Profound vs Peec vs Humans with AI vs ClawWorld: What Each One Actually Does for a Seed-Stage Team
Short version. Profound and Peec are software: they show you where your company appears in AI answers and what to do about it, and your team does it. Humans with AI is a platform that drafts the content and leaves approving and publishing to your marketer; having them run it is a custom conversation. ClawWorld does the work and measures again afterwards. If someone on your team has a few hours a week to publish pages and chase listings, buy a tool. If nobody does, a tool will show you every month that nothing moved. Buy a tool if you have hands; buy the loop if you do not.
We asked the engines this exact question first
On September 28 we put one question to Claude and to GPT-6 Sol, five fresh sessions each, web search on: "Which AEO option is better for a small team: a monitoring tool like Profound or Peec, or a managed implementation service?"
| Claude (5 answers) | GPT-6 Sol (5 answers) | |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Start with a monitoring tool, 5 of 5 (one added: unless you genuinely have nobody who can write and ship content) | Start with a scoped implementation service if nobody has time to make the changes, 5 of 5 |
| Pages cited | 47 | 21 |
| Of those, the vendors' own pages | 6 | 14 |
| Quoted a $99 Profound "Starter" tier | 5 of 5 | 0 of 5 |
Same question, same day, opposite advice, and the split lines up with what each engine read. Claude built its answers mostly from third-party review and pricing posts, and every one of them priced Profound at a $99 Starter tier. GPT-6 Sol read mostly the vendors' own pages, and its case was about who does the work: "Peec's own Actions page says the team executes its recommendations."
The same day, GPT-6 Sol read Profound's pricing page and described brand pricing as a seven-day trial followed by custom Enterprise pricing. When we checked that page ourselves on October 4 and again on October 5, it still said so, and $99 a month was the agency plan. A founder who asked Claude that week would have budgeted for a brand tier the vendor's own page did not list.
Both engines are partly right. The rest of this post is the part they disagree on, checked against each vendor's own pages. If you have already decided you want a service, the ten AEO services scored on the same five criteria is the next read.
The four side by side
From each vendor's own site, October 5, 2026.
| Profound | Peec AI | Humans with AI | ClawWorld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Software | Software | Software plus human support | A service, one round at a time |
| Who writes and publishes | Its agents draft, your team approves and publishes | Your team | Its agents draft, your marketer approves and publishes | We do, you approve |
| Who works on third-party sources | Your team, from tasks it suggests | Your team | Your team | We do |
| Cheapest way in | Free 7-day trial, then custom Enterprise (agencies from $99 a month) | $95 a month | $149 a month | Free audit; pilot sprint from $500 a round |
| How often it measures | Every tracked prompt daily | Each prompt once every 24 hours per engine | Once a month on most plans | Each question five times per engine, at the start and the end of a round |
| Contract | Set in the order form; renews unless cancelled 30 days ahead | Monthly, cancel any time, effective at the end of the cycle | Month to month (its terms ask for 30 days' notice) | Per round, no retainer |
Profound
What it is. The category's best-known monitoring platform, headquartered in New York, which describes its customers as "more than 700 enterprise brands and large agencies." It measures from the browser rather than an API ("Other tools pull AI responses from the API. We capture directly from the browser") and runs every tracked prompt daily. Its newer agents go further than a dashboard: "It identifies the work worth doing, drafts it, and pings you for approval," and approved drafts can publish to your CMS.
What your team still does. Review and approve every draft (its terms say "Customer is responsible for reviewing and confirming the accuracy and suitability of Agents Content"), and do the off-site work. Its gap analysis turns third-party citations into tasks such as pitching the publishers that drive them; someone on your side sends the pitches.
What it costs a startup. Brands get a free trial, "50 prompts run daily for 7 days," on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with no history or exports, and then a custom Enterprise plan. The $99-a-month plan is for agencies, plus $399 a month for each client workspace. There is no self-serve brand tier on the page between the trial and Enterprise. Pricing
Choose Profound if you have a content or SEO team ready to act on what it finds, you need many engines or markets tracked daily, or your company buys through enterprise procurement.
Peec AI
What it is. A monitoring platform from Berlin with the clearest self-serve pricing in the category: $95, $245 and $495 a month for 50, 150 and 350 prompts, each on three engines of your choice, unlimited users, self-serve onboarding. "Peec AI executes each prompt once every 24 hours on every AI model you've selected," mostly through the engines' own web interfaces rather than their APIs.
What your team still does. All of the writing and publishing, by design. Its own page: "Do I still have to create the content myself? Yes - and that's intentional." Its recommended actions cover off-site work as well, such as editorial coverage and community threads, and your team does those too.
Worth reading before you buy anything. Its September 29 post on prompt tracking says "Choose more prompts rather than more runs" and "Branded and non-branded prompts behave differently," and recommends freezing the prompt set. We agree with all three, and the second is the most common way a visibility number ends up looking healthier than it is.
Choose Peec if you have a marketer with a few hours a week and want the most tracking per dollar. Pricing · Actions
Humans with AI
What it is. A platform with people behind it, based in Dubai and Tbilisi with a Delaware parent company. Its own answer to "Who runs the platform?" is the clearest in this comparison: "You do. Your marketer sets the prompt map, approves briefs and publishes; the Workspace agents do the work. Our team is human support on every plan ... but we do not write for you. If you want us to run it, that is a Custom conversation."
What it costs. $149 a month (100 prompts scanned in ChatGPT once a month, one article) up to $4,997 (2,000 prompts scanned twice a month, 100 articles). Each scan runs every prompt once per engine. The Workspace is in private beta, and the content engine carries a one-time setup fee agreed on a call. Pricing
What to like. Its Birdview case names the client, reports the move (0.9% to 21.5% ChatGPT visibility in eight weeks), and says what it did not fix: "360 of 589 prompts still never cite the site."
Choose Humans with AI if you have one marketer who will publish what the platform drafts, and you want a low monthly price with a person to ask.
ClawWorld
What it is. A service. We measure what the engines say about your category, ship the fixes ourselves (answer-first pages, structured data, the third-party sources the engines cite), and measure again with the same questions. Every question runs five times per engine, alongside four control brands we do no work for, so a platform-wide shift is not reported as progress. You approve everything published under your name. A pilot sprint starts at $500 a round with no retainer, and the scope is written down before it starts. Pricing · Methodology
What we cannot show you yet. A client's before and after. Our public results are our own domain, at /lab, and on the category questions they are still zero. A redacted baseline report for one company is at /sample-report, so you can see what the first deliverable looks like before talking to us.
Choose ClawWorld if nobody on your team will write and publish the pages or chase the listings, and you want to try one round before committing to anything. Do not choose ClawWorld if you already have that person: a $95 tool and their time will cost less.
The decision, in three questions
- Who on your team will publish a page or pitch a listing this month, and how many hours do they have? If the answer is a name and a number, start with a tool. If the answer is "we'll find time," it is probably a service.
- What does the first month cost, and what can you cancel? Peec and Humans with AI are monthly. Profound's brand plan is a trial and then a contract. ClawWorld is one round.
- How will you know it worked? Whatever you buy, write down 10 to 20 questions your buyers ask without your name in them, before anything changes, and keep them frozen. Ask about the result the same way afterwards. A tool's daily number and a service's report are both only as good as that list.
How we checked
Each vendor's own pricing, product, terms and case-study pages, rendered in a browser on October 5, 2026, because some prices only appear after scripts run; Profound's pricing page was also checked on October 4. We used nothing from third-party roundups. That rule caught something while we worked: one vendor's page written for AI assistants still quotes Profound's old $99 and $399 brand tiers, the same figures Claude repeated. The engine answers in the first section come from our own measurement on September 28, with every answer and citation kept. If anything here about your product is wrong, write to hello@claw-world.app and we will correct it with a dated note.
Disclosure
ClawWorld is an AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) service for B2B startups based in New York. We compete with the other three companies in this post for some of the same customers. None of them was contacted about it or paid to appear in it.