Peec AI vs Profound vs Semrush: which AI visibility tool to buy

We priced all three against one workload and checked what each covers. The short version is that the decision is usually made by something other than the feature list: whether you already pay for Semrush, and whether your purchase has to clear a security review.

The same workload, three prices

150 prompts, tracked daily, six engines, one seat, twelve months.

Checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 14 September 2026. Profound's listed prices are billed yearly. Annual billing takes around 15% off Peec AI.

What each one actually is

Peec AI is a specialist AI Search analytics tool, Berlin-based with a New York office since 2026, founded in 2025 and funded to roughly $29M including a $21M Series A led by Singular. Six engines included on every plan. The part that distinguishes it is what sits under the visibility chart: every answer broken into the sources the model read, classified as editorial, corporate, UGC, reference or your own site, plus server-log integration through eight methods so you can watch AI crawlers hit your site. It publishes an agency plan line with per-client projects and a credit formula you can check.

Profound is an enterprise platform, New York based, funded to $58.5M including a $35M Series B led by Sequoia. It has the largest independent review base in the category at more than 140 G2 reviews, and it is the only one of the three, and the only tool in this category we know of, with published SOC 2, SSO and SAML. Its agent analytics cover AI crawler and referral behaviour. Most of the product sits behind Enterprise.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is a module inside a suite most SEO teams already pay for. $99 per domain buys 25 prompts across four engines, with Google reported as one combined figure. It is not trying to be a specialist tool and does not need to be. Its advantage is adjacency: the AI data sits beside the rankings and backlinks that explain it.

The Google problem

This is the distinction that decides more of these evaluations than anything else, and it is the one buyers most often do not know exists.

Google has two AI answer surfaces. AI Overviews is the summary above the classic results, and it leans on pages that already rank and domains Google has trusted for years. AI Mode is the conversational tab you switch into, and it breaks your question into background searches, which reaches Reddit threads, YouTube videos and niche comparison posts that classic search would never put on page one.

They name different brands for the same question. And the fixes differ: an AI Overviews problem is usually a ranking and authority problem your existing SEO work applies to, while an AI Mode problem is usually a coverage problem, where the pages the model reaches simply do not mention you.

Peec AI separates them on the entry plan. Profound covers AI Overviews from Growth and gates AI Mode to Enterprise. Semrush reports Google as one combined number, so it cannot tell you which of the two you have.

If your category involves people asking long comparative questions, that gap is the whole decision.

Where each one wins

Buy Semrush's toolkit if you already pay for Semrush. The operational argument beats the feature argument for most in-house teams. It is roughly $180 a month on top of a subscription you already have, nobody needs training, there is no procurement, and AI Overviews correlates with classic ranking more than any other surface, which is exactly what the rest of Semrush is built to move. You are accepting four engines and no AI Mode visibility. For plenty of teams that is a fair trade this year.

Buy Profound if a security review decides the purchase. SOC 2, SSO and SAML are not available anywhere else in this category, and if your company requires them the comparison ends there. The same applies if vendor stability is the concern: $58.5M and a Sequoia-led round answers that question in a way a younger company cannot. Budget for Enterprise, because the self-serve tiers will not cover a real workload.

Buy Peec AI if you want full coverage without a sales process. Six engines at $245 against four from Semrush at $279 and a quote from Profound, both Google surfaces separated on the entry plan, source-level data showing which URLs shaped each answer, and server-log data almost nobody else offers at this price. For agencies, the published per-client plan line and the credit formula make it the only one of the three you can price for ten clients from the website.

What you give up with Peec AI: it was founded in 2025, so the track record is short next to a public company and a Series B. There is no published SOC 2 or SSO, which rules it out of some enterprise processes. Eighteen G2 reviews is a thin evidence base, however good the 4.8 average looks next to Profound's 4.6 from 140-plus. There is no free tier. And engines beyond the included six are billed per engine per month, so a Claude or Grok requirement moves the real price above the list price.

A note on the reviews you will read next

Almost every page ranking for this comparison is published by a company that sells one of these tools, or a fourth one. That is worth knowing, and it is worth checking the date too, because pricing and engine coverage here change every few weeks and nothing gets re-checked.

We found live pages stating that Peec AI self-serve users choose three engines from a list of seven, when its own documentation says six are included on every plan. We found pages stating it has no API on any tier, when the documentation lists a REST API and an MCP server. Those pages describe an older product and nobody has corrected them.

Apply the same care to star ratings. The highest averages in this category sit on the smallest samples, because young tools accumulate early enthusiasts and the people who churned in week two never wrote anything.

What none of the three will do

All three measure. None of them moves your position.

The work that moves it is getting named on the third-party pages models retrieve, making your own pages quotable enough to be repeated, and building review profiles the models trust. That is content and digital PR, and a dashboard produces neither.

So the right test when choosing between these three is not which reports your visibility most attractively. It is which one tells you where the gap actually is, because that determines whether you spend the next quarter writing pages or earning mentions, and those are very different budgets.