Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI is the cheapest entry point at $29/month (15 prompts, 4 engines included), and has the largest track record with 54 G2 reviews.
- Peec AI starts at $95/month but packs in the most feature depth for the price: an ads library, AI Shopping/SKU tracking, brand-perception scoring, and a crawlability audit across 40+ AI bots.
- Citations.io sits in the middle at $39/month and is the only one of the three that includes Claude and Gemini out of the box, though it skips Google AI Overviews entirely and has no public review history yet.
- None of the three includes Google AI Mode as a default engine at the entry tier, which matters more than people assume given how AI Mode traffic is growing.
- If you need daily, multi-prompt, cross-model tracking with an execution layer attached (not just monitoring), you'll eventually outgrow all three and want a platform like Promptwatch.
Why this comparison exists
Every week there's a new AI visibility tool launching with a landing page that says "track your brand in ChatGPT." Most of them cost $250 to $500 a month before you've even added the engines you actually care about. But there's a smaller tier underneath that: tools built for solo marketers, small in-house teams, or agencies testing the AI-citation waters before committing real budget.
Citations.io, Otterly.AI, and Peec AI are the three names that keep coming up in that budget bracket. I pulled live pricing pages for all three and it turns out the headline prices tell you almost nothing on their own. A $29/month plan and a $95/month plan can end up costing roughly the same once you add the engines you need. So let's actually break it down.
The three tools at a glance
| Tool | Entry price | Entry prompts | Engines included at entry | Seats at entry | Standout feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citations.io | $39/mo ($5 for 5-day trial) | 25 tracked + 25 benchmark | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude (no Google AIO, no Copilot) | 3 | Confidence labels on every metric, hallucination/misattribution alerts |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo ($25/mo annual) | 15 | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | Unlimited | Public API + Claude Skill, largest review base |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | 50 | Any 3 of up to 13 models, your choice | Unlimited | Ads library, AI Shopping/SKU tracking, 40+ bot crawlability audit |
Right away you can see the trade-offs. Otterly is cheapest and includes the most useful default engine set (Google AI Overviews out of the box matters a lot, since AI Overviews now shows up on roughly a quarter of Google searches). Citations.io covers Claude and Gemini by default, which the other two don't, but leaves out Google entirely at every self-serve tier. Peec AI costs three times as much as Otterly at entry but gives you a choice of which three engines matter to your business, plus a pile of features the other two simply don't have.
Citations.io: the newest, most transparent, but least proven
Citations.io is the youngest of the three. It's built by Josh Tulip, a Chief Growth Officer with 15 years in technical SEO, and the company (Citations IO LTD) is backed by Google for Startups and the NatWest Accelerator. There's no G2 or Capterra listing to check yet, which is worth flagging: you're trusting a newer vendor with less of a track record than the other two.
What it does differently is worth noting. Every metric on the dashboard comes with a confidence label, something neither Otterly nor Peec advertises. It also runs "benchmark" prompts alongside your own, which are Citations.io-managed prompts meant to give you a like-for-like comparison against competitors rather than just your own custom prompt set.
Pricing breaks down as:
- Starter, $39/month: 1 brand, 25 tracked + 25 benchmark prompts, 4 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude), 1,000 analyzed AI answers/month, 5 competitors, 3 seats
- Growth, $69/month: 3 projects, 75+75 prompts, 3,000 analyzed answers, Slack alerts, 10 seats
- Pro, $99/month: 10 projects, 150+150 prompts, 6,000 analyzed answers, API + webhooks, hallucination/misattribution alerts, 50 seats
- Agency: custom pricing
The catch is the missing engine. If your buyers are searching through Google AI Overviews or AI Mode (and Conductor's own data puts AI Overviews at roughly a quarter of Google queries), Citations.io simply won't show you that surface, at any tier. That's a real gap for a lot of brands, not a nitpick.
Otterly.AI: the cheapest way to get started, full stop
Otterly Lite is $29/month ($25/month billed annually) and is genuinely the lowest-friction way into this category. Fifteen prompts isn't much, but the four included engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, MS Copilot) cover more real-world AI search traffic than Citations.io's default set does. Unlimited team seats on every tier is a nice touch too, since Citations.io caps seats even on its top plan.
Otterly's weakness at the entry tier is the same one everyone flags: Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini are paid add-ons, not included. So if your category lives across all six major engines, the real monthly cost climbs past $29 fast. Otterly also recently shipped a public API and a Claude Skill, which is a genuinely useful move: it means you can pull citation and recommendation data into your own workflows instead of staring at a dashboard. With 54 G2 reviews and a 2026 G2 Answer Engine Optimization award, it's also the most battle-tested of the three, for whatever that's worth to a buyer weighing risk.
Standard ($189/month) and Premium ($489/month) add prompt volume, API/MCP access, and Agent Analytics, but at that point you're no longer really comparing "budget" trackers, you're comparing mid-market platforms.
Peec AI: costs more, does more
Peec starts at $95/month (around €89) for 50 prompts and lets you pick any 3 of up to 13 tracked models rather than locking you into a fixed set. That flexibility matters: a brand that lives and dies by Perplexity and Gemini doesn't want to pay for a bundle skewed toward Copilot.
What sets Peec apart isn't the prompt count, it's the feature list at that price point. It classifies prompt intent (informational, commercial, transactional), tracks brand vs. non-branded queries, runs an Ads Library that tracks sponsored placements inside AI answers, has an AI Shopping module for SKU-level tracking if you sell products, scores brand perception, and even has an "Objections" feature that traces recurring negative arguments AI makes about your brand back to the source pages causing them. That's a genuinely unusual amount of depth for a sub-$100 tool. Unlimited seats and unlimited countries on every tier, same as Otterly, and a 7-day free trial with no credit card required.
The trade-off: the 3-model cap applies at every self-serve tier, including Advanced at $495/month. A 4th model is a paid add-on ($35 to $165/month depending on tier), so like Otterly, your real cost climbs once you need broader engine coverage.
Where each one actually falls short
All three share one blind spot: none of them makes Google AI Mode a default-included engine at the cheapest tier. Peec buries it in the "choose 3" pool, Otterly gates it as an add-on, and Citations.io skips Google entirely across every self-serve plan. If AI Mode traffic matters to your category, budget for that gap up front, don't discover it after you've onboarded.
And all three stop at monitoring plus recommendations. Citations.io has "implementation packs," Peec has prioritized "Actions," and Otterly has weekly GEO recommendations, but none of them actually writes and publishes content for you. You still need a content team or a separate tool to close the loop between "here's your citation gap" and "here's the page that fixes it."
How to actually pick between them
A few honest questions to ask yourself before you sign up for any of these:
Which engines actually drive your category's AI answers? If it's mostly ChatGPT and Google, Otterly's default bundle is the most complete out of the box. If Claude or Gemini matter more (common in dev-tool and technical B2B categories), Citations.io's default set fits better, as long as you can live without Google coverage. If you want to pick your own three and might need e-commerce-specific tracking like shopping or ads visibility, Peec is the clear choice.
How many prompts do you actually need? Fifteen (Otterly Lite) is enough to sanity-check a handful of core queries. Fifty (Peec Starter) or 25+25 (Citations.io Starter) gives you room to track a real prompt set across a category, not just your brand name.
Do you need proof this vendor will still exist in a year? That's not a knock on Citations.io's product, just an honest risk factor given it has no public review history yet versus Otterly's 54 G2 reviews and Peec's 21.
When you'll outgrow all three
Here's the thing nobody selling a $29 or $95 tool wants to tell you: at some point, tracking citations stops being the hard part. You already know you're missing citations for certain prompts. The question becomes why, and what to actually do about it. That requires crawler-level data (are ChatGPT and Perplexity's bots even reading your pages, and hitting errors when they do), traffic attribution (is AI-driven traffic actually converting), and a content workflow that turns a citation gap into a published page without six tools and a spreadsheet in between.
That's a different category of platform. Tools like Promptwatch approach this as a full stack rather than a tracker: agent analytics that show exactly what AI crawlers read and when they error out, citation trends across 22 content types and 20 source types, Reddit and YouTube citation tracking (both ignored by the budget trio above), and Content Agents that plan, write, and publish GEO-optimized pages directly to your CMS.
Worth noting for anyone weighing citation volatility: Promptwatch's own data shows citation share is a genuinely moving target, Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations fell from about 6.11% in May 2026 to 3.71% in June, a roughly 40% single-month swing (see Promptwatch's ChatGPT citation share data for June 2026). If your tracker only samples occasionally rather than daily across a decent prompt volume, you can miss real shifts like that entirely, which is exactly the risk with the lowest tiers of any of these three tools.
The bottom line
If you're testing the waters and want the absolute lowest entry cost with solid default engine coverage, start with Otterly Lite at $29/month. If your category is Claude- or Gemini-heavy and you're comfortable without Google coverage for now, Citations.io's confidence-labeled metrics are a nice touch at $39. If you sell products, run ads, or just want more signal per prompt, Peec AI's $95/month buys you meaningfully more feature depth than either competitor.
All three are fine starting points. None of them is where you should expect to stay once citation tracking turns into an actual GEO program. For a broader look at what's available above this budget tier, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com is a good next stop.