Profound vs HubSpot AEO vs Scrunch vs OtterlyAI vs Peec vs AthenaHQ

Choose Profound for higher-volume, multi-engine monitoring that can feed content agents. Choose HubSpot AEO when your team wants monitoring and recommendations inside its HubSpot operation. Choose Scrunch for a bounded one-brand package with audits. Choose OtterlyAI for a low-cost daily pilot or flexible agency workspaces. Choose Peec AI when its project-and-country structure matches how you work and the commercial terms check out. Choose AthenaHQ when you can budget in AI responses and want a broader action layer.

There is no honest overall winner. The products sell different units: prompts, responses, credits, projects, audits, workspaces and engines. Comparing the cheapest cards is like comparing office rents without asking whether one is a desk in Swindon. Write down the engines, markets, access and follow-through you need first. Then reject any plan that misses a non-negotiable.

Add the weights and reject anything missing a two-point item. If several products survive, run the smallest reversible trial against the same prompt inventory and review cadence. Do not give one tool 20 high-intent prompts and another 100 vanity questions, then admire the "results".

For a Series B CRM vendor, 25 prompts may cover the buying committee's hardest questions in one market. Add three industries, comparison queries, implementation objections and UK/US variations, and 25 disappears before lunch. A cybersecurity firm selling to cautious CISOs may care less about prompt volume than Copilot coverage, security review and an export that sales engineers can actually use. The requirement changes the sensible purchase.

Profound suits a team that expects monitoring to feed content agents, sheets and broader reporting as the programme grows. Profound's pricing table puts Starter at $99 per month billed yearly for 50 ChatGPT prompts, one seat, daily tracking and 100 Agent credits. Growth is $399 per month billed yearly for 100 prompts, three answer engines, three seats, 400 Agent credits and CSV/JSON exports. Custom Enterprise lists up to nine engines, multiple companies, API access and SSO/SAML.

Choose Profound when: you have a planned route from finding to content work, need Growth-level exports, or expect multi-company, API or identity-management requirements.

Do not choose Profound Starter when: multi-engine measurement, several markets, exports or more than one seat are immediate requirements. That is a Growth or Enterprise purchase wearing a $99 hat. It is also a poor first buy if nobody can approve and publish what an Agent produces. Automated drafts waiting six weeks for legal are merely a more efficient queue.

HubSpot AEO is a beta product for teams that want visibility, citation analysis and recommendations near their existing HubSpot work. The HubSpot AEO product details publish a price of $50 per month, or $45 per month annually, for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with no additional HubSpot subscription required. The listed workflow covers brand visibility and sentiment, competitor share of voice, citation analysis, prompt suggestions and prioritised recommendations.

Choose HubSpot AEO when: the team already runs marketing and content in HubSpot, 25 prompts can cover a disciplined first phase, and three-engine monitoring is enough. Recommendations sitting near the CRM can help a demand-generation lead connect a weak comparison answer to the pages and pipeline stages the team already manages. Validate any entitlement described for Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise before counting it as included cost.

Do not choose HubSpot AEO when: your prompt inventory is larger, a required engine falls outside the published three, or you need a large multi-brand reporting estate. Multiple instances may work. Discovering that after the pilot is less elegant.

Scrunch Core gives a compact team explicit allowances for monitoring, audits and optimisation rather than asking it to interpret a credit economy. Scrunch's official plan comparison lists Core at $250 per month for 125 unique prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. It covers one country, three personas, two languages, five competitors, five site audits per month, one brand workspace and five user licences. Citations and sources, sentiment analysis, recommendations and one page optimisation per month are also listed.

Choose Scrunch when: one brand and a bounded geography match the plan, and recurring site-audit capacity matters alongside monitoring. A SaaS team refreshing 40 decision-stage pages could use those audits to choose the next repair instead of producing another spreadsheet called final_priorities_v7.

Do not choose Scrunch Core when: you need broader model coverage, custom workspaces, API access, several countries or enterprise identity controls immediately. Those sit in the custom Enterprise package. A tidy dashboard does not confer enterprise readiness by osmosis.

OtterlyAI has the clearest graduated self-serve prompt ladder here. The OtterlyAI pricing and add-on table lists Lite at $29 per month for 15 prompts, Standard at $189 for 100 and Premium at $489 for 400. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot form the base engine set, with daily tracking and unlimited members. Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude cost extra. Standard and Premium list API, MCP, Agent Analytics and unlimited workspaces.

Choose OtterlyAI when: you want a defined daily-monitoring pilot, a low published entry price or multiple workspaces. This is especially practical for an agency testing one client's 15 commercially useful questions before asking six clients to fund a grand visibility command centre. The public add-on table also lets you estimate extra-engine costs before meeting sales.

Do not choose OtterlyAI Lite when: 15 prompts cannot represent the buying journey, or you need API access or multiple client environments. And do not describe the four base engines as "all engines". The vendor separates additional coverage as add-ons, so the budget should too.

Peec AI frames the purchase around models, projects and countries, but its accessible public page did not expose numerical self-serve prices on the verification date. The Peec AI pricing page published July 22, 2026 lists Starter with three models selected during onboarding, one project and daily tracking. Pro lists three models, two projects and three countries per project; Advanced lists three models, five projects and three countries per project. API access, MCP integration and SSO appear in the plan comparison, while Enterprise is custom.

Choose Peec AI when: your programme maps neatly to projects and countries, and you can confirm the selected models, price, data access and support in checkout or a proposal. This favours a team that has decided which markets matter, rather than one whose brief says "do AI visibility" and leaves the geography cell blank.

Do not choose Peec AI when: procurement requires a published price before a trial, or the vendor will not confirm models, projects, countries and access terms in writing. Quoting an old price from elsewhere would add false precision, which procurement already receives in ample supply.

AthenaHQ makes sense when the team can forecast AI responses and wants action capabilities beside monitoring. According to AthenaHQ's published plans, Essential is free with 300 credits and covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude. Starter is $295 per month for 3,600 credits and visibility across nine models, plus API access, integrations, CSV export, on-page and off-page actions, and a content-optimisation agent. One credit equals one AI response.

Choose AthenaHQ when: you can estimate prompt frequency and response use, want broader published Starter coverage, or prefer one monitoring, citation and action workflow. Enterprise adds multi-region and multi-language support, SAML/OIDC SSO, audit logs, BI support and custom credits.

Do not choose AthenaHQ when: nobody can estimate monthly responses, or procurement insists on a fixed-prompt allowance. Credits are not dark arts. They do, however, punish teams that skip the ten-minute run-rate calculation and buy by logo recognition.

Choose Profound over HubSpot AEO when you need a published path to multi-company monitoring, API access or agent-led work. Choose HubSpot AEO over Profound when HubSpot-native context is the practical advantage and 25 prompts across its three published engines cover phase one.

Choose Scrunch over OtterlyAI when five monthly site audits, one page optimisation, defined personas and a one-brand package are central. Choose OtterlyAI over Scrunch when a cheaper pilot, optional engines or workspace flexibility matters more than bundled audit capacity.

Choose Peec AI over AthenaHQ when projects and countries are the clearest operating model and you can verify commercial terms. Choose AthenaHQ over Peec AI when the published credit model, wider Starter model list and action features make planning easier.

These are fit rules, not outcome claims. Vendor pages establish what is sold; they do not prove better citations, revenue or accuracy. Your team still has to choose buyer questions, review findings, secure product and legal approval, publish the right asset and measure again. Software has yet to abolish the Tuesday content meeting.

Do not buy one because the board learnt "AEO" last week and wants a coloured chart by Thursday. Buy when somebody owns the prompt inventory, review cadence and resulting publishing or technical work. If nobody can explain why those 25, 50 or 125 questions matter, the dashboard will measure confusion with impressive consistency.

Monitoring cannot replace a content owner, technical owner or approval path. It may expose a missing comparison, stale page, weak source or brand-representation problem. It cannot make product provide evidence, legal approve the claim or marketing ship the repair. For a team without that capacity, the AI Extractability Audit or a single source-page review may be a better first move than another subscription.

1. Can we list the exact buyer prompts, engines, countries and languages to monitor over the next 90 days? If not, design the measurement before booking demos.
2. Can we turn a finding into an approved page change, technical fix or third-party action within one review cycle? If not, fix that bottleneck first.
3. Which entitlement would force an immediate upgrade: prompts or responses, another engine, another brand, a workspace, exports, API access or SSO? Price the real tier, not the cheapest rectangle on the page.

For broader category context before shortlisting these six, use DataDab's AI visibility tools comparison.

This page covers exactly the six named products because it answers a named-tool buying question. Product, price, model-coverage and entitlement claims come from official vendor pages accessed July 23, 2026. They are first-party statements, not independent tests. Different pricing units are not converted into a common cost score because the public evidence cannot support a fair one.

The preserved Bing AI Performance export records the exact query "Profound vs HubSpot AEO vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai vs Peec AI AI brand visibility tracking comparison" at 394 citations and 14.43% citation share. It separately records "Profound vs HubSpot AEO vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai vs Peec AI AI visibility tracking comparison" at 263 citations and 11.47%, and "Profound vs HubSpot AEO vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai vs Peec AI brand visibility tracking" at 103 citations and 29.43%.

• It does not crown a single winner. Pricing, methodology and segment fit vary; the right tool depends on team shape and prompt profile.
• It does not reproduce pricing tables. Pricing changes frequently in this category; always check the vendor's own page.
• It does not make disparaging claims about any vendor. Where a tool is the wrong choice for a segment, we say so plainly and move on.
• It does not treat vendor-stated features as performance results. Public documentation is a contract, not a benchmark.