Best AEO Tools: 8 AI Visibility Trackers Tested (2026)

A year ago, almost nobody was searching for “AEO tools.” Now there is a crowded market of them, all promising to tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews mention your brand when someone asks a question you should own. The category grew up fast because the problem is real. A growing share of searches end inside an AI answer, and if you are not named in that answer, you are invisible to the search no matter where you rank in the blue links below it.

The trouble is that the tools all describe themselves the same way, and the prices run from $29 a month to well over $1,000. So this guide does the sorting for you. I run SEO for my own products every day and I track AI visibility as part of that, so this is a tested read of where each tool earns its price, not a scrape of everyone else’s list.

One disclosure up front. I make one of the tools on this list, ContextBolt SEO. I have put it where it honestly belongs, flagged the bias when we get there, and left the competitors’ strengths intact. If you want the concept behind all of this first, our answer engine optimization guide covers how citation actually works.

What an AEO tool actually does

AEO tools, sometimes called AI visibility or GEO tools, measure how your brand shows up inside AI-generated answers. They work by firing a set of prompts at engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot on a schedule, capturing the answers, and then counting a few things.

• Mentions: how often your brand is named in the answers at all.
• Citations: how often you are the linked source the answer is built from.
• Share of voice: your mentions as a percentage against named competitors for the same prompts.
• Sentiment: whether you are named as the recommendation or the cautionary tale.

That is the whole category in four metrics. The differences between tools come down to how many engines they cover, how many prompts and competitors you can track, whether the data is a standing dashboard or an on-demand check, and how much you pay for it.

One honest note before the list. All of these tools model visibility from a sample of prompts. None of them watch every real answer every user sees, because that is not possible, and AI answers vary from one run to the next. The good tools are clear about this. Treat every number as a trend to watch, not a precise score, and you will not be misled.

AEO tools compared at a glance

1. Profound: the enterprise standard

Best for: organizations that need deep, defensible AI visibility data and can pay for it.

Profound is the tool most serious teams benchmark against. It tracks share of voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Copilot, ships crawler analytics so you can see how the AI bots actually read your site, and carries the enterprise trappings like SOC 2 compliance and single sign-on that big companies require. Entry pricing starts around $99 a month for a single engine and scales up quickly from there.

It is the most complete dedicated platform here, and the price and the SOC 2 story tell you who it is built for. If you are a solo founder, most of what you are paying for is procurement-grade security you do not need.

Verdict: the category leader for teams that need depth and compliance. Too much tool and too much money for a one-person shop.

2. Peec AI: the agency favorite

Best for: agencies and marketing teams tracking several brands and competitors at once.

Peec AI has become the popular mid-market pick, especially with agencies. Its competitor benchmarking is the selling point, side-by-side share of voice across a set of prompts, with unlimited team seats even on lower plans, which matters when several people need to see the same reports. Pricing starts around $95 a month for 50 prompts, with a no-card trial to test it first.

It sits in a sensible middle. Cheaper and lighter than Profound, deeper and pricier than the entry-level trackers. For a team whose whole job is watching a client roster, the per-seat math works nicely.

Verdict: the pick for agencies and teams watching multiple brands. More than a solo site needs, less than an enterprise buys.

3. Otterly.ai: the cheapest way in

Best for: solo operators who want a real tracker without a real budget.

Otterly.ai is the cheapest credible dedicated tracker, starting at $29 a month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, with more engines as paid add-ons. It covers brand visibility, link citations, and GEO audits, and it recently shipped an official MCP server and a Claude Skill, so you can pull its data into your agent if you want to.

The catch is the prompt count. Fifteen prompts is enough to validate the idea and watch a handful of your most important questions, not to cover multiple markets or a long competitor list. But as a first paid step into AEO, it is the easiest yes on the list.

Verdict: the best low-cost entry point. Start here to see if AEO tracking earns a place in your routine, then scale up if it does.

4. ContextBolt SEO: AI visibility inside your agent

Best for: founders and marketers who already do their SEO inside an AI agent and want visibility checks folded in, not billed separately.

Here is the one I make, so read the bias into it. Where it honestly fits is different from everything above, and that difference is the whole point.

Every other tool on this list is a dashboard you open. ContextBolt SEO is a hosted MCP server. You subscribe, get one URL, and paste it into Claude, Cursor, Codex, or Windsurf. AI visibility is one part of a wider SEO toolkit that also does keyword research, SERP analysis, competitor keywords, on-page audits, and a free connection to your own Google Search Console. It costs $35 a month for 1,000 lookups, and the AI visibility tools are included in that, not a separate subscription on top.

You ask in plain language. “Am I mentioned when people ask AI about bookmark managers, and who is beating me?” runs two tools: one that checks how often your brand is named and cited across the LLMs, and one that scores your share of voice against the competitors you name. Every result saves to a ./seo-findings/ folder in your project as markdown, and the tool remembers past checks, so next month it leads with what moved.

Be clear on what it is not. It does not run a standing daily dashboard with alerts the way Profound and Peec do. It checks when you ask, which suits research and comparison inside your workflow rather than always-on monitoring for a marketing team. And like every tool here, the visibility data is modeled and directional, a live check on demand, not round-the-clock surveillance of every answer.

Verdict: the value pick if your SEO already happens inside an agent. You get AI visibility, keyword and SERP research, and audits in one $35 tool, instead of paying a dedicated tracker on top of your SEO stack.

If you do your SEO in Claude or Cursor, one prompt gets you both your Google numbers and your AI-answer visibility side by side. That pairing, your real search data next to your real AI-answer data, is the thing a standalone tracker cannot give you. It is a production URL, month to month, with a 7-day free trial and no contract, so you can literally test it for a week without paying anything.

If you want a number before you commit to anything at all, the free AI Visibility Checker runs the same check twice with no signup. Enter a brand and a category and it scores you 0 to 100, then names the brands AI recommends in your place. It is the fastest way to find out whether you have an AEO problem worth paying to fix.

5. HubSpot AEO: the free way to start

Best for: people who want to see the idea work before paying, and existing HubSpot users.

HubSpot AEO shows how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, with an action plan for improving it. The reason it is on this list is the free tier: track 25 prompts with no credit card, then continue for around $50 a month. For a lot of small sites, the free tier alone answers the first question, which is whether AI even mentions you yet.

It is newer and lighter than the dedicated platforms, and it naturally pulls you toward the wider HubSpot ecosystem. But as a no-risk way to see your own AI visibility for the first time, it is hard to argue with free.

Verdict: the best free starting point. Use it to confirm the problem is real for you, then decide whether to invest in something deeper.

6. Semrush AI Toolkit: for people already on Semrush

Best for: teams already paying for Semrush who want AEO in the same place.

Semrush added an AI Toolkit that brings visibility tracking, AI share of voice, and competitor benchmarking into the suite marketers already use, drawing on a very large sample of LLM prompts. It runs around $99 a month as an add-on, and Semrush also exposes an MCP server and a ChatGPT connector for the wider platform.

The logic is simple. If you already live in Semrush for keywords and rank tracking, adding AEO in the same dashboard beats learning a new tool. If you do not, the add-on sits on top of a subscription you would be buying mostly for other reasons.

Verdict: the obvious pick if Semrush is already your home base. Not a reason to buy Semrush on its own.

7. Ahrefs Brand Radar: powerful and pricey

Best for: established Ahrefs teams with real budget.

Ahrefs Brand Radar measures AI visibility against a database of hundreds of millions of real user prompts, which is a genuine data advantage, and it is beginning to fold in TikTok and YouTube signals. The problem is the bill. It runs around $199 per platform per month, on top of an Ahrefs base plan, so a realistic all-in cost lands in the high hundreds to over a thousand dollars a month.

For a team already committed to Ahrefs at scale, the data quality can justify it. For everyone else, the price is the whole story, and cheaper tools cover the same four metrics well enough. For the wider ways around Ahrefs pricing, see our Ahrefs alternatives guide.

Verdict: strong data at a steep price. Worth it only if you are already deep in Ahrefs and the budget is there.

8. Scrunch AI: the enterprise agentic option

Best for: enterprises and agencies that want monitoring plus optimization workflows.

Scrunch AI aims higher than pure tracking, pairing AI visibility monitoring with workflows meant to help you act on what you find. Pricing starts around $250 a month and scales into custom enterprise tiers, which places it firmly at the top end of this list.

It is a capable platform, but the entry price alone rules it out for most individuals and small teams. If you are an enterprise or an agency that wants monitoring and action in one heavier system, it belongs on your shortlist. If you are a founder checking whether AI mentions you, it is the wrong end of the market.

Verdict: a solid enterprise choice. Overkill and overpriced for anyone below that tier.

How to choose an AEO tool

Match the tool to your budget and your workflow, not to the longest feature list.

• If you are testing whether this matters at all, run the free AI Visibility Checker for a score in about ten seconds, then HubSpot AEO’s free tier if you want ongoing tracking. Both beat guessing.
• If you want a cheap dedicated tracker, Otterly at $29 a month is the easiest way in.
• If you already do SEO inside an AI agent, ContextBolt SEO folds AI visibility into a $35 toolkit, so you are not paying a separate AEO fee on top.
• If you are an agency watching many brands, Peec AI’s per-seat model fits.
• If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs, use their AEO features before buying a second tool.
• If you are an enterprise, Profound or Scrunch AI have the depth and the compliance you need.

The mistake to avoid is buying enterprise depth for a solo site, or a standalone tracker when the AEO check you actually want lives one prompt away inside the SEO tool you already use. And remember what these tools cannot do. They measure visibility, they do not create it. The work of getting cited, answering questions directly, writing quotable sentences, earning mentions across the web, is covered in our answer engine optimization guide. A tracker tells you the score. You still have to play the game.