeoff is opacity: the current agency pricing page shows credits and capacity without showing dollar values, so an agency cannot model the cost from the page alone.

Otterly can serve agencies, particularly from Standard upward, where unlimited workspaces, the Looker Studio connector, and API access arrive together. Unlimited team members are included on every published plan, which removes a common source of seat cost. The limit is that Lite is not an agency plan in any practical sense: one workspace, 15 prompts, and three recommendations per week do not support a multi-client reporting program, so the $29 entry price is not the price of an agency deployment.

Reporting is not production

The otterly vs peec question has a boundary both products share. Otterly goes further than a dashboard through GEO audits, crawlability checks, content audits, prediction, and content briefs, which make it more actionable than a monitoring feed. Peec offers recommendations and source intelligence alongside its analytics. Neither is documented as a system that researches, writes, links, illustrates, publishes, or repurposes a finished article.

That boundary is where most AEO programs stall. The tracker reports that a competitor owns the citations for a tracked prompt, and the work of turning that finding into a published page returns to the same content team that was already behind. For a marketing lead whose constraint is production rather than measurement, a cheaper tracker does not relieve the constraint; it documents it more often.

DeepSmith: tracking joined to production

DeepSmith is one platform for AI search analytics and content production. It tracks how AI engines answer the questions that matter in a category, finds the gaps where a brand is invisible or losing, and produces the on-brand content that closes them from the same data. Its output is a publish-ready article rather than a first draft to rescue.

On the measurement side, the AEO module reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment, and visibility trend, with a per-platform breakdown, a competitor leaderboard, and the sources AI cites most. Tracked prompts carry their own mention and citation rates with full answer history, and Discover Prompts generates a starting set from stored product, persona, and buyer-stage context. Citations are attributed to specific pages, so a report names the page that won the answer rather than the brand in general.

On the production side, Content Map classifies a site and its competitors onto one topic taxonomy and funnel stage, surfacing coverage gaps and untapped topics. Opportunity Agents read that data and return ideas with the justifying data point attached. Content Studio moves an idea from New Ideas to Planned Content to Produced Content, with keyword coverage, heading structure, schema markup, internal linking, and metadata built in during writing rather than added afterwards. Autowrite generates a scheduled article without anyone opening the app, and finished pieces publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity, or Contentful. Deep IQ stores the brand context every run is grounded in, which is what keeps voice and product claims stable at volume.

Pro is $99 per month, or $80 billed annually, for 50 tracked prompts, 20 articles per month, and five seats. Grow is $199 per month for 100 prompts and 40 articles, and Scale is $399 per month for 200 prompts and 90 articles. A 7-day free trial gives real data and real drafts before payment, with no long-term contracts and no cancellation fees.

Two constraints deserve stating plainly. Pro tracks ChatGPT only, which is a narrower engine set than Otterly Lite includes, and it is a plan boundary rather than a product ceiling: Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten named engines, and ChatGPT is where most buyer research starts. Seats are capped at five, seven, and ten rather than unlimited, which matters for a large dashboard audience and matters less when the plan also includes 20 to 90 finished articles a month, since the work those seats would be reviewing is already done.

DeepSmith is not the cheapest way to monitor AI visibility, and it does not claim to be. At $99 per month it sits beside Peec Starter on price while covering both the measurement and the production halves of the problem.

Which should you choose

Choose Otterly Lite when the budget ceiling is close to $30 per month, the prompt set is genuinely small, four engines are sufficient, and the immediate need is to see which domains and URLs AI cites and how those link positions move. It is the most defensible first purchase for a solo marketer or a small team that wants a monitoring layer before committing further. Choose Otterly Standard when API access, MCP, Looker Studio, Agent Analytics, and 100 prompts justify $189 per month.

Choose Peec Starter when 50 prompts, position and sentiment analysis, source discovery, and unlimited users matter more than the lowest monthly outlay. Choose Peec for an agency when dedicated agency plans, multi-client prompt analytics, and branded client reporting sit at the center of the offer, and confirm the current agency prices directly, since they are not published on the page.

Choose DeepSmith when the peec vs otterly shortlist has already exposed the real constraint, which is that a tracker is only worth having if the team can act on what it finds. It fits a marketing lead who is spending more time editing, structuring, linking, and publishing than deciding strategy, and who needs a lost citation or a competitor gap to become a finished article rather than another backlog row.

Start a 7-day DeepSmith free trial and see real visibility data and real drafts before paying.