Best AEO tools (2026): how to track AI search visibility, and what actually moves it
AEO tools measure how often AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews mention or cite your brand when buyers ask about your category, and show which pages those answers pull from. AEO stands for answer engine optimization. Some vendors call the same thing GEO or LLM visibility.
Below is the data source OneGTM uses for its own SERP and AI-search work, then the dedicated AEO trackers, then the SEO tools that still matter because AI answers lean on the same pages that rank. Prices are what each vendor publishes. Some links may be referral links, which never changes what you pay or who is listed. A tracker only tells you where you stand. The section at the end covers what changes the number.
Key takeaways
- Gauge, Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, and AthenaHQ all track prompts across AI engines. They differ on engine coverage, prompt volume, and what they help you do after.
- Entry prices run from $29/month (Otterly Lite) to $599/month (Gauge Growth). Profound sells to enterprises on custom quotes.
- Check which engines a plan covers. Several vendors sell Claude, Gemini, or Google AI Mode as add-ons.
- AI answers cite third-party lists, Reddit, reviews, and docs heavily. Getting onto those pages moves visibility more than rewriting your homepage.
- Classic SEO still feeds AEO. Pages that rank and get crawled are the pages AI engines retrieve.
What OneGTM uses
We pull SERP results, keyword data, and AI-search brand mentions through treg, a pay-per-call catalog, and have Claude Code read the results and suggest page changes. It keeps the bill at cents per check instead of another monthly seat. See how we run that loop on Claude Code for GTM.
treg
OneGTM uses this
Pay-per-call gateway to 4,000+ endpoints from over 100 providers on one token, including SERP and SEO data, backlinks, keyword volume, AI-search brand mentions, and Search Console through your own account. Built for agents, so Claude Code or Cursor can call it directly.
Best for: Ad hoc SERP and AI-mention checks without a seat license
Pricing: No subscription. You pay per call, with the price shown before each call and no markup. $1.00 free to start. Example: keyword volume from Semrush at $0.006 per call. Search Console queries are free through your own account.
AEO tools for AI search visibility
These run a set of prompts against AI engines on a schedule, record whether your brand shows up, and show which sources the answers cite. Pick on engine coverage, prompt volume, and whether the tool helps you act on what it finds.
Gauge
AI search visibility analytics that tracks how your brand shows up across AI engines, with citation analysis showing which sites and pages the models pull from. A built-in agent, Ask Gauge, analyzes the data and drafts briefs and articles you can publish to Webflow, Framer, GitHub, or Sanity. It also tests which products coding agents pick for a task and where they get stuck in your docs.
Best for: B2B and dev-tool teams that want tracking and content work in one place
Pricing: Growth $599/month: 600 prompts run daily, ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot, 3 seats, unlimited domains and competitors. Enterprise custom, adding Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity. Claude and Grok can be tracked on either plan with your own API keys.
Profound
Enterprise AI visibility platform covering up to nine engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and DeepSeek, with prompt volume data, ChatGPT Shopping, exports, and an API.
Best for: Large brands that need broad engine coverage and SSO
Pricing: Free trial with 50 preset prompts run daily for 7 days. Enterprise custom pricing with unlimited seats. A self-serve Agency Growth plan is mentioned without a published price.
Peec AI
Prompt tracking across AI engines with source and competitor views, unlimited users on every plan, and a choice of three models per plan with more as add-ons.
Best for: SEO teams that want a clean self-serve tracker
Pricing: Starter $95/month (50 prompts), Pro $245/month (150 prompts), Advanced $495/month (350 prompts, 5 projects), billed monthly. Prices show in euros for European visitors (EUR 85, 205, 425). Enterprise custom, annual.
Otterly.AI
Low-cost AI search monitoring across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini sold as add-ons.
Best for: Small teams testing AEO before committing budget
Pricing: Lite $29/month (15 prompts), Standard $189/month (100 prompts), Premium $489/month (400 prompts). 15% off annually ($25, $160, $422). Enterprise custom from 1,000 prompts. Free trial.
Scrunch
AI visibility platform covering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta, with personas, page audits, and agent traffic monitoring. Its Agent Experience Platform serves an AI-friendly version of your site to crawlers.
Best for: Marketing teams that want audits and agent traffic data alongside tracking
Pricing: Starter $250/month billed annually ($300 monthly) with 350 custom prompts and 3 users. Growth $417/month billed annually ($500 monthly) with 700 prompts and 5 users. Enterprise custom. 7-day free trial, no card.
AthenaHQ
Credit-based AI visibility tracker where one credit is one AI response, with unlimited topics and prompts on paid plans and coverage of 11 models including Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral.
Best for: Teams that want wide model coverage and usage-based billing
Pricing: Essential free with 300 credits. Starter $295/month with 3,600 credits. Enterprise custom. Annual billing listed at 17% off.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs' AI visibility product. Custom Prompts tracks your own buyer questions, and the AI Visibility Index looks up any brand across a large prompt database, covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.
Best for: Teams already paying for Ahrefs
Pricing: Custom Prompts from $50/month, with a small prompt allowance free on paid Ahrefs plans (5 prompts on Lite). AI Visibility Index from $199/month. Ahrefs itself: Starter $29, Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449, Enterprise $1,499 per month.
SEO tools that still feed AI answers
AI engines retrieve pages from a search index before they answer. Pages that rank, load fast, and get crawled cleanly are the ones they can cite, so the SEO basics still decide a lot of your AEO result.
Semrush
Keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, and backlinks, now sold as SEO plus AI Search plans that track a set of prompts daily in AI engines.
Best for: One tool for keyword research and basic AI prompt tracking
Pricing: Free plan. SEO $139/month ($117.33 billed annually). Starter $199/month ($165.17 annually) with 50 daily prompts. Pro+ $299/month ($248.17 annually) with 100 daily prompts. Advanced custom.
Surfer
Content editor that scores drafts against what ranks for a keyword, plus an AI Search Analytics plan that tracks brand visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews.
Best for: Writers optimizing individual articles
Pricing: Billed yearly: Discovery $49, Standard $99, Pro $182, Peace of Mind $299 per month. AI Search Analytics $82/month billed yearly. Enterprise custom.
Clearscope
Content optimization and inventory monitoring, with query tracking across ChatGPT and Gemini and a view of the web searches AI platforms run while building an answer.
Best for: Content teams refreshing an existing library
Pricing: Essentials $129/month (50 tracked queries, 50 pages). Business $399/month (300 queries, 300 pages). Enterprise custom.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Desktop crawler that finds broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, blocked pages, and structured data errors. Run it before you blame the AI engines for ignoring a page.
Best for: Technical audits and schema checks
Pricing: Free up to 500 URLs per crawl. Paid licence GBP 199 per year.
Google Search Console
Google's own data on which queries show your pages, clicks, indexing status, and rich result errors. AI Overviews traffic is folded into the web search numbers.
Best for: Indexing problems and the real query data
Pricing: Free.
Prices are from each vendor's site as of October 2026 and change often, so check before you buy. This is an opinionated list, not a paid ranking. Some links are referral links that may earn us a credit; that never changes what you pay or who makes the list.
AEO tools compared
| Tool | Best for | Starting price |
|---|---|---|
| treg (OneGTM uses) | Ad hoc SERP and AI-mention checks without a seat license | Pay per call; $1 free |
| Gauge | B2B and dev-tool teams that want tracking and content work in one place | Growth $599/month |
| Profound | Large brands that need broad engine coverage and SSO | Custom pricing |
| Peec AI | SEO teams that want a clean self-serve tracker | Starter $95/month |
| Otterly.AI | Small teams testing AEO before committing budget | Lite $29/month |
| Scrunch | Marketing teams that want audits and agent traffic data alongside tracking | Starter $250/month billed annually |
| AthenaHQ | Teams that want wide model coverage and usage-based billing | Free; Starter $295/month |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Teams already paying for Ahrefs | From $50/month |
| Semrush | One tool for keyword research and basic AI prompt tracking | SEO $139/month |
| Surfer | Writers optimizing individual articles | From $49/month billed yearly |
| Clearscope | Content teams refreshing an existing library | Essentials $129/month |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Technical audits and schema checks | Free; GBP 199/year |
| Google Search Console | Indexing problems and the real query data | Free |
Starting prices as published by each vendor in October 2026.
How to choose an AEO tool
Start with the engines your buyers use. For B2B software that usually means ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, and increasingly Claude. Check the plan, since several vendors cover three or four engines in the base price and charge extra for the rest.
Then size the prompt set. Fifty well-chosen prompts that mirror real buyer questions beat 600 generic ones. Write them from sales call transcripts and the questions prospects type, then split them by persona and stage.
- Engine coverage in the plan you will actually buy, not the enterprise tier.
- Citation data: which URLs the engines cite, so you know where to get listed.
- Daily runs, because AI answers vary from one run to the next.
- Competitor tracking on the same prompts.
- Exports or an API if you want the data in your own dashboard.
- Whether it helps you act (briefs, audits, content) or only reports.
How to do AEO in practice
Tracking tells you the score. These are the changes that move it, roughly in order of payoff for a B2B company.
- Answer first. Open each page and each FAQ answer with a sentence that answers the question outright and names specific tools or numbers. Models lift those sentences.
- Add structured data. Mark up FAQs with FAQPage schema, articles with Article, and tool lists with ItemList, then validate them in Search Console and Screaming Frog.
- Publish an llms.txt file at your root that summarizes who you are and links your key pages in Markdown. It is cheap, and some agents read it.
- Get cited on third-party lists. AI answers lean on roundups, review sites, Reddit threads, and comparison pages. Find the URLs your trackers show being cited and get your product onto them.
- Build pages for the questions buyers ask: comparisons, alternatives, pricing, and best-of lists for your category, each with a dated update.
- Keep pages crawlable. Do not block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended in robots.txt unless you mean to, and serve the content in HTML, not only through JavaScript.
- Keep facts consistent. Pricing, positioning, and customer names should match across your site, LinkedIn, G2, and Crunchbase, or the models will hedge.
Common AEO mistakes
Most teams buy a tracker, look at a share-of-voice chart for a month, and stop. The chart moves slowly and only when you ship changes off-site as well as on-site.
- Tracking vanity prompts that include your brand name. Track the category questions a buyer asks before they know you.
- Reading one run as truth. Answers change between runs, so look at trends over weeks.
- Rewriting the homepage and ignoring the third-party pages the engines actually cite.
- Dropping SEO. AI engines still retrieve from search indexes, and pages that do not rank rarely get cited.
When to get help with AEO
Picking a tracker is quick. The work is building the prompt set from real buyer language, shipping the pages and schema, and getting listed on the sources the engines cite, then checking the trend every week.
OneGTM runs that loop with Claude Code and treg: pull SERP and AI-mention data, find the cited sources, and ship page changes. You own the pages and the data.
- Competitors show up in ChatGPT answers for your category and you do not.
- You bought a tracker but nobody acts on what it shows.
- You want comparison and best-of pages built without hiring a content team.
- You need the AEO data next to pipeline data in your CRM.
AEO tools FAQ
What are the best AEO tools?
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
How much do AEO tools cost?
How do I track if ChatGPT mentions my brand?
Does llms.txt help with AEO?
How do I get my product cited in AI search answers?
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