tobecited alternatives, compared on price and assistant coverage
The three tools named beside us most often are Otterly.ai, Peec AI and Profound. Their entry plans cost $29, $95 and $99 a month, and none of them covers all four major assistants at that price: Otterly bills Claude and Gemini as add-ons, Peec caps Starter at three models, Profound Starter checks ChatGPT alone. tobecited is $19 with all 4.
Where these numbers come from
Otterly and Profound figures were read from their own pricing pages on August 28, 2026. Peec no longer prints numbers on its page, so its figures are reported by 2026 reviews and reconciled on the same date. Ours are printed from the plan catalogue this site runs on. These three products are on this page because our own audit of tobecited.com, run on August 28, 2026, found them named in AI answers to buying questions in this category more often than anyone else.
| Compared on | tobecited — $19/mo | Otterly.ai — $29/mo | Peec AI — $95/mo | Profound — $99/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assistants included at that price | All 4: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | Any three models you pick | ChatGPT only |
| Price for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity | $19 | $67 — Lite plus Claude $29 and Gemini $9 | $95 plus one model add-on, $35–165 | Enterprise, price on request |
| Buyer questions on the entry plan | 10 | 15ahead of us | 50ahead of us | 50ahead of us |
| Free check without a card | Yes — 12 answers, no expiry | No free tier | 7-day trial, no permanent free tier | No free tier |
| Ready-to-publish fixes | Yes — llms.txt, schema markup, titles, FAQ blocks | No — monitoring only | No — monitoring only | No — monitoring and analytics |
| Biggest published plan | Max $99 — 5 sites | Premium $489 — 400 questions; Enterprise from $1,000ahead of us | Advanced $495 — 350 questions; Enterprise to 11 modelsahead of us | Growth $399; Enterprise, up to 9 enginesahead of us |
Cells marked "ahead of us" are the ones where the other tool wins.
The line that decides most of this table
Every one of these products can tell you whether an AI assistant names your brand. What separates them at the entry price is which assistants they ask.
Otterly Lite asks four, but a different four: Copilot and Google AI Overviews instead of Claude and Gemini, both of which are billed as add-ons. Peec Starter lets you choose any three and stops there. Profound Starter asks ChatGPT and nothing else.
tobecited runs the same panel on every plan — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity — including the free check, because the panel is how the audit is built rather than a display option attached to a price. That is the whole of our argument on price, and it is checkable in one click on each vendor's pricing page.
What the free check actually gives you
3 buyer questions, asked of all 4 assistants, is 12 answers, plus a readiness report on the site itself: whether AI crawlers can reach your pages, what a model sees when JavaScript is not executed, and which structured data is missing. No card, and it does not expire.
None of the three tools on this page has a permanent free tier. Peec runs a 7-day trial without a card, which is the closest of the three.
We are not the only free entry point in the wider category, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise: Trakkr runs a free tier for one brand, and LLMrefs gives one keyword free. Neither of them checks four assistants and neither generates fixes, but if free is the only criterion, they belong on your list too.
Reporting versus fixing, and what that is worth
All three of these tools are monitoring-first: they show you where you are named and where a competitor is named instead, and the work of changing anything is yours.
tobecited generates the files — llms.txt, schema markup for pages that lack it, rewritten titles, FAQ blocks built from the questions the assistants were actually asked — and you publish them.
The honest boundary: outside monitoring, several content platforms do generate and even deploy changes, Gradial and Scrunch AI and Writesonic among them. They are enterprise products at enterprise prices. What is true is narrower and still useful: below $100 a month, among monitoring tools, generated fixes are rare.
And what we will not claim: there is no large-scale evidence that publishing an llms.txt or a schema block causes an assistant to cite you. Those files make a page unambiguous to a machine. That is a precondition, not a result.
Where we lose, on the record
Question volume, against all three. Otterly Lite tracks 15, Peec Starter and Profound Starter track 50 each, and our Pro plan tracks 10. That is the row in the table with three marks against us, and it is not a rounding difference.
Surfaces we do not cover at all: Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. Otterly monitors both on its $29 plan and Profound covers AI Overviews from Growth. There is no add-on on our side that fixes this — those surfaces are not in our panel.
Scale and track record. Profound reaches nine engines with an API, SSO and multi-company accounts; Peec Enterprise reaches eleven models; Otterly Premium tracks 400 questions. And on G2, Profound has 323 reviews and Peec has 11, where we have none at all.
If any of those lines is the deciding one for you, buy the tool that wins it. This page exists to make that decision quickly, not to end it in our favour.
Check your own site before you pick a tool
No card. Four assistants. The report is yours whether you buy anything or not.
What this comparison is not
- This is not a feature matrix of everything four products do. It compares entry plans on price, assistant coverage, question volume, free access and whether you get files to publish.
- It is not neutral either. We built one of the four. What we can promise is that where we lose, the table says so in the row itself rather than in a footnote.
- It is not a live price feed. Every figure is dated August 28, 2026. Prices in this category move, and one of the three — Peec — no longer publishes numbers on its own page at all. Check before you buy.
- None of these tools, ours included, can promise you a mention in an AI answer. Anyone who does is selling something they do not control.
Questions buyers ask before switching
- What are the main alternatives to tobecited?
- Otterly.ai at $29 a month, Peec AI at $95 and Profound at $99 are the three named most often alongside us in this category. All three are monitoring products, and all three price the full four-assistant panel above their entry plan.
- Which AI visibility tool is cheapest?
- tobecited, at $19 a month, and it is the only one of the four with a free check that does not expire. Otterly Lite is $29, but Claude and Gemini are add-ons there, so matching our panel costs $67.
- Which tool checks the most AI assistants at its entry price?
- tobecited: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, on every plan including the free one. Otterly Lite also covers four surfaces, but a different four — Copilot and Google AI Overviews in place of Claude and Gemini.
- Which tool tracks the most buyer questions?
- Not us. Peec Starter and Profound Starter track 50 each and Otterly Lite tracks 15, against 10 on tobecited Pro. Question volume is the one axis where all three beat our entry plan.
- Do any of them fix what they find?
- Not in this price band. Otterly, Peec and Profound are monitoring-first: they report and stop. tobecited generates llms.txt, schema markup, titles and FAQ blocks for you to publish. Above this price band, enterprise content platforms such as Gradial, Scrunch AI and Writesonic do generate and deploy changes.
- Is there any other tool with a free tier?
- Yes. Trakkr runs a free tier for one brand and LLMrefs gives one keyword free, so we are not the only free entry point in the category. Among the three tools on this page, only Peec offers anything free — a 7-day trial with no card and no permanent tier behind it.