Short answer: AEO Copilot can get your AI answers in 3 ways. Pick by the question you need answered.
- The easiest: AEO Copilot Managed. I run everything. Pick it to track whether AI engines mention you.
- The safest to keep control: AEO Copilot BYOK with OpenRouter. Official model APIs, on your own key. Pick it for Claude, your own key, or a cost you control.
- The most accurate data: AEO Copilot BYOK with Querying.ai. The answers real people see in the apps. Pick it to find the web pages the apps cite.
!2 choices decide your data source: whose account (yours or AEO Copilot's) and how answers are collected (official API or live scraping). Managed: AEO Copilot's account, API. BYOK with OpenRouter: your account, API. BYOK with Querying.ai: your account, live scraping. AEO Copilot's account with scraping is not offered.
5 terms I use in this post:
- Data source: where AEO Copilot gets the AI answers from. Managed, OpenRouter or Querying.ai.
- Cited pages: the web pages an AI answer links to.
- The app: what a person uses. chatgpt.com or the ChatGPT phone app, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, and the AI Overview at the top of Google Search.
- The API: software asks the AI model directly, through the official access its maker sells to developers. No website, no screen. AEO Copilot Managed and OpenRouter work this way.
- Scraping: a program opens the app like a person would, types the prompt and copies what shows on screen. You get what a buyer sees, but the AI company never agreed to it. Querying.ai works this way.
What BYOK means in AEO Copilot
BYOK stands for bring your own key. Instead of using my accounts, you connect your own account with an answer provider and pay it directly. AEO Copilot runs your prompts through it and analyzes the answers.
There are 2 kinds of provider:
- An API provider: OpenRouter. It sends your prompt to each model's official API, with web search on. AEO Copilot Managed uses the same method, on my keys.
- A live scraping provider: Querying.ai. It types your prompt into the real ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google apps, and records what comes back.
What BYOK costs
You pay 2 bills: AEO Copilot for the analysis and reports, and your provider for the answers. AEO Copilot's BYOK plans are billed yearly:
The provider bill depends on your volume: about $0.011 per prompt on Querying.ai's $20 plan, about $0.148 per prompt on OpenRouter, for 4 engines. The full math is in the cheapest AI search tracking tools, compared.
What this means for you
- Choose AEO Copilot Managed to get started fast. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, with nothing to set up.
- Choose BYOK with Querying.ai to see what people see in the apps, including the real Google AI Overview.
- Choose BYOK with OpenRouter to use your own key and pay per answer.
- On BYOK, the provider bills you directly. You open the account and top it up yourself. AEO Copilot never touches that bill.
Which option should you pick?
Start from what you want to know.
My default: start with AEO Copilot Managed. Switch to Querying.ai when you start outreach and need the real cited pages. Choose OpenRouter when you want Claude or your own key.
What this means for you
- Write down the one question you want answered before you pick. "Am I mentioned?" and "Where should I get featured?" lead to different options.
- Pick one data source and stay with it. Switching later starts a new trend line, so early weeks won't compare with later ones.
Does the data source change your results?
Partly. I ran the same 12 prompts through all 3 data sources, with Notion as the test brand. Whether Notion was mentioned changed a little. Which pages got cited changed almost completely.
Mentions change a little
!Share of answers that mention Notion, by engine and data source. Mentions stay between 42% and 75% on every data source.
On ChatGPT and Gemini, the 3 data sources land within 17 points of each other. Perplexity varies more, from 42% to 75% (how I measured).
Cited pages change a lot
Here are the websites ChatGPT cited most often across the same 12 prompts, through the API and through scraping.
!Scraping ChatGPT shows different websites than the API. API: notion.com, atlassian.com, fathom.ai. Scraping: theairankings.com, techrepublic.com, zapier.com.
Through the API, ChatGPT mostly cites the vendors' own pages. Through scraping, you see what people see: rankings and review sites. Only 3% of the cited websites are the same (method). The other engines show the same split, less strongly: 13% in common on Gemini, 5% on AI Overviews.
Could my own settings cause this? AEO Copilot sends the API a short instruction asking for a list. So I reran the 12 prompts through the API with the bare prompt, exactly as a person types it and as Querying.ai sends it. The overlap with scraping didn't move: 2% on ChatGPT, 20% on Perplexity, 16% on Gemini (method). The gap comes from API vs app, not from my settings.
One example, "What is the best tool to record and summarize Zoom calls for a team?":
- ChatGPT through the API cited fathom.ai, zoom.us, support.zoom.com and fireflies.ai: vendor pages and help docs.
- ChatGPT through scraping cited 8 pages, mostly reviews and rankings: techsifted.com, theairankings.com, aimeetingassistantreviews.com, panoptixai.com. None of the API's websites.
What this means for you
- You want to know if ChatGPT recommends you. The API is enough. Mentions differ only a little between the API and scraping.
- You want to know which websites to get featured on. Use scraping. In this example, the API points you to fathom.ai and fireflies.ai, vendor pages you can't change. Scraping points you to techsifted.com and theairankings.com, review sites you can pitch to be listed on.
What chatgpt.com and Google show people, and the API doesn't
Across the 12 prompts, the pattern held:
- The ChatGPT API cites vendor pages: notion.com, slite.com, atlassian.com. It cited notion.com in 17 of 36 answers.
- The ChatGPT app cites rankings and listicles: theairankings.com, techrepublic.com, zapier.com. It cited notion.com in 1 of 12 answers.
- Real Google AI Overviews cite YouTube, Reddit, Facebook and Quora. YouTube showed up in 5 of 12 real AI Overviews, and in 3 of 24 simulated ones.
The app page also shows ads, shopping cards and product carousels. Querying.ai returns them, but AEO Copilot doesn't capture them yet. Today it keeps the answer text, the cited pages and the search queries.
What this means for you
- Build your outreach list from scraped data, not from the API. The review sites and listicles ChatGPT cites are the ones worth pitching.
- Don't count on your own product pages alone. The ChatGPT app cited notion.com in 1 of 12 answers, against 6 of 12 through the API.
- If Google's AI Overview matters to you, look at YouTube and Reddit. That's where the real AI Overview went in my test.
What are the risks?
Each data source has a trade-off. Know them before you pick.
> Scraping a live session sits in a gray area. From one day to the next, the scraper can be cut, and my users would be the ones left in a bad position.
> Sofian Bettayeb, AEO Copilot Founder
Is scraping allowed?
Mostly not, by the AI companies' own terms. OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Google all ban or restrict automated collection from their consumer apps. Scraping providers argue that a logged-out visitor never accepted those terms, and some court rulings support that for public pages. It's a gray area, not a settled one. I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.
With BYOK, the agreement is between you and Querying.ai: read its terms before you connect it. I go through each company's terms and the court cases in LLM scraping vs official API.
What this means for you
- Choose Querying.ai only if you need the cited pages people see, and accept that its data can stop for a while.
- On BYOK, check your provider credits before each month starts, so your runs don't stop halfway.
- Don't plan outreach from API data alone. Use it for mentions, not for the list of websites to pitch.
Why I built BYOK
Data is one of the main reasons to choose a tool, and most tools don't say where theirs comes from. I chose not to build AEO Copilot itself on scraped app data. I explain why in LLM scraping vs official API.
Some people still want that data, for good reasons. So I made it a choice. With BYOK you connect your own provider, you pay it directly, and that data source is your responsibility.
> I don't want to be the one who stops you from making that decision. The freedom to choose your data source, and to control your data, is yours.
> Sofian Bettayeb, AEO Copilot Founder
Why OpenRouter and Querying.ai
OpenRouter is the best-known gateway to the model APIs. Its fee is small: 5.5% on card top-ups, with an $0.80 minimum (OpenRouter FAQ).
Querying.ai won after I compared several live scraping providers. It gave me the best data at the best price, and its team was the most responsive.
Why AEO Copilot doesn't take any provider
Every provider returns answers in its own format. AEO Copilot has to turn them into one structure, so a cited page from the app and one from the API mean the same thing in your reports. That's why I can't open it to every provider.
The rules I set
- One provider per account, OpenRouter or Querying.ai.
- Results are tagged by data source and never mixed in one chart.
- Your provider key is encrypted at rest (AES-256) and only used to run your prompts.
- I don't store the provider's raw answers, only the answer text, cited pages and search queries.
- No Claude on Querying.ai, and no accuracy grading on BYOK. Accuracy grading checks whether AI answers about your brand are factually right. It runs on my key and would cost more than the plan at BYOK volumes.
What broke along the way
Gemini Flash failed 1 call in 3 through OpenRouter and often skipped web search, so I switched to Gemini Flash-Lite.
Querying.ai dropped connections when I sent 3 tasks at once. AEO Copilot now waits for a free slot on your Querying.ai account before sending the next task, and adds late answers to your results when the provider finishes them.
What this means for you
- You decide where your data comes from, and you pay the provider directly.
- You can change your mind. In Settings, under LLM settings, you can switch between Managed and BYOK on the same subscription. The price difference is prorated.
- Your provider's raw answers aren't stored. AEO Copilot keeps the answer text, cited pages and search queries.
- If you need accuracy grading, stay on AEO Copilot Managed. It isn't available on BYOK.
The takeaway: pick your data source by your question
The data source changes whether you're mentioned a little. It changes almost completely which websites get cited. Everything else follows from that.
- "Am I mentioned?" AEO Copilot Managed is enough. Start there.
- "Which websites should I get featured on?" Use scraping, with AEO Copilot BYOK and Querying.ai. The API would point you to the wrong pages.
- "I want my own key and my own bill." Use AEO Copilot BYOK with OpenRouter.
Whatever you pick, stay with one data source, so your trend means something.
Frequently asked questions
What is BYOK in AI search tracking?
BYOK means bring your own key. You connect your own account with an answer provider, like OpenRouter or Querying.ai, and pay it directly. The tracking tool runs your prompts through that account and analyzes the answers.
Is the ChatGPT API the same as the ChatGPT app?
For mentions, close: in my test the brand showed up in 50% to 67% of answers either way. For cited pages, no: the app and the API shared 3% of the websites they cited on the same prompts.
Can I switch between Managed and BYOK later?
Yes. In Settings, under LLM settings, you can move between the 2 on the same subscription. Moving to BYOK charges the yearly plan minus your unused month. Moving back to Managed turns the unused part of the year into credit. Your new data source starts a new trend line.
Is my API key safe?
AEO Copilot checks the key before any charge, stores it encrypted at rest with AES-256, and only uses it to run your prompts.
Can I connect OpenRouter and Querying.ai at the same time?
No. An account connects one provider, so your results never mix 2 data sources.
How I ran the Notion test
- Date: 2026-10-28, compared with 2 Managed runs of the same prompts on 2026-10-21.
- Prompts: Notion's 12 tracked prompts, run once through OpenRouter (48 answers) and once through Querying.ai (48 answers).
- Mentioned: the brand name appears anywhere in the answer, including as an integration.
- Cited-domain overlap: shared domains divided by all domains cited in either answer.
- Instructions checked: Managed and OpenRouter send AEO Copilot's instructions, which ask for a list. Querying.ai sends the bare prompt. On 2026-10-30 I reran OpenRouter with the bare prompt (48 more answers). Cited-website overlap with scraping stayed the same: 2% on ChatGPT, 20% on Perplexity, 16% on Gemini.
- Sample size: 12 answers per engine. Read the percentages as a direction, not a precise measure.
- Prices: read on Querying.ai pricing and the OpenRouter FAQ on 2026-10-28.
I make AEO Copilot and sell the BYOK plans. Weigh my view accordingly.
Where to go next
Ready to pick your data source? See the BYOK plans and connect your OpenRouter or Querying.ai key, or start free on Managed with ChatGPT and Claude.