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Comparison

Every tool in this category
finds the same gap.
Somebody still has to close it.

Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Scrunch and AthenaHQ all answer one question well: which pages are producing the answers about your category, and where are you missing from them. None of them changes those pages, and each says so in its own words. That is not a flaw in the software, it is the edge of what software can do, and it is the whole of what an agency is for. Which half you should buy depends mostly on whether you have people.

How the two differ

Every tool in this category finds the same gap. Somebody still has to close it.. An agency, in our case GetMOW against The software, row by row.
How the two differAn agency, in our case GetMOWThe software
Who does the workThe agency. We run the category analysis, build the target list of third-party pages, write the pitches, contact the editors, argue the case and report the transcripts back. Nobody on your team owns a workflow.You, or an agency you hire. The vendors say so themselves. Otterly’s product page: the platform “hands your team a prioritized list of fixes.” Peec’s Actions page: “you keep full creative control over execution.” Profound maintains a directory of 19 outside agencies under the heading “Skip the learning curve of AI Search and find an expert.”
Which pages get changedThird-party pages: the roundups, comparison articles, review site category pages and directories the models quote when a buyer asks who to consider. Pages you do not own, changed editorially, with the diff shown to you.Your own, mostly. Profound’s Agents publish approved content into ten CMS integrations. Peec and Otterly change nothing at all by design; they audit and recommend. Two of them now offer a paid route to third-party pages through publisher networks, which is buying a placement rather than earning an edit.
What it costsEngagements start at €5,000, which buys a 49 day proof phase: the baseline, the map of the sources shaping your category’s answers, the plan, and one qualifying mention on a relevant third-party site that neither of us owns. Miss that mention by day 49 and the €5,000 is returned in full. Past the proof phase the implementation is quoted before it starts, and two payments across the first year fall due only once the target attached to each has been verified.Cheap, published and easy to compare. Otterly $29, Peec $95, Profound $99 billed yearly, Scrunch Core $250, AthenaHQ $295 with a free tier. Add-ons stack: an Otterly Premium plan with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode enabled is $1,226 a month at list price, though most vendors keep the tiers carrying every engine unpublished, and Otterly’s stacked add-ons are the rare case you can actually compute one.
MeasurementWe do, included with the engagement rather than sold separately: your visibility score, what has changed on each target, and the approval workflow for every pitch before it goes out. The daily multi-engine tracking these tools do is still theirs, not ours. Without a tool of your own, our free category report is the one-off version of the same read.What they are for, and they are good at it. Profound queries nine engines daily across 30+ languages and 150+ regions with licensed prompt volume data. Peec captures what real users see through the web interfaces rather than APIs. Otterly fetches your pages as OAI-SearchBot and Perplexity’s crawler to check you are readable at all. No agency deliverable replaces any of that.
Time to a first answerThe free category report is written by hand and lands within one working day. What takes time is the change itself: editorial work moves on the publisher’s clock rather than ours, so some targets land inside a month, some a quarter, and some never, because an editor is allowed to say no. Every target’s status gets reported, not only the wins.The same day. Sign up, add prompts, and see your position in a category answer within one tracking cycle. This is the single biggest advantage software has over any agency, and it is why buying the tool first is almost always the right order.
What you keep if you stop payingThe edits. A roundup that names you keeps naming you after the engagement ends, until somebody rewrites it, and the 2026 lists do become 2027 lists, which is the honest argument for staying rather than a reason to leave.Nothing changes, because nothing had changed. The tracking stops and the history stops with it; how the models describe you is exactly where it was, since the subscription was never what moved it.
Risk of buyingAgencies in this category are mostly small and young, and GetMOW is one of them: no outside funding, no public customer list yet. What that buys you is a founder who answers the phone rather than an account manager reading from a deck, and the refund at day 49 does the vouching a logo wall would otherwise do.Much lower. Profound raised $96M at a $1B valuation in February 2026 with Fortune reporting 700+ enterprise customers, Peec raised $21M in November 2025, and Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026. If your CFO asks whether the vendor exists next year, you have the easier answer.
Do you need bothUsually, and we would still recommend keeping the tool. It gives you daily multi-engine tracking that our own dashboard does not attempt to replace; ours instead shows the approval workflow and the change log for the work itself. The two overlap less than they sound like they should.A tool alone is enough if you already have a content lead, a technical SEO and somebody with publisher relationships. Without those, the tool names the same gap every week and the gap stays open, which is the specific failure this page exists to describe.

Which one you want

You have the diagnosis, or you need one, and no capacity to act alone

A B2B software company that already holds a list of the third-party pages deciding its category and has no spare marketing headcount to work them, or one that has no idea yet whether the models even mention it, in which case the free category report is where this starts. Either way, you want the URLs named, your position on each, and somebody who goes and changes them, and you are willing to pay for labour you are not going to supply yourself. If you already have the list, the test is simple: open it and count how many recommendations from three months ago actually shipped.

You are diagnosing, or you already have people

Buy AI visibility software and skip the agency in several cases. If you do not yet know whether you have a problem, $29 a month at Otterly or AthenaHQ’s free tier answers that faster and more cheaply than any sales call, and it is the right first move. If you already have a content team, an in-house SEO and PR relationships, then a prioritised action list is the only thing missing and $95 to $99 a month beats paying an agency for labour you already have. If you need measurement rather than intervention, daily tracking across nine engines with licensed prompt data and SOC 2 is something no agency ships. If you are an agency yourself, these tools are your supplier. And if the problem is on your own site, a page AI crawlers cannot read is fixed by a crawlability check and your own developer, not by outreach.

What people ask

What is the difference between an AI visibility agency and an AI visibility tool?
A tool measures how AI answers describe your category and tells you what to fix, and an agency does the fixing. The platforms are explicit about the split: Otterly says it “hands your team a prioritized list of fixes,” Peec’s Actions page says “you keep full creative control over execution,” and Profound points customers to a directory of 19 partner agencies for the work itself.
How much does an AI visibility agency cost compared with a tool?
Considerably more, because the money buys labour rather than a dashboard. Published tool prices in 2026 run from $29 a month at Otterly to $95 at Peec, $99 billed yearly at Profound, $250 at Scrunch Core and $295 at AthenaHQ. On the agency side Digital Elevator publishes AI visibility work from $3,000 and off-site campaigns from $3,495 per 30 day cycle, Siege Media publishes an $8,000 a month content minimum, and Omniscient Digital says full-service engagements start at $10,000 a month. GetMOW engagements start at €5,000 for the 49 day proof phase, returned in full if the first mention is not secured; the implementation past day 49 is quoted before it starts and lands inside that same agency band rather than below it.
Can an AI visibility tool get my company added to the listicles ChatGPT cites?
Not by itself, though two of them now route you to somewhere you can buy a placement. Otterly’s in-app Marketplace lets you browse vetted sites and publishers those engines already cite and book a placement without leaving the platform, and Profound’s Noble node hands citation gap domains to a publisher network that runs outreach and payment. Earning an editorial inclusion by persuading the editor is a different route onto the same page.
Do I need to cancel my Profound, Peec or Otterly subscription to hire an agency?
No. Whichever tracker you already bought keeps doing what it does well, daily multi-engine tracking that no agency deliverable replaces, and GetMOW layers its own dashboard on top for the work itself: your visibility score, the change log, and the approval workflow for every pitch.
Is a $29 a month tool enough, or do I need to hire someone?
A $29 plan answers the first question and not the second. Otterly’s Lite tier tracks 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot with unlimited team members, which is enough to prove whether the models name you in your category. Turning that finding into a changed page is work, and the question is whether somebody on your side has the time, the relationships and the persuasion skill to do it.
What can an agency do that software structurally cannot?
Persuade a human editor. The pages deciding a B2B software shortlist belong to publishers rather than to you or your vendor: best-of roundups, comparison articles and review site category pages. Ahrefs’ study of 26,283 source URLs across 750 top-of-funnel prompts found best-of list posts dominate what the models cite, and no dashboard has ever changed one of those posts.
What are the honest limits of hiring an agency for this?
Four of them, and GetMOW has all four. An agency in this category is typically small and young with no long public case-study roster. Its dashboard covers the work itself, target status, changes and approvals, rather than the wider multi-engine tracking a dedicated tool does, so you still want one of those for that view. Editorial inclusion depends on editors agreeing, so timelines are not fully controllable and some targets never open. And none of it helps if your own site cannot be read by AI crawlers, which is a technical fix that comes first.

Where these claims come from

Every price and product claim on this page was read from these pages in September 2026.

Start with what the answers say about you.

Before you choose anyone, including us, see the answer ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give today when a buyer asks who to consider in your category. Free, written by hand, and yours whatever you do next.

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