You want your brand to show up when people ask ChatGPT, Google's AI answers and other AI search engines for a recommendation. You have a few hundred dollars a month to spend, and every tool on your shortlist promises the same dashboard. Some of them only measure. Some also diagnose problems or write content, often on a higher plan than the one in the headline price.
Sort them by the job they do and the choice gets easier. Each tool is listed with its published pricing and a plain note on what it cannot do. One of them, Peekaboo, is ours. Its core job is tracking, so that is where its entry sits.
The short list
Tool
Core job
Published starting price
Main limit at the entry plan
Peekaboo
Measure, with to-dos and content briefs
From $29 a month, configurable
Claude adds 20 cents per check; white-label reports start at $100 a month
Otterly
Measure
$29 a month for 15 prompts
Four engines included; Gemini, AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons
HubSpot AEO
Measure, with recommendations
$50 a month for 25 prompts
Three engines, one domain per setup
Peec AI
Measure, with recommendations
€85 a month for 50 prompts
You choose three models; Looker Studio starts on Advanced
SE Visible
Measure
$99 a month for 200 prompts
No content tools on its plans page; help pages would not load for us
Promptwatch
Measure, diagnose and act; articles and crawler analytics from Professional
$95 a month for 50 prompts
No AEO articles and one seat on Essential
Scrunch
Measure, diagnose and act
$250 a month for 125 prompts
Four engines and one country on Core; API, MCP and Looker Studio are Enterprise only
AthenaHQ
Measure, diagnose and act
Free plan, then $295 a month
Paid by the response: 3,600 a month on Starter, one country
Av. António Augusto de Aguiar 122C 1050-046 Lisboa, Portugal
Minnesota
202 N Cedar Ave, Suite 1 Owatonna, MN 55060, USA
Measure, diagnose and act
No published price; free 7-day trial
Anything past the trial goes through a demo
AirOps
Act
No published price; 14-day trial
Solo plan covers ChatGPT only, for one user
Writesonic
Measure, plus articles
$79 a month, billed annually, for 50 prompts
Three platforms below Enterprise; one user on Starter
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Measure, with a site audit
$99 a month for 25 prompts
Brand Performance updates weekly, desktop results only
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Measure
From $50 a month for your own prompts; $199 for the prompt index
The index is $699 for all models; no free trial
Prices are the ones each company publishes, checked on 2 October 2026, in US dollars except Peec AI, which is in euros.
What an AEO tool actually does
AEO stands for answer engine optimization: getting your brand named and cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI results a question. If the term is new to you, start with AEO vs SEO.
The tools sold under that label do three different jobs.
Measure. The tool asks AI engines a set of questions on a schedule and records whether you were named, where in the answer, and which sources were cited. Every tool listed here does this.
Diagnose. The tool explains why: which pages the AI engines cite instead of yours, whether their crawlers can reach your site, where an answer gets your facts wrong.
Act. The tool writes or rewrites content, or runs the publishing workflow for you.
Buy for the first job you cannot do today. If you do not yet know where you stand, a measuring tool is enough. If you already know your gaps and lack the time to write, look at the tools that act.
Where these facts come from
Every price, plan limit and capability listed comes from the company's own pricing page and help documentation, read on 2 October 2026. One exception: SE Ranking's help pages would not load for us, so SE Visible is described from its plans page only. We did not run paid trials of the other tools, so nothing here is a hands-on verdict on them. Where a company's own pages disagree with each other, or leave out something you would want to know before buying, we say so.
We make Peekaboo. Its entry follows the same rules as the others.
AEO tools that measure
These five do the tracking job and stop there, or close to it. Their entry plans run from $29 to $99 a month.
Peekaboo
Peekaboo tracks how often your brand is named in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot. Its site describes the answers as captured from actual user interfaces. Claude is tracked through its API and adds 20 cents per check, so one prompt checked daily on Claude adds about $6 a month.
There is one plan, and you set its size yourself. The price moves with four things: how many brands you track, how many prompts per brand, which AI platforms, and how often they are checked (monthly, weekly, every three days, every two days or daily). That makes it a fit for a small team that wants a handful of questions tracked cheaply, and for an agency adding brands one at a time.
From $29 a month, and you choose how much you pay above that by changing the four settings.
Annual billing takes 15% off.
Every configuration includes competitor share of voice, sentiment analysis, citation sources, Looker Studio reporting, workspace seats and prompt suggestions.
New workspaces priced under $100 a month get a 14-day trial with a card on file. At $100 or more, billing starts at checkout.
Peekaboo also turns gaps into prioritised to-dos and builds content briefs from a tracked question, the competitors mentioned and the sources cited. It does not write the article for you. White-label reports and share links are only included from $100 a month, and adding brands or prompts in bulk goes through the API or MCP, since the dashboard adds them one at a time. See AI visibility for SEO and AEO teams.
Otterly
Otterly's Lite plan is $29 a month. It fits a solo marketer or a small team tracking a short list of questions daily. Beyond tracking, its citations report shows which sources the AI engines lean on, and its Agent Analytics shows which AI crawlers visit your site.
Lite: $29 a month for 15 prompts and one workspace.
Standard: $189 a month for 100 prompts, with API and MCP access.
Premium: $489 a month for 400 prompts.
Enterprise: custom, from 1,000 prompts.
Annual billing takes 15% off. An extra 100 prompts costs $99 a month. A free trial is offered on Lite and Standard. Read from Europe, Otterly's page shows the same figures in euros.
Read the engine list carefully. Otterly's help center names seven engines, but the pricing page includes four in each plan (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot). Gemini and Google AI Mode are add-ons at $9 to $149 a month each, and Claude at $29 to $439, depending on your plan. Agent Analytics is not on Lite. For more, read our Otterly review.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO sets itself up from a few answers: you confirm your brand, competitors and customer profiles, it suggests the prompts, and it runs them daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It works without any other HubSpot subscription, and it is also included in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise.
$50 a month, or $45 a month paid annually, for 25 prompts.
28-day free trial with no card.
Extra prompts and a Brands add-on are sold separately; we could not find their prices on HubSpot's pages.
It covers three engines and one owned domain per setup. Recommendations are generated from the citation patterns across your prompts, and turning one into a blog post costs 1,000 HubSpot credits. HubSpot's free AI Search Grader is a separate thing: a one-time snapshot with no account, not monitoring.
Peec AI
Peec AI fits an SEO or content team that wants daily tracking with room for the whole team, since every plan has unlimited users. Its documentation also covers source analysis, recommendations grouped by where the opportunity sits (your own pages, editorial coverage, reference sites, communities) and AI bot traffic.
Starter: €85 a month for 50 prompts and one project.
Pro: €205 a month for 150 prompts and two projects.
Advanced: €425 a month for 350 prompts and five projects, with multi-country tracking and Looker Studio.
Enterprise: custom, with API access and SSO.
Peec AI's prices are given in euros because that is how its pricing page lists them in Europe, where we read it. Every other price in this article is in US dollars, so check Peec's page for your own currency before comparing. Each plan lets you choose three models, so covering more engines means paying for more. Agencies are priced separately, in credits: one prompt on one model for one day uses one credit. Read our Peec AI review.
SE Visible
SE Visible is SE Ranking's standalone AI visibility product, with a large prompt allowance at its entry price. All tiers cover ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
Basic: $99 a month for 200 prompts and three projects.
Core: $189 a month for 450 prompts and five projects.
Plus: $355 a month for 1,000 prompts and ten projects, by demo.
10-day free trial. Yearly billing saves 20%.
SE Ranking also sells an AI Search add-on to its SEO plans, so check which route is cheaper if you are already a customer. The plans page lists tracking and source analysis and no content tools. SE Ranking's help pages would not load for us, so confirm the refresh frequency and features during the trial.
AEO tools that also diagnose and act
These four start from tracking and add crawler analytics, site audits and content agents. The extra features pay off only if someone on your team will use them.
Promptwatch
Promptwatch does all three jobs, though not all of them on its entry plan. Tracking is daily on every tier. Crawler log analytics, which show when GPTBot, ClaudeBot and the others visit, and AI-written articles both start on Professional. It also keeps an Action Board of prioritised tasks, and its Content Agent plans, drafts and publishes to your CMS.
Essential: $95 a month for 50 prompts, one project, one seat, with MCP and API access.
Professional: $245 a month for 150 prompts and two projects, with five AEO articles a month and Agent Analytics.
Business: $579 a month for 350 prompts and five projects, by demo.
7-day free trial on Essential and Professional.
The plans are sized by responses: prompts times models times 30 days. Essential's 6,000 responses is exactly 50 prompts on four models. The pricing page says "Track 4 models" while the documentation says there is no model cap, only the response quota. Either way, a fifth model means tracking fewer prompts. Its documentation says ChatGPT answers come from automated browser sessions, while some models are called through their APIs.
Scrunch
Scrunch brings citations, AI bot traffic and an AI-focused site audit together with tracking. It also offers AXP, which serves AI agents a clean version of your pages while people see the normal site, but that is an Enterprise feature.
Core: $250 a month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses, one workspace and five users.
Enterprise: custom.
Agency Core: $500 a month. Scrunch's FAQ gives that price; we could not read what the plan includes.
7-day free trial of Core, which rolls into a paid plan unless you cancel.
Core covers four engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot), one country and five competitors, with one page optimisation a month. Gemini, Claude, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok are Enterprise only, as are the API, MCP, Looker Studio and AXP. After a prompt's first 14 days of daily collection, the default refresh is every 72 hours. Scrunch says it collects answers through browser automation and official platform APIs.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ has a free plan, Essential, with 300 credits, so you can see the product before spending anything. Its pages do not say whether those credits renew each month. Beyond tracking it has a sources view, a site health audit and a content workspace.
Essential: free, with 300 credits and five models.
Starter: $295 a month for 3,600 credits and eleven models.
Enterprise: custom.
Annual billing takes 17% off.
One credit is one AI response, so 3,600 credits is 3,600 answers a month across every prompt and model you run. AthenaHQ does not publish how that converts to prompts, so work it out for your own setup before you commit. Starter is single country, and API access and extra credits are add-ons with no published price. Oracle, which checks AI answers against your own facts, is Enterprise only.
Profound
Profound is the enterprise option: up to nine answer engines, a FactCheck feature that traces a wrong answer to the source behind it, crawler and AI traffic analytics from your server logs, and an agent builder that runs from visibility data through to publishing in your CMS.
Trial: free for 7 days, with 50 prompts run daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
Enterprise: custom pricing, by demo.
Profound's pricing page lists no self-serve price. Some of its own blog posts refer to Starter and Growth tiers, but those are not on the pricing page, so ask what is available before you plan a budget around them. Its traffic analytics need a server or CDN integration.
AEO tools built for producing content
If your gap is output and not insight, these two start from the writing side.
AirOps
AirOps is a content operations platform first. You build workflows and playbooks that research, draft and route content for human review, fed by Brand Kits and knowledge bases that hold your voice and facts. Its Insights layer tracks prompts daily so the workflows can use live visibility data.
Solo: 35,000 tasks a month, one user, ChatGPT insights only.
Pro: 100,000 tasks a month, unlimited seats, insights across seven or more engines.
Enterprise: custom.
14-day free trial with 50,000 credits.
AirOps shows no dollar price for Solo or Pro. Its pricing page says the price depends on task volume and quotes $0.025 per extra task on Solo, and it does not say how many prompts each plan tracks. You will need to ask AirOps for both numbers.
Writesonic
Writesonic puts daily tracking, article generation and site audits in each plan, which is useful when one subscription has to cover both measuring and writing.
Starter: $79 a month, billed annually ($948 a year), for 50 prompts, 15 AI articles and one user.
Basic: $199 a month, billed annually, for 100 prompts and 25 articles.
Growth: $399 a month, billed annually, for 200 prompts and 50 articles.
Enterprise: custom.
Free to start with no card.
Every plan under Enterprise covers three platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. The ten-platform coverage Writesonic advertises is Enterprise. Sentiment analysis starts on Growth, and extra users on Basic and Growth are $50 each a month. Writesonic's older documentation lists different plan prices from its pricing page, so check the figure at checkout.
If you already pay for Semrush, Ahrefs or HubSpot
You may already own enough to start. HubSpot AEO, covered earlier, is included in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise with 25 or 50 daily prompts.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush sells its AI Visibility Toolkit on its own or bundled with its SEO plans. It works from Semrush's own database of more than 317 million prompts and responses, plus the prompts you choose to track. It also audits your site for AI crawlers it is blocking and scores draft content against factors linked to being cited.
Toolkit alone: $99 a month for 25 prompts tracked daily and one domain.
Semrush One, SEO and AI together: from $199 a month. The Starter bundle tracks 50 prompts.
Higher bundles track 100 and 200 prompts. The dollar figures are from Semrush's help pages; read from Europe, its pricing page shows €94.94 a month for the Toolkit and about €191 for the Starter bundle.
Semrush's pricing page lists ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity; its help pages name ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Gemini for prompt tracking. Prompt tracking is desktop only, and Brand Performance updates weekly. Its pages also disagree on a free trial: the pricing page offers seven days, one help article says there is none.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar can be bought alone or added to an Ahrefs plan. It runs on Ahrefs' index of search-backed prompts, which you use to benchmark share of voice against competitors and to see the most cited pages and domains.
AI Visibility Index: $199 a month, with a $699 a month option for all models. An Ahrefs help article describes the $199 as per platform.
Your own custom prompts: from $50 a month for 2,500 checks, which is about 83 prompts checked daily on one platform. One check is one prompt on one platform in one location, and a check on Claude counts as eight.
Paid Ahrefs plans from Lite up already include 150 to 600 checks a month.
Ahrefs offers no free trial. The pricing block on its Brand Radar page puts the per-platform and all-models prices side by side, so confirm at checkout which one you are buying.
Free AEO tools worth using first
Free checkers are a fair first step, as long as you know what each one measures. We looked at the free checkers that rank for this search on 2 October 2026, and they do not measure the same thing.
Site readiness checkers. The two we looked at score your website: whether AI crawlers are allowed in robots.txt, whether you have structured data, how the content is laid out. One states that its score does not come from live prompts, and the other describes only site checks. One gave our own domain 96 out of 100, which tells you the site can be crawled, not whether anyone is recommending you.
Mention counters. Ahrefs says its free AI Visibility Checker reports total mentions, mentions by platform and the most cited domains and pages.
One-time snapshots. HubSpot's AI Search Grader scores your brand once, with no account, on things like presence, sentiment and share of voice.
Live answer checks. Our own free AI visibility checker runs a sample of questions through ChatGPT and Gemini and shows a visibility score, the competitors mentioned and the sources. AthenaHQ's free Essential plan comes with 300 responses.
Use a readiness checker to rule out a blocked crawler, then a live answer check to see whether you are named.
How to test two finalists before you pay
Where a trial exists it is short. Profound, Scrunch and Promptwatch give 7 days, SE Visible 10, AirOps and Peekaboo 14, HubSpot 28. Ahrefs has none. Decide the test before you start the clock.
Write 20 to 30 questions your buyers ask. Leave your brand name out of most of them.
Load the same questions into both tools, on the same engines, on the same day.
After a week, compare three things: whether both tools agree on who gets named, whether you can open the full answer behind each number, and how long it took you to find one thing worth fixing.
Price the plan you would really need. Count your prompts, the engines you care about and the seats, then find the tier that covers all three. For several tools here that is not the entry plan.
If two tools disagree about the same question on the same day, ask each how it collects answers. Some capture the consumer interface, some call the model's API, and the two can return different answers.
What no AEO tool can prove yet
Buyers are saying this out loud. We read 81 Reddit threads about choosing and paying for AEO tools, posted since April 2026 across eight subreddits, and the 783 comments under the 27 busiest. The same complaints keep coming back.
What buyers say
Comments
I use free or manual methods instead (Search Console, Clarity, a spreadsheet of prompts)
54
The score does not tell me what to do
51
I cannot trust the numbers
51
I cannot see which page the AI used, or why
32
It is not worth the price
31
I cannot tie visibility to traffic or revenue
29
These counts are minimums, a comment can sit in more than one row, and many of the threads include vendors promoting their own product.
One buyer put it this way: "62% visibility... compared to what? Doesn't tell me what to actually do." Another offered a useful test for any of these tools: "Before you pay, write down what you would actually do differently if the number came back good versus bad. If the answer is the same either way, you are buying a report, not a decision."
Two limits sit behind that frustration, and they apply to every tool listed here.
The first is that AI answers change from one run to the next, so any score is a sample and not a fixed position. Semrush says as much in its own documentation: "no platform can provide exact numbers on visibility". Treat a visibility number the way you would treat a poll, and watch the direction over weeks.
The second is revenue. None of these tools publishes a way to tie a single mention to money earned. Several connect to your analytics or read your server logs to show visits that came from AI engines, and that is the closest any of them gets. If someone has to justify the spend, agree before you buy on what you will count as success: more answers that name you, more cited pages, or more AI-referred visits. And since one of the most repeated requests on Reddit is to see which page an AI used, check during any trial that you can open an answer and read the sources it cited.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AEO tool?
Software that helps you get named and cited in AI answers. Most AEO tools track a set of questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI results and report how often your brand appears. Some also diagnose why, and some write content.
What is the best AEO tool?
It depends on the job. For tracking on a small budget, Otterly, Peekaboo and HubSpot AEO start between $29 and $50 a month. For tracking with crawler analytics and AI-written articles, Promptwatch's Professional plan is $245 a month. For content production, look at AirOps and Writesonic. Profound sells by demo once its 7-day trial ends.
What does AEO stand for?
Answer engine optimization. You will also see GEO, generative engine optimization, used for the same work.
Do I need an AEO tool if I already use Ahrefs or Semrush?
Maybe not straight away. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month on its own with 25 tracked prompts, and Ahrefs Brand Radar starts at $50 a month for your own prompts, or $199 for its prompt index. If you want to track a longer list of your own buyer questions every day, compare those allowances with a dedicated tracker first.
Are there free AEO tools?
Yes. AthenaHQ has a free plan with 300 responses, HubSpot's AI Search Grader gives a one-time snapshot, and several free checkers score your site's readiness. Many paid tools also offer a trial.
Where to start
Find out where you stand before you buy anything. Run the free AI visibility checker to see your score, the competitors named instead of you, and the answers behind the number. Any of the live answer checks in the free tools section will do the same job. If you are choosing a platform for a whole agency or brand portfolio, our guide to AI visibility platforms covers that decision.
Start with your own visibility.
See where your brand appears in AI answers and which competitors get mentioned.
Filipe Lins Duarte
