AEO tools compared
Answer engine optimisation tools all promise the same thing — tell me whether AI recommends my product. They differ enormously in who they are built for. Here is the whole market, honestly, including ours.
3 August 2026| Tool | Price | Built for | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | $99/mo Starter · $399 Growth | Enterprise brand teams | The category leader by funding and headcount — a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026, 700+ enterprise customers. Starter buys 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, one seat; the second engine arrives at $399/mo. Everything that makes it enterprise software sits above that. |
| Peec AI | €85/mo · 50 prompts | Marketing teams in Europe | Berlin-based, ~$29M raised. Clean product, prompt-count pricing, strong on competitor comparison views. Priced in euros, and every tier below Enterprise caps you at three models — 50 prompts does not mean five engines. |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier · $295/mo Starter | Anyone trying it, then agencies | YC-backed. Positions as GEO strategy rather than measurement alone — the Starter price reflects the service half. It also has the most generous free entry in this table: Essential is free across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude with unlimited members. It is credit-metered, though — $25 of free credit, 300 credits — so it is a free trial of five engines, not a free plan that keeps running. |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo Lite · $189–489 above | Budget solos, then agencies | One of the earliest movers, and the cheapest way into a standalone AEO tool from an established vendor: Lite is $29/mo for 15 prompts. Every paid tier watches the same four engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot — with Claude, Gemini and AI Mode as paid add-ons. Standard and Premium buy prompt volume and client seats, not more engines. |
| Semrush AI Toolkit / Ahrefs Brand Radar | Suite add-on · Ahrefs Pro from $79/mo | Teams already paying for the suite | If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs, the marginal cost of AI visibility data is near zero, and Ahrefs bundles an llms.txt generator. If you do not, buying a whole SEO suite to get one report is an expensive way in. |
| Mangools AI Search Watcher | ~$15.60/mo | Solo SEOs on a budget | The cheapest ongoing paid plan in this table, and an add-on to Mangools rather than a standalone product. Mangools publishes its figures client-side, so this number is the one secondary-sourced price here — read it off their page before you rely on it. |
| CiteRankthis product | $19–49/mo | Founders tracking their own product | Five engines, your questions, a weekly report with share of voice. Probes run on a shared, scheduled browser pool rather than an API, which is what makes the price work — and means results land weekly rather than on demand. |
The short version
The category split into two tiers almost immediately. The top tier — Profound, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, Otterly’s upper plans — is enterprise software: multi-seat, agency-shaped, sold to brand teams with a budget line for it, running from a few hundred a month upwards. The bottom tier used to be nearly empty. It is filling in: Otterly now sells a $29/mo Lite plan, Mangools sells an add-on around $15.60, and we are at $19. A founder tracking one product has real choices now, and this page would be lying if it still said otherwise.
The cheapest way to see all five engines is not a paid plan at all. AthenaHQ’s Essential tier is free across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude, with unlimited members — more engines, at zero, than our own $19 plan covers. The catch is that it is credit-metered: $25 of free credit, 300 credits, and then it stops. That makes it an excellent way to find out whether any of this matters to you, and a poor way to watch a number move week after week, which is the job everything below is actually priced for. Anyone comparing tools honestly should start there and only pay once the free credits run out.
What separates the cheap tier is not the price, it is what the price includes. Read the engine list before the number. Profound’s $99 Starter is ChatGPT alone, and the second engine costs $399. Otterly’s $29 Lite covers four engines but only 15 prompts, with Claude and Gemini charged on top. Peec caps every tier below Enterprise at three models. Two tools at the same headline price can be measuring very different amounts of the internet. Tracked engine by engine, that gap gets stark: the most expensive entry plan in this table is the one that does not cover Perplexity.
That gap is not a technical one. The underlying mechanism is scheduled prompting of answer engines and parsing which domains get cited. Nothing about that costs $99/mo per customer. What costs money at the top of the market is enterprise sales, SOC 2, seats, and years of stored history — all real, all irrelevant if you are one person trying to find out whether ChatGPT names you.
How to actually choose
Three questions settle it faster than any feature matrix.
- How many people will open the report? If the answer is more than two, you are buying seats and workflow, and the enterprise tier is priced for that. If the answer is one, you are buying a number, and paying enterprise prices for it is a mistake.
- Do you need it daily or weekly? Answer engines do not change their minds hourly. Anything faster than weekly is mostly noise — and a single run is genuinely unreliable, since only about 2.2% of cited domains recur across three runs of the same prompt. Weekly cadence is a feature, not a limitation.
- Do you want to be told what to do about it? Some of these tools sell strategy alongside measurement. That is a real service and it is priced like one. Measurement alone is cheap.
What none of them can do for you
Every tool in this list measures. None of them changes the answer. The thing that changes the answer is being mentioned somewhere other than your own domain: branded web mentions correlate far more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do, and on commercial “best X” questions the engines overwhelmingly cite listicles and comparison pages — a large share of them on small, young domains rather than the big publishers.
Which is why the useful half of any of these reports is not your own score. It is the list of domains the engine cited instead of you. That list is a work queue. What to do with it is here.
Before paying anyone — us included — it is worth seeing what one of these reports actually says about your own domain. The free AI visibility checker asks one real buyer question on a real signed-in session and gives you the answer your buyer would have got, on a page you can share. No account, and no obligation to come back.
