# citAEOtion vs Peec AI: Measured AI Crawler Traffic vs Prompt Guessing

https://citaeotion.ai/citaeotion-vs-peec-ai/

citAEOtion reads your server logs and shows which AI crawlers actually hit your WordPress site. Peec AI sends sample prompts to language models and counts brand mentions. One measures traffic that happened; the other estimates presence from a sample.
citAEOtion vs Peec AI is measured versus guessed. citAEOtion is a WordPress plugin that classifies real AI crawler visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Amazonbot, and Bytespider using actual server traffic, priced at $34.99 per month for a single site. Peec AI is a prompt-based visibility tool that runs sample prompts through models like ChatGPT and Perplexity and tracks how often your brand is mentioned, with plans starting around $95 per month.
Quick answer: citAEOtion is AI crawler analytics for WordPress. It logs every bot hit by page, timestamp, HTTP status code, and category, so you can see exactly which pages GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Amazonbot, and Bytespider fetched and how often. A single site costs $34.99 per month, with multi-site and agency plans and white-label reports for resellers. Peec AI, starting near $95 per month for 50 prompts and three AI models, measures visibility by sending sample prompts to models and tallying how often your brand appears in the answers. citAEOtion counts server-verified crawler visits you can audit line by line; Peec estimates share of voice from a prompt sample. For agencies that need proof an AI bot read a specific client page, citAEOtion is the cheaper, evidence-based option.
The core difference: logs versus prompts
These two tools answer different questions. Peec AI answers "does my brand show up when someone asks ChatGPT about my category?" It builds a set of prompts, runs them on a schedule, and records whether your name appears. That is a sampling method. The result depends on which prompts you picked, when they ran, and how the model felt that day.
citAEOtion answers a question you can verify: "which AI crawlers requested my pages, and when?" It reads the same server traffic your host already records. When GPTBot fetches /pricing/ at 3:14 a.m. and gets a 200 response, that hit lands in your dashboard with the bot name, the URL, the time, and the status code. There is no sampling and no model in the loop. The data is a record of what happened.
That distinction matters because AI answer engines cite pages they have crawled. If a bot never fetched a page, that page cannot be quoted. citAEOtion shows you the crawl layer that sits underneath every citation. Peec sits at the output layer and infers backward.
Side-by-side comparison

Factor
citAEOtion
Peec AI

Data source
Real server traffic (actual crawler hits)
Sample prompts sent to AI models

Method
Measured, log-based
Estimated, prompt-based

What you see
Bot name, page, timestamp, HTTP status, category
Brand mention rate across prompt runs

Starting price
$34.99/mo single site
Around $95/mo (50 prompts, 3 models)

White-label reports
Yes, for agencies and resellers
Only on higher agency tiers

Agency multi-site
Yes, multi-site and agency plans
Credit-based agency plans, $245 to $795/mo

Platform
WordPress plugin, lightweight collector
Web app, prompt scheduler

What citAEOtion measures
The plugin installs on WordPress and reads incoming requests. It matches each request against a maintained list of AI and search crawler signatures, then files the hit under a category: AI training, AI assistant, search index, or scraper. You get counts per bot, per page, per day. You can see that PerplexityBot hit your comparison pages twelve times last week while Google-Extended stayed away from your gated content.
Because the source is your own log stream, the numbers are defensible in a client report. There is no "the model may have hallucinated your brand" caveat. A hit is a hit. That is why the tagline is "The GA for AI." It is the same idea as Google Analytics, applied to the machines reading your site instead of the humans.
See how citAEOtion classifies every AI crawler for the full breakdown of bots and categories.
Where Peec AI fits
Peec AI is useful if your goal is share-of-voice tracking against competitors inside AI answers. It runs prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, shows sentiment, and charts your mention rate over time. Teams that treat AI answers like a brand-monitoring channel get value from that view.
The limits are the ones any sampling tool has. Fifty prompts on the Starter plan is a small window into an enormous query space. Prompt results drift as models update. And a mention in a sampled answer does not tell you which of your pages the model actually read. You are watching the shadow, not the object. If Peec is not the right fit, weigh other Peec AI alternatives, or see how a cheaper prompt tracker compares in citAEOtion vs Otterly.
Pricing compared
Peec AI Starter runs around $95 per month for 50 prompts, three AI models, and a single project. Pro is roughly $245 per month, Advanced near $495 per month, and agency plans run $245 to $795 per month on a credit system, with white-label reporting reserved for the top tier. You can confirm current figures on the Peec AI pricing page.
citAEOtion is $34.99 per month for a single site. Annual billing saves up to 29 percent. Multi-site and agency plans cover more properties, and the Founders Club takes 25 percent off agency plans for the life of the account. White-label reports are included for agencies and resellers, not gated behind the most expensive plan. Compare the tiers on the citAEOtion pricing page.
Which should you choose
Pick Peec AI if you want a scoreboard of brand mentions across AI chat answers and you have budget for a prompt-tracking subscription. Pick citAEOtion if you run WordPress and you want hard evidence of which AI crawlers read which pages, at a fraction of the cost, with client-ready reports. Many agencies run citAEOtion as the proof layer because a crawler log is harder to argue with than a prompt sample. Explore the agency and white-label options to see how it fits a client roster. For the full field of tools in this category, see our guide to the best AI visibility tools.
Does citAEOtion track the same bots Peec AI reports on?
citAEOtion tracks the crawlers that feed those engines, including GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, and Google-Extended for Google AI. It also logs Amazonbot and Bytespider. Peec reports on the answer output; citAEOtion reports on the crawl that precedes it.
Is citAEOtion cheaper than Peec AI?
Yes. citAEOtion starts at $34.99 per month for a single site. Peec AI starts around $95 per month. For agencies the gap widens, since citAEOtion includes white-label reports without pushing you to a top tier.
Can I use both tools together?
You can. Some teams run Peec for output-level mention tracking and citAEOtion for crawl-level proof. citAEOtion tells you whether the bot fetched the page; Peec tells you whether the brand surfaced in a sampled answer.
Do I need to touch code to install citAEOtion?
No. It is a WordPress plugin. You install and activate it, and the collector begins logging AI crawler hits from your real traffic. No log downloads or server config required.
Why do server logs beat prompt sampling for AI visibility?
Server logs record every crawler request as it happens, with no sampling gap and no model variance. Prompt tools test a small slice of possible queries and infer presence. Logs are a census; prompts are a poll.
See your real AI crawler traffic. Book a demo

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Site: citAEOtion - https://citaeotion.ai/
LLM index: https://citaeotion.ai/llms.txt | Full text: https://citaeotion.ai/llms-full.txt