Choosing an AI visibility tool in 2026: SynectGEO vs Profound, Peec, Otterly, Scrunch and Semrush

More buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity before they ever open Google. If those answers don’t name you, you’re invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to choose. A new category of tools — AI visibility (or GEO) platforms — measures whether that’s happening to your brand.

We build one of them. So instead of pretending to be neutral, here’s the comparison we’d want as a buyer: what each of the best-known tools does well, where SynectGEO fits, and where it honestly doesn’t. Everything below was checked against each vendor’s own public pages on 31 August 2026 — if you’re reading this later, re-check before you decide.

The field, in one paragraph each

Profound is the enterprise-leaning heavyweight: prompt-volume demand data, crawler analytics and AI “marketing agents” on top of answer-engine monitoring. Its self-serve plans (from $99/month) track ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews; the wider surface list — Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude — sits on its custom-priced enterprise tier. If you want demand data and have the budget, start there.

Peec AI is the mid-market and agency favourite: clean dashboards for visibility, position and sentiment across six surfaces, competitor benchmarks, source recommendations and a strategy-recommendations feed, plus API and MCP access. Its pricing page lists four tiers but no figures — you’ll need to talk to them for a number.

Otterly.AI is the small-business favourite, and among the most transparent on price: from $29/month for 15 prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot — with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode as paid add-ons. Strong content audits and a genuinely good GEO-experiments blog.

Scrunch is betting on what’s next: it calls itself an “AI customer experience platform” and focuses on making your site readable by AI agents, with agent-traffic analytics and a 30-second instant audit. Plans run $250–$500/month plus a custom enterprise tier — monitoring is one module of a bigger play.

Semrush AI Toolkit is the suite entrant, now with a standalone AI Visibility plan ($99/month per domain, tracking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI) alongside its SEO + AI Search tiers ($117–$456/month). If your team already lives in Semrush, the AI visibility, competitor gap analysis and prompt demand data bolt onto the workflow you have.

Where SynectGEO fits

SynectGEO is built for one job: tell you exactly how AI portrays your brand, and prove it. One score. Four chat engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity — plus Google AI Overview as a fifth measured surface. Every report is built from real answers to real buyer prompts, generated from your actual page and steerable with plain-English instructions (“no branded prompts”, “20% US and 80% Ireland”).

Three things we do differently, and why:

You can read every answer. Every cell in a SynectGEO report opens the actual AI response behind it — dated, quoted, with sensitive claims flagged. AI statements are presented as AI statements, never as facts about your brand. If an engine was unavailable during a run, we say so and score without it rather than counting silence as absence.

Prompts you control. ~95% of generated prompts are non-branded (so we measure real discoverability, not vanity), split across up to three target markets, editable by instruction before a single query is spent.

Built in Ireland, GDPR-first. SYNECT LIMITED is a Dublin company. We document our sub-processors, cap what every audit can spend, don’t retain what we don’t need, and put the whole data flow in plain English in our privacy policy. If EU procurement asks where your brand-monitoring data goes, you’ll have an answer.

Honest trade-offs

We’d rather you pick the right tool than pick us for the wrong job. As of today: Profound’s enterprise tier and Otterly track more AI surfaces than we do (we add engines only after their terms of service allow the analysis we run — some don’t). Profound and Semrush surface prompt-volume demand data we don’t yet show. Peec and Otterly offer API/MCP access we haven’t shipped. If you need those today, they’re the better choice — this table is the short version:

n/s = not stated on the vendor’s public pages as of 31 August 2026. Vendor features and prices are theirs to change — always check their sites.

The short version

• Want demand data, agents, or the widest surface list: Profound.
• Agency managing many clients: Peec AI or Otterly.
• Already in Semrush: the AI Toolkit is the path of least resistance.
• Preparing your site for AI agents: watch Scrunch.
• Want proof, not promises — real answers, honest scores, EU-grade data handling, at SMB pricing: that’s the job SynectGEO was built for.

See exactly what a report looks like — no signup — at the sample report, or run one on your own brand from €49/month. Curious how the score itself works? We published the full methodology.

Competitor information verified against each vendor’s own website on 31 August 2026. Spotted something outdated or wrong? Email hello@synectgroup.com and we’ll correct it.