Type your company name into ChatGPT right now. Does it know who you are? Most people have no idea — and the answer matters more every month.
Three tools promise to fix that blind spot: Otterly, Profound, and Peec. Each costs differently, each pitches the same outcome — telling you what LLMs say about your brand. So I spent 30 days feeding all three identical brand queries to see which one actually delivers. The result wasn’t close. One tool is genuinely useful today. One is built for a future that hasn’t shown up yet. One is overpriced for what it does.
Here’s which is which.
Why This Question Suddenly Matters
ChatGPT is at 1.6 billion daily queries. Google AI Overviews appear on 58.5% of searches. Zero-click results are the default, not the exception.
Your Semrush dashboard tells you if you rank on Google. It can’t tell you what Perplexity says when someone asks “best CRM for freelancers.” Those are different searches with different gatekeepers, and the second one is becoming the one that matters — and the answers those engines give vary wildly in accuracy, as I found when I tested which AI search engine actually deserves your trust.
The shift in plain terms: people are stopping at the AI answer. If your brand isn’t in that answer, you may as well not exist. So I picked the three most-talked-about monitoring tools and ran the same test on each.
The 30-Day Test: Same Brand, Same Queries, Three Tools
I tracked one mid-sized SaaS brand (anonymized) across all three platforms for a month. Each tool got the same 20 prompts — half branded (“Is [Brand] good for X?”), half category prompts (“best tool for X”).
Where supported, I tracked four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude. I measured four things — mention rate, citation source accuracy, sentiment quality, and time from signup to first useful insight.
The three tools split more sharply than I expected.
What Each Tool Reported
Otterly: Fast, Cheap, Limited
Otterly was the fastest from signup to first report — under 10 minutes. It reported a 42% mention rate on branded prompts and surfaced citation sources cleanly.
The catch is real. Otterly Lite at $29/mo only watches ChatGPT and Perplexity. Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons. If you want the platforms most non-technical readers actually care about, you’re closer to $99/mo on Standard. Still cheap. But the sticker price is misleading.
Profound: Most Polished, Most Expensive
Profound’s dashboard is the best of the three — deeper sentiment, competitive share of voice, the kind of charts a CMO wants screenshotted. Mention rate came in at 38%, close to Otterly.
The Starter plan at $399/mo only covers ChatGPT. To run the comparison I actually wanted across multiple engines, I needed Growth at $499/mo — and I hit the 100-prompt cap by day 12. For an enterprise team with a real budget, fine. For everyone else, it’s a trap dressed up as a starting tier.
Peec: Quietest Tool, Sharpest Insights
Peec reported the lowest mention rate — 31%. And I trust it the most.
Why: it surfaced citation sources the other two missed, flagged when the AI was hallucinating about the brand, and the Actions feature (beta) was the only one in the test that suggested concrete fixes. Not just “you’re not being mentioned” but “here’s the kind of page you’d need to publish.” Pricing is in EUR (€85/mo entry) with model add-ons that stack.
This is the only tool that bridges the gap between monitoring and doing something. So which one wins on price once you add the asterisks?
The Pricing Trap: What These Tools Actually Cost
Sticker prices lie. Here’s what an honest test across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI actually runs:
- Otterly: ~$99/mo (Standard tier with platform add-ons)
- Peec: ~€160/mo (entry plus model add-ons you’ll want)
- Profound: ~$499/mo (Growth — Starter only watches ChatGPT)
That’s a 5x spread between the cheapest and most expensive useful configuration. The question is whether the most expensive is 5x better — and whether any of this actually moves the needle yet.
The Honest ROI Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Reddit and G2 reviews are full of users reporting no consistent traffic correlation between AI visibility improvements and site traffic. I saw the same in my test.
What these tools do well: tell you whether you’re being mentioned, what’s being said, and which sources LLMs are pulling from. That has real value for reputation management and content gap discovery. What they cannot yet do is prove that a citation in ChatGPT drove a signup or a sale. Attribution is the missing layer, and nobody has it.
If you’re a non-technical professional asking whether to spend money here, the honest answer is: only if knowing what AI says about you is itself useful — independent of revenue attribution. For many of us, it is. If you’re building out my full recommended AI marketing stack, brand visibility is the one category no one had two years ago — and the one that might matter most in two more. Just don’t expect a dashboard that connects mentions to MRR. Not yet.
If you find out you’re invisible, the next question is the practical one.
If ChatGPT Doesn’t Mention You, Do These Three Things
First, find the high-authority sources LLMs cite for your category — G2, Reddit threads, industry publications — and make sure your brand is accurately represented there. LLMs lean heavily on these for retrieval. This is the same principle behind the 15-minute weekly AI competitive analysis workflow.
Second, write your own answer pages. Pages titled like questions (“What is the best X for Y?”) with clear, structured answers get picked up disproportionately. This is also why making ChatGPT sound human is the wrong target — clarity beats voice for retrieval.
Third, audit existing content for specificity. Vague marketing copy gets ignored. Specific, claim-backed paragraphs get cited.
That playbook works regardless of which tool you pick. Which leaves one question.
The One I’d Pay For
I asked at the top whether your brand shows up in ChatGPT — and which tool answers that best. Here’s the verdict.
For most non-technical professionals: Otterly Lite at $29/mo. You’ll know within a week if your brand is invisible. That’s the single most important data point right now, and it’s the cheapest way to get it.
For mid-market teams who want recommendations, not just dashboards: Peec. The Actions feature is the only one in this test that told me what to fix.
Profound: skip it unless you have enterprise budget and need the full dashboard. The Starter tier is a trap.
Pick the tool that matches the question you’re trying to answer, not the one with the prettiest dashboard. Start with Otterly. Graduate to Peec when monitoring stops being enough.