I built one of these tools, so I'll be upfront about that. I'll do my best to be fair about what each one does well and where it falls short, including my own.
AEO tools track how AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews talk about your brand. More than a dozen exist now, and most do roughly the same thing. The differences that matter: pricing, how they handle multi-client agency work, and what they do with the data beyond showing you a number.
One number that frames how young this category still is. In June 2026 we ran a 30-prompt baseline about AEO tools across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview and logged all 614 source citations in the answers. The most-cited tools were general SEO suites, not AEO tools: Semrush picked up 42 citations and Ahrefs 28, ahead of every dedicated product. Profound (25), Otterly (11), and Peec (10) were the only AEO-native names near the top. Even the tools on this list are still fighting for visibility in their own market.
Methodology: 30 prompts phrased the way a buyer actually asks ("best tool to track AI visibility," "AEO software for agencies," and similar), run once each across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview, with every cited source URL logged and grouped by domain.
Here's what's worth using in 2026.
The short version
The choice usually comes down to how many brands you track and what you're willing to spend.
- AI startups, freelancers, and agencies who work with Claude and agents: AEO Copilot. Free to start, then $9, $34, or $99 flat, no per-brand fees.
- Best free AEO tool: AEO Copilot, 50 tracked prompts a month on 1 brand, free with no expiry.
- Enterprise teams with budget and a data function: Profound or Scrunch AI.
- A site built on Webflow with an enterprise budget: Webflow AEO, native and agentic.
- Widest engine coverage on a small budget: Rankscale, from $20 a month across 17+ engines.
- 1 brand, clean reporting: Peec.ai or Otterly.ai.
- Already paying for Semrush: the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, as an add-on to a subscription you already have.
- Free AEO checker for a one-time check: the free audit or HubSpot's AEO Grader.
The rest of this piece is the reasoning behind each pick. If you're specifically after ongoing rank-style monitoring, the AEO tracker guide goes deeper on that category, and the AI search visibility tool guide covers what to look for before you buy.
Quick comparison
The 14 tools, one by one
AEO Copilot: Best for AI startups, freelancers, and agencies
Full disclosure: I built this one. I'll be as honest as I can.
AEO Copilot is the only tool in this list built specifically for AI-native startups, freelancers, and agencies: the people who already work with Claude and AI agents every day, whether that's on their own brand or on 10 client brands. Every other tool assumes you're tracking 1 brand for 1 company from a dashboard. AEO Copilot assumes you'd rather pull the data into your own workflow than log into another tab.
What it tracks: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. You define topics, set prompts, and the platform runs them on a schedule or manually. It reports on Visibility Score (how often the brand appears), Sentiment (positive/neutral/negative), Competitive Share (your brand's mention rate vs. named competitors), and Visibility Trend over time.
What makes it different: it comes down to who it's for, the free tier, and the price. It's built for people working with Claude and agents from day one. It runs as an MCP server, so in Claude Code you can set up a client, run prompts, and pull a report straight from a conversation, no dashboard required. The free tier is real: 1 brand, 50 prompts a month, ChatGPT and Claude, no credit card, no expiry. Above that, the pricing is flat and public: $9/month for Startup (adds Perplexity and Google AI Overview, plus API and MCP access, still 1 brand), $34/month for Freelancer (up to 5 brands), or $99 for Agency with unlimited brands and no per-brand fees. The technical audit covers robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt, schema markup, and crawlability, so you walk away with a client deliverable, not just a number. And if you're weighing it against Peec.ai or Profound, the detailed comparison goes through the 3 side by side.
What it doesn't do well: It doesn't have the deep custom workflow builder that something like AirOps offers. If you're a large enterprise wanting to run hundreds of prompts daily across a custom set of AI models, there are tools built for that scale. But for the agency delivering this as a service to 5 to 20 clients, it's the right fit.
Pricing: Free to start with 1 brand, then $9/month (Startup, 1 brand, all 4 engines), $34/month (Freelancer, up to 5 brands), or $99/month (Agency, unlimited brands).
What users say: 1 voice per segment, quoted as sent.
> It checks every week whether our Shopify apps come up in the answers. I never open it, I just ask Claude and it does the work.
>
> Kostas Zhukov, Founder & CEO, videopoint.ai
> AEO Copilot lets me measure my clients' AI visibility at an affordable rate, with quick feedback from Sofian.
>
> Samuel Uebersax, freelance marketer, uebersaxsamuel.ch
> Before AEO Copilot, we had no clean way to show clients their AI visibility. Now we monitor every account, build strategies from the data, and see it pay off in citations and inquiries. It turned AI visibility into a service we sell with confidence, on retainer.
>
> Karpi Studio, agency, karpi.studio
Profound: Best for enterprise
Profound is the most technically capable tool in this space. It handles large-scale prompt monitoring, integrates with enterprise data stacks, and is built for teams that need audit trails, advanced reporting, and custom data pipelines.
The trade-off is price and complexity. The entry Starter plan is $99/month and tracks only ChatGPT with 50 prompts. A Growth tier at $399/month adds Perplexity and AI Overviews with more volume, and Enterprise coverage of up to 9 engines is custom-priced. It's designed for marketing teams at mid-size to large companies, not freelancers. If you're an agency trying to add AI visibility as a service line, Profound's pricing model makes it hard to build a margin on client work.
Pros: the deepest enterprise feature set in the category, with audit trails, custom data pipelines, and up to 9 engines at the top tier.
Cons: $99 gets you ChatGPT only, and real coverage starts at $399/month.
Best for: Enterprise in-house marketing teams, large agencies with dedicated data teams, brands running 100+ prompts monthly.
Scrunch AI: Enterprise monitoring for big-budget clients
Scrunch is built for the top of the market. It tracks 8 or more engines, carries SOC 2 compliance, and adds the things enterprise buyers ask for: Google Analytics integration to attribute AI referral traffic, AI crawler analysis, and content tools tied to your priority prompts.
The price matches the positioning. A 7-day trial now gets you in the door, but self-serve plans still start at $300 a month, with a Growth tier at $500 and custom pricing above that. The entry plan gives you 1,000 prompts across prebuilt industry topics plus 350 custom prompts, which is a lot of volume if you have 1 large brand to cover.
For an agency, the math only works with high-budget clients. At $300 to $500 a month before your own margin, you can't build a profitable service line on top of it for a small-business client. For an in-house team at a large company, the depth and the compliance story can justify it.
Pros: 8+ engines, SOC 2 compliance, Google Analytics attribution for AI referral traffic, serious prompt volume.
Cons: $300 to $500 a month before your own margin, more tool than a single small brand needs.
Best for: Enterprise marketing teams and agencies serving large clients who need broad coverage and SOC 2 compliance.
Webflow AEO: Best if your site lives on Webflow
Webflow launched its own AEO product in 2026, and it's the most tightly integrated option on this list, as long as your site is built on Webflow. It's a closed-loop system: AEO analytics inside Webflow Analyze show how AI bots crawl your site and how your brand shows up in answers, agents surface prioritized fixes, and those same agents ship the changes, with review before publish. Measure, recommend, execute, all in one platform.
The catch is the box you're in. AEO agents now ship on Webflow's $2,500/month Team plan, not Enterprise-only anymore, but the analytics underneath still need the Enterprise tier of Webflow Analyze, and the whole thing assumes your site is on Webflow. If it is, and you have the budget, the measure-to-fix loop is genuinely hard to beat. If you run clients on WordPress, Shopify, or a custom stack, it's not for you.
It's also the opposite philosophy to a tool like AEO Copilot. Webflow AEO keeps everything inside Webflow's own agents. AEO Copilot hands you the data and lets you act on it with whatever agent you already use. Which you prefer depends on whether you want a closed system or your own.
Pros: the only closed measure-to-fix loop on this list, agents ship the changes with review before publish.
Cons: needs the $2,500/month Team plan plus Enterprise-tier Webflow Analyze, and it does nothing for clients on WordPress, Shopify, or custom stacks.
Best for: Enterprise marketing teams whose sites are built on Webflow.
Peec.ai: Best for brand monitoring breadth
Peec covers a wide range of AI platforms and has solid reporting. The interface is clean and the data is easy to read. Its Starter plan runs €85/month (about $92) for 50 prompts, with Pro and Advanced tiers above that and extra engines sold as paid add-ons. It's priced for company marketing teams, not agency resellers. There's no multi-client workflow, and the cost per brand makes it expensive to scale across client accounts.
Pros: clean interface, reporting a client can read without a walkthrough.
Cons: €85/month buys 50 prompts, extra engines are paid add-ons, and there's no multi-client workflow.
Best for: Single-brand companies who want clean, reliable monitoring with a polished interface.
Rankscale: Widest engine coverage on a small budget
Rankscale takes the opposite approach to most tools here on pricing. Its Essentials plan starts at $20 a month and includes every engine it supports, 17 and counting, with newer ones like Google AI Mode, Grok, and DeepSeek in the mix. Pro, Growth, and Enterprise tiers run from $99 to $780 a month for more volume. There's no per-engine upsell, which is the lever most competitors pull to move you up a tier.
The model is credit-based: you're charged per prompt, per model, per run. That gives you fine control over spend, and it also means a heavy month of tracking can cost more than the $20 headline suggests. Coverage is the reason to pick it. If you want to see how a brand shows up across a long list of engines without paying enterprise rates, nothing else comes close on price.
What it lacks is the multi-client structure AEO Copilot is built around. It tracks brands, not client accounts with separate reporting and white-label output. For a solo consultant watching a wide engine spread, it's a strong, cheap option.
Pros: 17+ engines from the $20 plan, no per-engine upsell, fine control over spend.
Cons: credit-based billing climbs with heavy use, no client accounts or white-label reporting.
Best for: Solo consultants and small teams who want the widest engine coverage at the lowest entry price.
Otterly.ai: Light use, solo users
Otterly reworked its pricing in 2026: the entry Lite plan is now $29/month for 15 prompts, down from its old flat $49 rate, with Standard and Premium tiers above it for more volume. There's still no permanent free plan, only a free trial. It's straightforward, covers the core platforms, and works fine for someone tracking 1 or 2 brands without a lot of complexity. It doesn't have the agency infrastructure (multi-client, team access, automated reporting) that makes a service line scalable.
Pros: cheap entry at $29/month, simple to run.
Cons: 15 prompts on the Lite plan, no permanent free plan, and none of the agency infrastructure.
Best for: Solo founders or marketers tracking 1 brand on a limited budget.
HubSpot AEO: Free grader, plus a paid monitoring tier
HubSpot rebranded its AI Search Grader to the AEO Grader in 2026 and added a paid product next to it. The free grader is worth running on any stack: enter a brand and get a one-time snapshot of how you show up across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, with a visibility score, sentiment, and share of voice against competitors. No account, no caps.
The paid HubSpot AEO tier adds ongoing monitoring at $50/month after a 28-day trial, with 25 prompts. That's the part to compare carefully. At $50 for 25 prompts it sits above AEO Copilot's $34 Freelancer plan, which includes 250 prompts and multi-brand support. If you already live in HubSpot's CRM, the integration can justify the premium. If you don't, you're paying for an ecosystem you're not using.
Pros: the free grader needs no account and works on any stack, and the paid tier lives inside the CRM you may already use.
Cons: $50/month for 25 prompts is thin value if you're not a HubSpot customer.
Best for: Teams already on HubSpot who want AI visibility data inside the same platform. The free grader is worth a run by anyone.
SE Ranking: SEO-first with AEO add-on
SE Ranking is primarily an SEO platform that has added AEO monitoring features. The $65/month headline price is for the base SEO suite and doesn't include AI-visibility tracking on its own: that needs the AI Search add-on on top, or its standalone SE Visible product starting around $189/month. The realistic cost for AEO tracking is closer to $150 to $240 a month, not $65. If you're already using SE Ranking for keyword tracking and backlinks, the add-on is a natural extension. If you're looking for a dedicated AEO tool at that headline price, it's not what you'll get.
Pros: SEO and AI visibility in one platform if you're already a customer.
Cons: the real AEO cost is $150 to $240 a month, not the $65 headline.
Best for: SEO agencies already on SE Ranking who want basic AI visibility data in one platform.
Quattr: Content + AEO, enterprise pricing
Quattr combines content optimization with AI visibility tracking. It's strong on the content side and has added AEO features as the category has grown. There's no published price anymore, just a contact-sales form, and the market rate for tools at this tier has climbed well past what a small agency can build a margin on top of.
Pros: content optimization and AI visibility tracking in one product.
Cons: no published pricing, enterprise-tier cost.
Best for: Enterprise content teams that want AEO data alongside content scoring and optimization.
AirOps: LLM workflow builder, not a monitoring tool
AirOps is often listed alongside AEO tools but it's a different category. It's a platform for building custom LLM workflows, not for monitoring how AI systems respond to prompts about your brand. If you need to automate content generation or build custom AI pipelines, it's worth looking at. If you need to know whether ChatGPT mentions your brand when someone asks about project management software, it's not the right tool.
Pros: a genuinely powerful builder for custom LLM workflows and content pipelines.
Cons: it doesn't monitor brand visibility, so it can't replace any tracker on this list.
Best for: Teams building internal AI workflows, not brand monitoring.
AI Clicks: Newer entrant, published pricing
AI Clicks has moved from a vague "pricing varies" listing to a clear published structure: Starter at $59/month for 30 prompts across 3 LLMs, Pro at $189/month for 150 prompts, and Business at $499/month for 300 or more, with custom pricing above that. There's no permanent free plan, just a 3-day trial. The tiers land close to Otterly's, so the choice between them usually comes down to which engines you need covered and how the reporting looks.
Pros: clear published pricing, tiers that map cleanly to usage.
Cons: 3-day trial only, and the $59 entry covers 30 prompts across 3 LLMs.
Best for: Small teams who want a straightforward, published-pricing alternative to Otterly.ai.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: For teams already on Semrush
Semrush added an AI Visibility Toolkit to its existing SEO platform: $99/month per tracked domain, billed annually, covering 25 daily-tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. It comes with a 7-day trial through the Semrush One bundle.
It's not a dedicated AEO tool the way AEO Copilot or Peec are, and per-domain pricing gets expensive fast if you're running it across several client accounts. But if you already pay for Semrush, adding AI visibility to a tool you're already logged into is an easy call.
Pros: 25 daily-tracked prompts across 5 AI surfaces, inside a platform your team already knows.
Cons: $99/month per domain billed annually, which multiplies fast across client accounts.
Best for: SEO teams already on Semrush who want AI visibility without adding another vendor.
AthenaHQ: Enterprise monitoring, credit-based pricing
AthenaHQ is a newer dedicated AEO platform that shows up alongside Profound, Peec, Otterly, and Scrunch in most comparisons. There's no free tier: a discounted first month runs about $95, then Lite plans land around $270 to $295 a month, Growth around $545, and Enterprise from $2,000 up. Monitoring and its "Ask Athena" query feature share one credit pool, and lower tiers cap you to a single country.
Pros: a dedicated AEO platform that holds its own next to Profound and Scrunch in feature depth.
Cons: no free tier, one credit pool shared between monitoring and queries, single-country cap on lower tiers.
Best for: Enterprise teams who want a dedicated AEO platform and don't mind a credit-based pricing model.
How to choose your AEO tool?
If you're an AI startup, freelancer, or agency tracking your own brand or multiple client brands: AEO Copilot is the only tool in this list built specifically for your workflow, and the only one that plugs into the way AI-native teams already work, through Claude and an MCP server rather than yet another dashboard. The free tier lets you test before committing, and the agency pricing leaves room for your margin.
If you're an enterprise with a dedicated marketing team and a significant budget: Profound or Quattr, depending on whether you need content features alongside the tracking. If your site is on Webflow, Webflow AEO keeps measurement and fixes in one place.
If you want the widest engine coverage cheaply: Rankscale starts at $20/month and covers more engines than anything else at that price, as long as you're tracking brands rather than separate client accounts.
If you want a free starting point to understand where you stand: the free audit or HubSpot's AEO Grader will give you a snapshot without any cost.
If you're new to AEO: the complete AEO guide for freelancers and agencies covers the full picture before you invest in any tool.
If you're already on SE Ranking: try the AI Search add-on before paying for a separate platform, and budget for it as its own line item, not part of the $65 base plan.
If you're already on Semrush: the AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month per domain is the lowest-friction way to add AEO tracking without a new vendor.
AEO tool pricing: the 5 models
Every tool above prices one of 5 ways, and the model matters more than the headline number once you track more than 1 brand.
Free. AEO Copilot is the only dedicated tool on this list with a permanent free plan: 1 brand, 50 prompts a month, no credit card, no expiry. The logic is simple. Most tools in this category spend $200 or more acquiring each customer through ads and outbound. I'd rather put that money into a free plan and let you test the product instead.
Flat monthly plans. 1 price covers a set number of prompts and brands. AEO Copilot ($9, $34, $99), Otterly ($29 and up), AI Clicks ($59 and up), and HubSpot AEO ($50) work this way. Predictable, and the easiest to build a client retainer on.
Credit-based. You pay per prompt, per engine, per run. Rankscale and AthenaHQ use credits. The entry price looks low; the invoice follows your usage. Good control, less predictability.
Per domain. Semrush charges $99 a month for each tracked domain. Simple for 1 brand. Across 5 client sites it's $495 a month before you've done any work.
Sales-call pricing. Quattr, Profound above Starter, Scrunch above Growth, and Webflow AEO all put the real number behind a demo. In practice that means budgets starting north of $500 a month.
2 questions come up constantly here. Does any AEO tool charge per seat? Not among the tools on this list: team access is included on every plan I checked. And is there an AEO tool that doesn't charge per brand or per domain? That's the exact gap AEO Copilot's Agency plan fills: $99 flat, unlimited brands.
Worth knowing before you pay for an enterprise tier: the mention data itself is a commodity. Every tool runs prompts against the same public AI engines. What you're buying at higher tiers is volume, engine coverage, compliance, and integrations, not better underlying data.
AEO checker, tracker, software, analysis tool: what the names mean
People search for this category under a dozen different names, and vendors use the labels loosely. Here's how they map to what the tools actually do.
AEO checker. A one-time test: run your site or brand through it, get a snapshot score. The free audit is a checker in that sense, and so is HubSpot's grader. Useful for a baseline, silent about trends.
AEO tracker, AEO tracking software. The ongoing version. It runs your prompts on a schedule and charts how your brand mentions move over time. Most of the tools on this list are trackers at heart; the AEO tracker guide goes deeper on this category specifically.
AEO analysis tool, AEO analysis software. The reporting layer on top of tracking: sentiment, competitive share, and which sources the engines cite. If a tool only gives you a mention count, it tracks but doesn't analyze, and you'll feel the gap the first time a client asks why their score dropped.
AEO software, AEO platform, AEO monitoring tool. Umbrella labels for the same ongoing category. Vendors pick whichever sounds bigger.
The label matters less than the job. If you want a number today, a checker does it. If you want to know whether visibility is climbing or slipping month over month, you want a tracker. And when a client asks why the score dropped, that's the analysis layer plus a technical audit.
What to look for in any AEO tool
Before buying anything, check these 6 things:
- Which AI platforms does it track? At minimum: ChatGPT and Perplexity. Better: plus Claude and Google AI Overviews. Some tools only cover 1 or 2.
- Does it work with AI agents? If you run your work through Claude or another agent, a dashboard-only tool breaks your flow. Look for MCP or API access so your agent can pull the data and act on it. AEO Copilot runs as an MCP server; most tools on this list only speak dashboard.
- How does it handle multiple clients or brands? If you're an agency, a per-brand pricing model at $200+/brand/month makes the service unsellable.
- What does it do with the data? A visibility score is useful. A visibility trend, sentiment breakdown, and competitive share is what you actually need for client reporting.
- Is there a technical audit component? Knowing your brand doesn't show up is only half the answer. Knowing why, and having a checklist to fix it, is the service.
- What's the free tier? Tools that don't offer a free trial or free tier are asking you to commit before you've seen the product.
FAQ
What is an AEO tool?
An AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) tool tracks how AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews respond to queries related to your brand or category. It measures whether your brand is mentioned, how it's described, and how your visibility changes over time.
What's the most affordable AEO tool?
AEO Copilot. The free plan has no expiry, and the $9/month Startup plan is the lowest paid price on this list, covering all 4 engines on 1 brand. Plans stay flat at $34 and $99 with no per-brand fees, so it remains the cheapest option as you add brands. The closest alternative is Rankscale at $20/month, but its credit model means cost climbs with usage.
Do AEO tools charge per seat or per domain?
None of the tools on this list charge per seat; team access is included on every plan I checked. Per-domain pricing does exist: Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/month per tracked domain. Most dedicated tools price by brand count or prompt volume instead, and AEO Copilot's Agency plan is flat at $99/month with unlimited brands.
Are AEO tools worth it for small agencies?
For agencies adding AI visibility as a service line, yes. The tool cost is built into the retainer price. At $400 to $700 per client per month, even 2 clients cover the tool cost with significant margin remaining.
What's the difference between basic and enterprise AEO tools?
Volume, coverage, and compliance, not better data. Enterprise tiers add more prompts, more engines, SOC 2, analytics integrations, and support agreements. The underlying mention data comes from the same public AI engines at every tier.
Which AEO tool covers the most engines?
Rankscale, with 17+ engines including Google AI Mode, Grok, and DeepSeek, all included from the $20 plan. Scrunch AI covers 8 or more, and Profound reaches 9 on its enterprise tier. Most other tools cover the core 4: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
How often should you run AEO tracking?
Weekly monitoring gives you enough data to spot trends without burning through credits. Monthly is the minimum for a useful trend line. Daily tracking is available on most paid plans but is only needed if you're in a competitive category where AI mentions shift frequently.
Can AEO tools tell you how to improve?
Better ones do. AEO Copilot includes a technical audit that flags specific issues affecting AI crawlability and citation likelihood. Other tools show you the score without the fix.
Is AEO the same as GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
They refer to the same practice under different names. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and LLM SEO all describe optimizing for visibility in AI-generated answers. The terminology varies by author and platform.
Is there a free AEO checker?
Yes. The free audit runs a one-time AEO check on any URL with no signup, and HubSpot's AEO Grader does a similar snapshot. For ongoing checks rather than a single run, AEO Copilot's free plan tracks 1 brand with no expiry.
What's the best AEO software?
It depends on scale. For startups, freelancers, and agencies tracking 1 or several brands, flat-priced software like AEO Copilot keeps the cost predictable. For enterprise teams, Profound and Scrunch AI offer more depth. Match the software to how many brands you track, not the headline feature list.
What's the best AEO checking tool for agencies?
Agencies need multi-brand support and reporting they can hand to a client, which rules out most single-brand checkers. AEO Copilot and Peec.ai are the 2 that hold up for client work; the deciding factor is usually flat versus credit-based pricing.