The Question That Sends Owners Shopping
A customer tells you they asked ChatGPT for a recommendation in your line of business. Three companies came back. Yours was not one of them.
So you go looking for a tool that will tell you how often that happens. Within ten minutes you have found prices ranging from US$29 a month to "book a demo", and no clear explanation of what separates them.
This page gives you the real 2026 numbers for three of the most-cited platforms, explains the pricing unit that actually drives your bill, and says plainly which type of buyer should choose what. All prices below are US dollars, converted at HK$7.8 where noted, and were checked in August 2026.
What Are You Actually Buying?
You are not buying "AI visibility". You are buying a number of prompts, multiplied by a number of AI models, multiplied by how often each one is run. Everything else in these products, the dashboards, the competitor charts, the citation lists, is a presentation layer on top of that one calculation.
A prompt is a single question the tool asks an AI engine on your behalf, over and over. Something like "best freight forwarder in Hong Kong for small shipments".
Peec AI states the arithmetic openly in its own documentation: running one prompt against one model for one day costs one credit, so 25 prompts across 3 models for 30 days is 2,250 AI answers analysed.
This single fact reframes the whole purchase. Two tools at the same monthly price can differ by five times in what they actually measure, because one gives you 50 prompts on three engines and the other gives you 15 prompts on four.
It also explains why the entry tiers are the wrong size for most small companies, which we come back to below.
How Much Does Otterly.AI Cost in 2026?
Otterly.AI publishes its full price list openly, which already makes it the easiest of the three to evaluate. Plans run from US$29 to US$489 per month, with a 15 per cent discount for annual billing and enterprise pricing starting from US$1,000 per month.
From otterly.ai/pricing, checked August 2026:
--- Lite: US$29/month (US$25 annual) for 15 search prompts, 1 workspace.
--- Standard: US$189/month (US$160 annual) for 100 prompts, unlimited workspaces, API and MCP access.
--- Premium: US$489/month (US$422 annual) for 400 prompts.
--- Enterprise: custom, stated as starting from US$1,000/month.
All four tiers include unlimited team members, daily tracking, and coverage of four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot.
The detail that catches buyers out is what is not in the base price. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons. Adding Claude costs US$29/month on Lite, US$109 on Standard and US$439 on Premium. Gemini or AI Mode cost US$9, US$59 and US$149 respectively.
So a Lite subscriber who wants Claude and Gemini tracked is paying US$67 a month, not US$29. That is a 131 per cent increase over the advertised entry price, for two engines many buyers assume are included.
Extra prompts, where available, cost US$99 per additional 100 on Standard and Premium, and cannot be bought on Lite at all.
How Much Do Peec AI and Profound Cost?
Neither Peec AI nor Profound shows a plain price on a page you can read without interacting. Peec publishes what is in each plan but renders the figures in an interactive widget. Profound has moved to a demo-led page with no public price ladder at all.
Peec AI lists four brand tiers on peec.ai/pricing. Starter includes 50 prompts, a choice of 3 models, unlimited users, daily tracking and 1 project. Pro moves to 150 prompts and 2 projects. Advanced gives 350 prompts, 5 projects, multi-country tracking and a Looker Studio integration. Enterprise adds up to 11 models and API access. Peec states a 15 per cent annual discount, and that tracking additional countries and languages costs nothing extra because pricing is tied to prompts, not regions. Third-party reviews published in 2026 place the Starter tier at roughly US$100 per month. Treat that as an estimate and confirm it at checkout.
Profound is the best-funded platform in this category and the one most often named in roundups. It is also the one you cannot price without talking to a salesperson. Independent reviews in 2026 report historical signals of US$99 per month for a ChatGPT-only starter with 50 prompts and US$399 per month for a three-engine tier with 100 prompts, while noting these are not guaranteed live checkout prices, and that enterprise deployments have been reported anywhere from US$2,000 to US$5,000 a month.
For a Hong Kong owner running a company of ten people, that last paragraph is the answer, not a detour. A vendor that will not publish a price has told you who its customer is.
What Does This Cost a 10-Person Hong Kong Business?
At HK$7.8 to the US dollar, the cheapest genuinely useful configuration in this category lands between HK$2,730 and HK$9,360 per year, and the mid-tier lands between HK$14,976 and HK$17,690 per year. Here is the ladder on annual billing.
Annual cost, converted at HK$7.8
--- Otterly Lite, 15 prompts, 4 engines: US$300/year, HK$2,340.
--- Otterly Lite plus Claude and Gemini add-ons: US$693/year, HK$5,405.
--- Peec Starter, 50 prompts, 3 models, estimated at US$100/month monthly billing: about HK$9,360.
--- Otterly Standard, 100 prompts, 4 engines: US$1,920/year, HK$14,976.
--- Profound Growth, reported at US$399/month, 100 prompts, 3 engines: about HK$37,346.
--- UD AEO Auditor, structural scan of your site across five engines: HK$0, no credit card and no account.
Now put that against the size of the question. A ten-person Sheung Wan trading company does not have 100 buying questions. It has perhaps six to ten that matter, in two languages, which is 12 to 20 prompts.
That means Otterly Lite is the only paid tier in this list that is actually sized for the business, and Lite is the tier where the two engines you most want to add cost more than the plan itself.
Where Each Tool Wins, Including Where UD Loses
No product here wins every row, and any comparison that says otherwise is an advertisement. Here is the honest split.
Otterly.AI wins transparency and small-team pricing. It is the only one of the three that lets you calculate your bill before you speak to anyone, and the only one with an entry tier a ten-person company can justify. Unlimited team members on every plan is genuinely unusual.
Peec AI wins multi-language and multi-market coverage. Its published position is that tracking extra countries and languages adds nothing to the bill. For a Hong Kong business monitoring English and Traditional Chinese questions, and possibly a mainland market too, that is the single most relevant policy difference in this comparison.
Profound wins enterprise depth and analyst credibility. If you have a marketing team, a budget approval process and a board that wants benchmarking, it is the name that will survive scrutiny. It is also the name that will consume your entire annual marketing tooling budget.
Where UD loses. The UD AEO Auditor is a structural audit, not a longitudinal tracker. It scans your site, scores it, and tells you what to fix. It does not sit in the background running 100 prompts a day for six months and charting your share of voice against three competitors. If that time-series is what you need, buy one of the tools above. This is not a row we win, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
What None of These Tools Will Do
Monitoring tells you that you are absent. It does not make you present. That gap is the most expensive misunderstanding in this category, and it is worth being blunt about the limits before you commit a budget.
--- They report, they do not fix. A dashboard showing zero mentions across 40 prompts is a diagnosis. The work of making your site readable and quotable by AI engines is separate, and it is where the actual cost sits.
--- Prompt coverage is your guess, not their expertise. You choose the questions. If you pick the wrong twenty, you will monitor a market you are not selling into.
--- Cantonese and Hong Kong context is untested territory. These vendors market multi-country support. None of them publishes evidence of how their results behave on Traditional Chinese questions with Hong Kong intent. Run your own real questions during a trial before subscribing.
--- The answers move. AI engines change their outputs frequently. A single monthly reading is close to meaningless, which is precisely why the vendors price on daily tracking, and why the bill scales the way it does.
So Which One Should You Buy?
The right answer depends on how many questions genuinely decide your revenue, not on how large the dashboard looks in a demo.
If you have a marketing team and 50 or more prompts that matter: Otterly Standard at US$189/month, or Peec Pro, and use the trial to check which one handles your Traditional Chinese questions better.
If you are a ten-person company with a handful of key questions: Otterly Lite at US$29/month, and add engines only after you have seen a month of data. Do not start at Standard.
If you operate across Hong Kong and the mainland in two or three languages: shortlist Peec first, because its no-extra-cost multi-country policy is the one structural advantage in this group that maps directly to your situation.
If you have not yet checked whether AI engines can even read your website: buy nothing this month. Run a free structural scan first. If your site has no schema markup, blocks AI crawlers, or has no extractable answers on it, a monitoring subscription will simply charge you monthly to watch a problem you already know about.
If nobody in your company will look at a dashboard weekly: also buy nothing. These tools reward attention. An unread dashboard at HK$14,976 a year is the most expensive kind of reassurance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a free way to check my AI visibility?
Yes, for the structural half of the question. UD's AEO Auditor runs a free scan in under 30 seconds with no sign-up and no credit card, covering more than 170 structure checks across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. It tells you why you are hard to cite. It does not replace ongoing prompt tracking.
What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
SEO targets ranking and clicks in Google search results. AEO, also called GEO, targets being quoted as the answer inside AI engines, where there may be no click at all. The tools in this article measure AEO outcomes.
How many prompts does a small company actually need?
Count the distinct questions a customer might ask an AI assistant before choosing you, then multiply by the number of languages you sell in. Most Hong Kong SMEs land between 10 and 25, which is why the 100-prompt tiers are usually oversized.
Do these tools offer free trials?
Otterly.AI advertises a free trial and Peec AI offers a start-free route from its pricing page. Profound's public page is demo-led with no advertised public trial. Confirm current terms at sign-up, since trial policies in this category change often.
How long before AEO work shows results?
Structural changes are typically re-crawled within two to four weeks. Citation and authority signals accumulate over one to three months. Any tool or agency promising results in days is selling you the dashboard, not the outcome.
The Decision in One Line
If you already know your site is technically sound and you need a time-series, buy Otterly Lite and grow into Standard. If you do not yet know whether AI engines can read your site at all, spend nothing until you do, because monitoring an unfixable problem is just a subscription to bad news.
Being found by AI is not a mystery, and it should not require a demo call to get a straight answer about price. We understand AI. UD stands with you.
Reviewed by the UD AI team, Hong Kong. Prices verified 17 August 2026 and subject to change.
Find Out Where You Stand, For Free
Before you pay anyone to monitor your AI visibility, find out whether AI engines can read your site at all. The UD AEO Auditor scans your website in 30 seconds, with no sign-up and no credit card, and returns a score plus a prioritised action list. If you want help acting on it, we will walk you through it step by step.
