Profound, Peec AI, Semrush Or Ahrefs?
Category
AEO & SEO
Published by
Tom Emmanuel
Read Time
6 Minutes
Profound vs Peec AI vs Semrush vs Ahrefs Brand Radar is the shortlist most brands reach when they want to know whether ChatGPT and Google's AI answers mention them. The short answer: Semrush or Ahrefs if you already pay for one and want AI tracking alongside your SEO data, Peec AI if you want a focused tool with product-level shopping tracking at a mid-market budget, and Profound if you are an enterprise brand that needs depth and will pay for it. Here is what each tracks, what it costs and how to choose.
Tom Emmanuel
Founder, Furnace Commerce
Profound vs Peec AI vs Semrush vs Ahrefs: what each one does
How these tools work
All four run a set of prompts, the questions your buyers might ask, through AI assistants on a schedule. They record whether your brand is mentioned, whether your site is cited as a source, which competitors appear instead, and how that changes over time. The prompts are the product. Fifty well-chosen prompts that match how your buyers really ask, such as "best vitamin C serum for sensitive skin UK", tell you more than five hundred generic ones. Expect to spend the first month refining them. When you compare them, look at four things: which assistants each plan covers, how many prompts you get for the money, whether it shows the sources the AI cited, and whether it can track individual products rather than just brand mentions. Then check the countries it can run prompts from, because answers in the UK can differ from answers in the US. None of these tools changes what the AI says. They tell you where you stand so you can fix the pages, product data and listings that answer engines draw on.
Semrush and Ahrefs: AI tracking inside your SEO tool
Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit tracks prompts in Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, Gemini and ChatGPT search, and adds Perplexity in its brand performance reports. It covers share of voice, sentiment, prompts where competitors are cited and you are not, and an AI search site audit. As a standalone toolkit it is $99 a month for one project and 25 tracked prompts. Semrush also bundles AI search tracking into its SEO plans. Its help centre says the toolkit itself has no free trial. Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks mentions and citations across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, with an AI share of voice measure and competitor benchmarking. Ahrefs' pricing page lists Brand Radar AI from $199 a month, with custom prompt packages from $50 a month on top. Its own pages present the pricing in more than one way, so confirm the current offer before you buy. Both suit a brand that already lives in one of these tools. You get AI visibility next to your keyword rankings and backlinks, and one fewer login.
Peec AI and Profound: built for AI search
Peec AI is a dedicated AI visibility tool. Its Starter, Pro and Advanced plans let you choose three models to track from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot and Gemini, with Perplexity as an add-on, and include 50, 150 or 350 prompts respectively. Every plan includes unlimited users and daily tracking. For ecommerce, its AI Shopping module tracks visibility at product level, the price the AI shows and which retailers appear. Peec's pricing page did not show prices when we checked, so get a quote or check the live page. Profound is the enterprise option. It tracks the major assistants, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with citation analytics, AI crawler logs and prompt volume data. Its ChatGPT Shopping tracking works at product level but sits in the Enterprise plan, which is priced on request. There is a free seven-day trial covering ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. If you sell physical products, product-level shopping tracking is the feature to look for. Of these four, only Peec and Profound publish it.
Which to choose
Choose Semrush if you already use it for SEO and want AI tracking for a known $99 a month. It is the simplest way to start. Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if Ahrefs is already your SEO tool and you want broad coverage of the assistants, including Copilot, with share of voice reporting. Choose Peec AI if AI visibility is a priority in its own right, you want daily tracking across a chosen set of assistants and you need to see how individual products appear in AI shopping answers. Choose Profound if you are a large brand with an enterprise budget and want the deepest data, including crawler logs and SKU-level ChatGPT Shopping tracking. On a tight budget, there are cheaper dedicated tools. Otterly.AI lists a Lite plan at $29 a month for 15 prompts, and Scrunch starts at $300 a month month-to-month. All prices here are in US dollars and come from the vendors' own pages; none publishes sterling pricing. Run a trial or the cheapest plan for a month before you commit to anything annual. The first month mostly tells you whether your prompts are right, and that matters more than which dashboard you look at. Whichever you pick, the tool is the easy part. Writing the right prompts, and then fixing the product pages, feeds and listings it shows are missing, is where the results come from.
An AI visibility tool tells you where you are missing. It does not fix anything on its own.
Questions brands ask about AI visibility tools
Do I need an AI visibility tool at all?
Not on day one. You can start by asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode the questions your buyers ask, and by tracking ChatGPT referrals in analytics, which arrive with utm_source=chatgpt.com. A tool earns its cost once you want to track dozens of prompts consistently and report on progress month to month.
How many prompts should I track?
Start with 25 to 50 that map to real buying questions in your category: comparisons, best-for questions, problems your product solves and questions about your brand by name. That fits the entry plans of most tools. Add more once you know which ones move.
Can these tools track Amazon Rufus?
None of the four says it tracks Rufus on its pricing or product pages. Rufus answers inside Amazon's app and website, so for Amazon the practical measure is still listing quality, conversion and sales, alongside the AI assistants these tools do cover.
Are these tools accurate?
Treat them as a trend, not a precise count. AI answers vary by user, location and wording, and assistants change their models often. A tool that runs the same prompts every day is useful for spotting direction and competitor gaps. It will not tell you exactly what every shopper sees.
Let's work together
Not sure where you stand in AI search?
Tell us your category and your main competitors, and we will tell you which tool fits, or whether you need one yet.