CrawlBit vs Profound vs Otterly vs Peec AI
Comparison·Updated August 2026·6 min read
The short answer
Every tool here measures your citations, and that stopped being the differentiator a while ago. Profound now goes further and writes, publishing content straight into your CMS. But all of them stop at the same border: your own website. CrawlBit works on the other side of it, on the third-party pages AI actually cites, and gets you onto them.
The AI visibility category is well funded and crowded: Profound alone raised $96M at a $1B valuation, Scrunch AI $26M and Peec around €7M, and a dozen tools now track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mention your brand. They are good at telling you the score. The gap almost all of them share is the next step: once you know you are not cited, what do you actually do about it? That is the question this page is about.
Measurement is table stakes. The gap moved.
Every tool in this comparison can tell you whether AI cites you. That used to be the hard part; now it is the commodity. Through 2026 the gap was action, and it has partly closed: Profound Agents now research, write and publish. So the honest line is no longer "they measure, we act". It is where the work lands.
On-page is the half the category has caught up on: clear answer-first content, FAQ and Organization schema, tables instead of prose, a clean technical foundation, fresh timestamps. CrawlBit checks these, generates the schema and drafts the content. Profound will also publish it for you. Credit where it is due.
Off-page is the half the tools above stop short of, and it is the stronger signal. The biggest predictor of being cited by AI is being mentioned elsewhere: on review platforms like G2, Trustpilot and Capterra, inside "best X" roundup listicles, and in genuine community discussion. Profound now gets closer than the rest: its agent marketplace has an Outreach category that pulls the cited URLs, researches the author and drafts the email, then writes the result to a spreadsheet. Someone still has to send it, and someone still has to land the page. CrawlBit finds the specific pages your competitors are cited on that you are missing, and does that last step.
To be accurate about it, "nobody does off-page" stopped being true in 2026, and the field has since filled in from both ends. Scribble Network runs a marketplace of creators paid per verified AI citation, with managed campaigns from $2,000 a month. Visiblie sells a done-for-you plan at $4,125 a month that includes community signal work on Reddit and LinkedIn. Respona sells placements one at a time, content, outreach and publication included, roughly $100 to $500 each with no retainer and no commitment, read on their pricing page on 27 August 2026. All three do real off-page work, and the two retainers run at a scale we could not match and would not try to. So the thing that is missing is not a rung on the price ladder. It is a number: almost nobody tells you how many placements you get for what you pay. A Citation Sprint is $490 once and says five, researched, written and sent against the exact gaps your own citation test surfaced, then re-tested at 30 days and reported with its margin of error, including when it barely moved.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AI visibility tool in 2026?
There is no single best tool; it depends on what you need done. Profound has the widest engine coverage and now writes and publishes content to your own CMS. Otterly and Peec AI are strong mid-market monitors. CrawlBit is the one that works on pages you do not own: it finds the third-party pages AI cites your competitors on, and gets you onto them.
How is CrawlBit different from Profound, Otterly and Peec?
The difference is not measurement, and since 2026 it is not execution either: Profound Agents write and publish content through your CMS. The difference is where the work lands. Every one of these tools stops at the edge of your own website. CrawlBit works on third-party pages, the review platforms, roundup listicles and community threads that AI actually cites, finds the exact ones your competitors appear on, and gets you onto them.
How much does CrawlBit cost compared to Profound and Otterly?
CrawlBit audits your site for free with an account. The live citation test, which asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini whether they name you, is paid. Paid work is a Citation Sprint at $490 one-time, which includes three off-page placements executed for you and a re-test after 30 days, then optional Monthly Tracking at $390 per month. The others are monitoring subscriptions: Otterly runs $29 to $489 per month with enterprise from $1,000, Profound runs $99 per month for ChatGPT only and $399 for three engines with enterprise on quote, and Peec AI does not publish its prices. Checked 19 August 2026. They tell you where you stand, and Profound will also write on your own site; none of them do the off-page work on third-party pages. Prices change; check each vendor for current numbers.
Which AI visibility tool is best for a Shopify or DTC store?
DTC stores need product-level readiness, not just brand tracking. Since Shopify's agentic storefronts push products into ChatGPT by default, the lever is complete, machine-readable product schema. CrawlBit checks Product schema completeness and the off-page footprint ecommerce brands are graded on, which general AI visibility trackers do not focus on.