CheckMarque AI vs. the GEO market: an honest comparison

If you're evaluating GEO and AI-visibility options in 2026, you're choosing between roughly five kinds of thing, most of which are not what we sell. This page compares them by name, with pricing as published in July 2026, and tells you plainly where a tool is the better answer — because a comparison page you can't trust to say that isn't a comparison page, it's an ad.

One framing note before the names, and it's the honest basis for everything below. Nearly every product in this market answers the question "where does my brand appear in AI answers?" That's measurement, and measurement matters. CheckMarque is built for the questions that start after the measurement: why does the AI describe you the way it does, what specifically do you change, across which parts of the organisation — and who re-evaluates the answer when the landscape shifts again, as it did at least six times in the eight weeks to mid-July 2026 (documented, with dates, in our pillar guide). Monitoring tools report present state. We sell the diagnosis and the road ahead. Different job. Sometimes you need both; often one; occasionally neither.

Prices below are as published by vendors or documented in dated third-party reviews as of July 2026. This market reprices and repackages constantly — two of the companies below were acquired, or agreed to be, within the last nine months — so verify with the vendor before you buy. Where a vendor publishes no pricing, we say so.

The short version

Now the detail, tier by tier.

Mid-market monitoring dashboards

Peec AI is the fastest-growing of the European monitoring tools — roughly $10M ARR in 16 months and a $21M Series A in November 2025.¹² Starter pricing is listed from about €89–90/month for daily tracking of a set number of prompts across a subset of AI engines, with more engines available as paid add-ons and higher tiers around €240–500/month.³ It's a well-built product with genuine momentum. What you're buying is visibility into your visibility: prompt tracking, share-of-voice, sentiment, competitor overlays. What it won't tell you is why the numbers are what they are, or that part of this week's movement is retrieval plumbing rotating rather than anything you did — a documented phenomenon.⁴ Choose Peec if you want a capable, affordable scoreboard and you have someone in-house who'll interpret it.

Otterly.AI is the budget entry point: plans documented from about $29/month for a small prompt set across the major engines.⁵ For a small business that just wants recurring proof of "do we appear, yes or no," this is honestly a fine place to start, and we say so. The audit layer is thin and the interpretation is on you. Choose Otterly if budget is the constraint and you need basic recurring monitoring.

AthenaHQ starts around $295/month with broader engine coverage from day one, positioning itself closer to action with in-platform drafting and attribution features.⁶ Goodie AI starts around $399/month and is positioning for agentic search and commerce monitoring.⁶ Both are credible mid-market options in the same fundamental shape: your prompts, your scores, your dashboard.

Scrunch AI listed at $250–500/month (brand tiers) before being acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 for a reported $225 million.⁷⁸ The acquisition is worth pausing on, because it tells you where this tier is going: monitoring is being absorbed into big marketing-suite ecosystems as a feature. Our read, stated as our read: standalone measurement is commoditising — the incumbents' own M&A behaviour says the durable value sits elsewhere.

The honest common denominator across this tier: methodology is largely a black box (you get a score, not the reasoning), scope is your tracked prompts rather than your organisation, and the product reports today's state with no layer watching what's about to change. None of that makes them bad products. It makes them measurement products.

The enterprise platform: Profound

Profound is the category's heavyweight: a $96M Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026, more than 700 enterprise customers, over 10% of the Fortune 500, SOC 2 credentials, and serious data infrastructure — very large conversation datasets, high-volume citation tracking, crawler analytics.⁹¹⁰ Pricing is demo-led with nothing public; older references cite $99/$399 self-serve tiers, and 2026 reviews report enterprise deployments in the $2,000–5,000+/month range.¹¹

Credit where due: if the job is enterprise-scale AI-visibility data (many brands, many markets, procurement requirements, an in-house team ready to work the numbers), Profound is the strongest data operation in the market, and pretending otherwise would mark this page as unserious. The difference is the one that runs through this whole page: it's a platform that hands your team powerful evidence and proprietary scores; the interpretation, the org-level fixes, and the forward watch remain your team's job. Choose Profound if you're an enterprise with the team to work a heavyweight platform. If you're a mid-sized considered-purchase business without that bench, a subscription to enterprise-grade evidence still leaves the actual questions unanswered: why, what now, what's next.

SEO suites bolting on AI visibility

Semrush added an AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month per domain on top of a base subscription, and is being absorbed into Adobe via a $1.9 billion acquisition announced in November 2025.¹²¹³ Conductor, SE Ranking, Ahrefs and the other SEO incumbents have equivalent moves in flight. The appeal is real: one vendor, familiar workflows, AI metrics next to your rank tracking.

The structural caveat is equally real, and it's not a knock on the engineering. These are toolkits built by mapping AI visibility onto SEO's mental model — domains, rankings, tracked queries. As we lay out in the pillar guide, the evidence increasingly shows AI visibility behaving unlike page-level ranking: only 17% of AI-cited sources also rank in the organic top ten,¹⁴ and 96% of AI citations point to third-party sources rather than your own domain.¹⁵ Our read: a domain-scoped add-on inherits a frame that measures your 4% and structurally under-weights the 96%. Choose a suite add-on if you're already paying for the suite and want directional AI numbers beside your SEO data — just know what the frame can and can't see.

Content-automation tools

Frase ($39–103/month) began as an SEO content-optimisation tool and folded GEO tracking into all plans in 2026.¹⁶ Gracker AI sells an "autopilot" that, in its own words, handles strategy, content creation, and publishing — AI-optimised articles, listicles, and comparison pages at scale for cybersecurity and SaaS brands.¹⁷

Used as drafting assistance under real editorial judgement, tools like these have a legitimate place. But buyers should walk in knowing the policy environment: Google's spam policies explicitly name scaled content abuse — using automation, including generative AI, to produce many pages without adding value — as a violation, method-agnostic and actively enforced through the 2026 core updates, where some volume-content sites reported traffic losses above 50%.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰ To be precise, because precision is the difference between analysis and scare copy: Google does not penalise AI-generated content as a category; it penalises unhelpful content at scale, whoever or whatever wrote it.¹⁹ Our read follows directly: the closer a tool's value proposition sits to "volume without proportional human judgement," the more directly its output competes with the one thing the platforms have committed to filtering out. That's not a prediction about any one vendor. It's the published direction of platform policy, and a buyer should price it in.

CheckMarque AI

Now us, in the same honest register.

What we are: a GEO consultancy delivered as agentic advisory. A diagnostic and ongoing engagement in which the evidence-gathering and the explanation are run by an AI pipeline that holds your organisation's full context, and the judgement calls are made by humans. Consultant-depth explanation, without consultant-hour economics.

What you get that the tiers above don't sell:

• The why, on every finding. Not "your visibility is 46." Which engines say what about you, traced to which sources, failing at which of the three gates (found / understood / actionable), and what specifically to change — in plain language, with the reasoning attached. We assess against public standards rather than a secret rubric, and we show our work. A score without a reason is a receipt, not a deliverable.
• Whole-organisation scope. The evidence says machines synthesise you from everything — your site's machine-readable skeleton, third-party sources (96% of citations¹⁵), forums, structured declarations. So the engagement touches positioning, content, technical signals, and the third-party record together, not a marketing silo.
• The forward watch. We monitor the landscape across four layers — models, infrastructure standards, the retrieval machinery underneath, and platform policy — and translate each shift into what it means for you specifically: act now, watch, or safely ignore, with reasons. The events of May–July 2026 are the argument for why this layer exists; no dashboard tier above has it.
• A deliverable your team can execute. 30/90-day action plans, technical artifacts (schema, declaration files, knowledge structure), and re-assessment on a cadence, so the work compounds instead of expiring with the next platform shift.

What we don't sell, for symmetry: a self-serve dashboard you log into today (that's on our roadmap, honestly labelled as roadmap); per-seat licences; instant scores; or certainty about a landscape that's pre-1.0 — where a standard is weeks old, we'll tell you to position calmly, not panic-buy.

Pricing model: a flat-fee entry diagnostic (where you stand, why, and the plan), then a monthly advisory retainer scoped to company size for the ongoing engagement — explanation, technical deliverables, alignment work, and the forward watch. We publish the model rather than a number because the scope genuinely varies; the diagnostic is designed to be a self-contained, commitment-free way to find out what working together looks like.

Who we're for: organisations selling considered, non-commodity products — technical and industrial B2B above all — where buyers research seriously (increasingly via AI) before ever talking to you, and where being misread by a machine quietly costs real deals. Who we're not for: commodity or impulse products, and teams that genuinely just need a number to watch — that's the tiers above, and several of them are good at it.

The bottom line

Measurement, commoditising — in nine months, with receipts.

Buy a dashboard when your question is "where do we stand?" and you have the in-house judgement to act on a number. Buy enterprise tooling when your question is "where do we stand, at scale?" and you have the team to work it. Talk to us when your question is "why — and what do we do about it, and who's watching what changes next?" — because in a market where all the measurement is rapidly becoming a commodity (the acquirers are telling you so⁷¹³), the explanation is the part that holds its value.

Start with the twenty-minute self-audit in our pillar guide. It costs nothing, and it will tell you which of these questions is actually yours.