Beacon vs Profound vs Scrunch vs Peec: The Honest AEO Tool Comparison (2026)
Every AEO platform compared on price, engines, and what happens after the dashboard shows you the problem. Written by Space, the team behind Beacon.
TL;DR
- Written by the team behind Beacon, this comparison covers Profound, Scrunch, Peec, HubSpot, Goodie, and AirOps, and stays deliberately fair because the core difference holds either way.
- Every rival sells monitoring: you pay monthly, the dashboard shows where AI ignores your brand, and your team does the work. Beacon's $5,000 a month buys the work itself.
- Profound leads the category with over $155 million raised, but its enterprise tier of $2,000 to $5,000+ per month still leaves execution to your team while a strategist advises.
- Peec is the best budget tracker at $95 a month but caps every tier at three of seven engines, with Claude enterprise-only and per-engine add-ons of 20 to 140 euros.
- Beacon's free audit covers five engines including Claude, runs 86 technical checks, includes a strategist's review in 24 hours, and the managed program ships fixes from day one.
We build Beacon, so read this knowing that. We are going to be fair to every tool on this list anyway, because the comparison only helps you if it survives a fact-check, and because the thing that separates Beacon from the field is true whether we spin it or not.
Here is that thing up front. Every platform below sells monitoring. You pay monthly, the dashboard shows you where AI ignores your brand, and then your team does the work. Beacon inverts the model. The audit is free, and the $5,000 a month buys the work itself: a strategist and an engineer deployed on your account, fixes shipping from day one, content written and live inside the first month. Dashboards charge enterprise money to describe the problem. We charge the same money and the problem gets solved.
Now the field.
The comparison at a glance
Tool | What it is | Entry price | Full price | Engines | Who does the work |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Beacon by Space | Free audit + done-for-you AEO program | Free | $5,000/mo managed | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | Space's strategists and engineers |
Profound | Enterprise AEO monitoring platform | $99/mo (ChatGPT only) | $399/mo for 3 engines; enterprise reported at $2,000 to $5,000+/mo | Up to 10+ on enterprise | Your team (enterprise adds an advising strategist) |
Scrunch AI | AEO monitoring + crawler analytics | $300/mo ($250 annual) | $500/mo Growth; enterprise custom | 4 on entry; Claude gated to enterprise | Your team |
Peec AI | Lightweight AEO tracking | $95/mo | $495/mo Advanced | 3 of 7 on every tier; Claude enterprise-only; per-engine add-ons | Your team |
HubSpot AEO | AEO inside Marketing Hub | Bundled with Hub subscription | Scales with Hub tier | Major engines via Hub | Your team |
Goodie | AEO with revenue attribution | Demo-priced | Custom | Major engines | Your team |
AirOps | AI visibility + content workflows | Demo-priced | Custom | Major engines | Your team, running their workflows |
Pricing as published or reported August 2026. Enterprise figures for Profound come from third-party reviews; Profound does not publish them.
Profound: the category leader, and the clearest case for our model
Profound is the reference point in AEO, and it earned the position. Over $155 million raised, a customer list that includes Ramp, MongoDB, and US Bank, and the deepest visibility dataset in the category. If you want to know exactly how AI engines see your brand, Profound's data is excellent.
Look at what converts for them, though. Profound's highest-performing asset is its free AEO report. The thing buyers actually want is the diagnosis, and Profound gives it away to sell monitoring on top. Their Starter plan runs $99 a month and covers ChatGPT only. Multi-engine tracking starts at $399. Enterprise deals, per third-party reviews, commonly land between $2,000 and $5,000 or more per month, and even at that tier the model is a dashboard plus a strategist who advises while your team executes.
That last clause is the whole comparison. At $5,000 a month, Profound's enterprise tier and Beacon's managed program cost about the same. One shows you the gap. The other closes it.
Choose Profound if you have an in-house AEO team that needs enterprise-grade data and you want to run the program yourself. Choose Beacon if you want the program run.
Scrunch: strong crawler analytics, a higher floor, and a new owner
Scrunch's differentiator is real. Its crawler and agent analytics show how AI bots actually access your site, which most trackers skip entirely, and the platform is SOC 2 Type II certified for teams that need the compliance box checked. Sitecore acquired Scrunch in 2026, which brings enterprise resources and an open question about where the roadmap goes inside a larger suite.
The trade-offs are price and gating. Entry is $300 a month, or $250 billed annually, for four engines. Claude sits behind the enterprise tier. Reviewers note the recommendations reward teams with in-house technical depth, because Scrunch tells you what to fix and assumes you have people who can.
Beacon runs its crawler and rendering checks, all 86 of them, inside the free report. Claude included.
Peec: the best budget tracker, with a ceiling
Peec is the tool we would point a bootstrapped team toward if all they wanted was tracking. Starter runs $95 a month with genuinely fast dashboards, clean citation drilldowns, and a customer list that includes Wix and Brevo. For pure monitoring on a budget, Peec wins its bracket.
The ceiling shows up in the engine list. Every Peec tier, including the $495 Advanced plan, caps you at three engines from its set of seven, and Claude is enterprise-only. Tracking a fourth engine means a per-engine add-on of €20 to €140 a month. The sticker price and the full-coverage price are different numbers.
And Peec, like everyone above, hands you data. The work is still yours.
HubSpot, Goodie, AirOps: three different bets on the same model
HubSpot's AEO features make sense if you already live in Marketing Hub. AEO becomes another pane in the tool your team opens every day, which is a real convenience and a real limitation, because the depth goes only as far as the Hub tier you pay for.
Goodie bets on attribution, connecting AI visibility to pipeline and revenue. If your CFO asks what AEO is worth in dollars, Goodie's answer is the most direct in the category.
AirOps gets closest to execution. It connects visibility data to content workflows, so the gap between insight and action is smaller than anywhere else on this list. Your team still runs the workflows, still reviews the output, still owns the calendar. AirOps shortens the distance to the work. It does not do the work.
The pattern, and why it exists
Six platforms, one model. Software subscriptions scale beautifully when the customer does the labor, so every venture-backed entrant built a dashboard. None of them employ the strategists and engineers who close the gaps their dashboards find, because that would make them an agency, and agencies do not get SaaS multiples.
Space is an agency, so we built the model the others structurally cannot copy. Beacon's free report matches or beats the paid diagnostics above: five engines including Claude, prompts built from your actual business rather than a category template, 86 technical checks, a strategist's review on every report, back in 24 hours. Then the managed program does what no dashboard offers. Technical fixes on day one. The AI-readability layer rebuilt in week one. Strategy and the first flagship content live inside month one. One metric reported monthly: how often AI mentions you.
We will also tell you what we do not do. If you want raw dashboard access, historical trend exports, and API hooks for your BI stack, Profound and Peec are built for that and we are not. If you want to run AEO as an in-house discipline, buy a tracker and hire the team. Beacon is for companies that want the outcome without building the department.
Start with the free report
Every comparison on this page gets easier with your own data in hand. Run the free Beacon audit, see where you stand across all five engines, and decide from there. The report is yours either way.
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