The Cheat Sheet: Nine Tools At A Glance
Skim this first. Then read the full take on any tool that fits your situation. Prices come from the sections below and from each vendor at the time I wrote them, so confirm before you buy.
| Platform | Best for | Watch out for | Entry price I cite |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Enterprise teams and agencies with an owner for the tool | Shelf-ware without an analyst; self-serve tiers retired | Free 7-day trial, then custom Enterprise |
| AirOps & Quill | Teams that want execution, not just a score | Usage-based tasks are hard to forecast | Not published for self-serve |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar & LetAIDo | SEO teams tying AI mentions to backlinks and PR | Thin recommendations; verify ChatGPT counts | LetAIDo $99/month |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Teams already living in Semrush | Sampled data; extra domains cost $99 each | $99/month add-on |
| HubSpot AEO | Small and mid-market teams on HubSpot | Three engines; lighter recommendations | About $50/month |
| Scrunch | Regulated brands and agencies that need AI traffic reports | Best features sit in Enterprise | $250 to $300/month (Core) |
| Peec AI | Clean daily analytics with unlimited seats | Three-model cap below Enterprise | $95 headline, higher once loaded |
| Otterly | Cheap on-ramp and the GEO Audit | Add-on engines inflate the real price | $29/month |
Updated October 24, 2026. I corrected Profound pricing, added a side-by-side table, a five-step buying filter, a prompt-set warning and a crawler-access check. Everything below the new sections is the original review.
Search changed. The front door to discovery used to be ten blue links. Today it’s an answer. People ask ChatGPT for the best CRM. They ask Perplexity which agency to hire. They read the AI Overview and never scroll. When that answer mentions your brand, you win the customer. When it doesn’t, you don’t exist to them. That’s the whole game now. And it has a name… Answer Engine Optimization. I’ve been early to this stuff before. We were doing Reddit for B2B back in 2018 when everyone said it was a waste of time. We were building GEO and AEO programs for enterprise clients more than 18 months before the acronyms went mainstream. At Foundation, my team runs AI visibility work every single day for brands you’d recognize, including a national bank, a payroll giant, and a stack of high-growth SaaS companies. We call the metric that matters Share of Model… the percentage of AI answers in your category that include your brand. So I didn’t pull this from a Google search. These are the platforms we actually open, test, and pay for. I’ll tell you what each one is great at, where it falls down, and how I’d film a video walking through it. Let’s get into it.A Quick Note: Trusting The Market & Picking A Tool
Most “best AEO tools” posts are written by the vendors selling the tools. Scrunch ranks Scrunch first. Profound ranks Profound first. HubSpot pays for placement. That’s fine… but you deserve to know the angle.
Here’s mine:
I have working relationships with several companies on this list. We’re partners with some.
A few of their founders, marketing teams and execs have been on my podcast or they will be soon. I use most of these tools at Foundation. I’ll flag the bias where it matters and still give you the straight version, including the parts the vendors won’t say out loud.
One more piece of context worth sitting with:
A recent analysis found that only about 12% of the URLs ChatGPT cites also rank in Google’s top 10 for the same query…
The thing you’ve been optimizing for a decade barely predicts whether AI mentions you. New game, new scoreboard, new tools.
What Does An AEO Platform Actually Do?
Before the tools, the criteria. Most platforms claim to do everything. Almost none do. When I evaluate one, I run it through five layers.LLM Prompt Monitoring
Does it track your brand across the engines that matter… ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini at a minimum? Bonus points for Copilot, Claude, Grok, and AI Mode. If a tool only watches one or two engines, you’re seeing a sliver of reality.Synthetic Demand intelligence
Can it tell you what people are actually prompting? Mentions are nice. Knowing the questions driving those mentions is where strategy starts. This is typically done by gathering clickstream data or data from other third party tools for insight around search.Source & Citation Analysis
When AI answers a question in your space, where does it pull from? The platform should show you the exact domains and URLs shaping the answer, so you know where to go earn your spot.Optimization and Execution Intelligence
Tracking tells you the score. Closing the gap is the job. The strongest platforms move you from “we’re invisible for this prompt” to a brief, to published content, to a citation.On-Site Attribution Support
Can it connect AI visibility to traffic, pipeline, and revenue? This is the weakest spot across the entire category right now. The tool that nails it will own the budget conversation. Alright… Let’s get to it.Profound
Profound is the enterprise heavyweight of this category. It’s the platform we pull citation data from at Foundation, and it’s the one most often name-dropped in boardrooms right now. Great at: Engine breadth and depth. Enterprise plans track ten-plus surfaces including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, and AI Overviews. Answer Engine Insights shows you how models describe your brand, and where competitors get framed more favorably. Prompt Volumes is their answer to synthetic demand intelligence… what people are actually asking, at what scale. Agent Analytics shows how AI crawlers move through your site, which matters because retrieval is the new indexation. There’s even a Shopping dashboard for how your SKUs show up when buyers ask AI what to purchase. On my five layers, Profound scores on four of them and is credible on the fifth. Where it falls down: Price and complexity. As of my October 2026 review, the $99 Starter and $399 Growth self-serve tiers are gone from the public pricing page. What remains is a free seven-day trial and a custom Enterprise quote, with credits for Agents and the AI Marketer as the line item that moves the price. Agency packages are priced separately. The full breakdown is in my Profound review. And the platform assumes a team that can operationalize deep data. If you don’t have an analyst who lives in it, you’ll pay for shelf-ware. The seven-day trial is also tight for evaluating something this deep. The bias flag: Foundation partners with Profound. We co-produced research on AI citations in banking and financial services, and the partnership goes beyond the research. Discount accordingly… then notice we still pay for it and open it daily.AirOps & Quill
Most tools in this category tell you the score. AirOps is built to change it. The platform pairs an Insights layer (visibility, citations, share of voice) with an Action layer that creates, refreshes, and publishes content at scale. Great at: Execution. Quill, launched in May 2026, is an AI agent that monitors your citation share, spots the gaps, drafts or refreshes the content to close them, and flags everything for human review before anything publishes. It pulls from your Brand Kit, so output sounds like you instead of generic AI sludge. Early numbers are loud: Asana saw a 93% lift in ChatGPT citations in two weeks, Parallel saw 165%. They also shipped Offsite, which finds the publishers LLMs actually pull from and measures the lift from each placement. That’s the off-site earned-media layer almost nobody else touches. On my framework, this is the strongest Layer 4 tool on the list. Where it falls down: Pricing transparency. Self-serve plans hide behind “Start for Free” and billing runs on usage-based “tasks” that are hard to forecast up front. And an agent is only as good as the operator… teams that treat Quill as a magic button will publish mediocrity faster. It rewards teams with a real content operation behind it. The bias flag: AirOps is a research partner. We built a 5,000-prompt B2B SaaS AI citation corpus together, and I just published a full Quill review video on my channel. Watch it if you want the long version.Ahrefs & LetAIDo
Ahrefs took the opposite path from the startups. Instead of building a new dashboard, they bolted AI visibility onto the biggest crawl index in the industry. Great at: Brand Radar covers six engines… AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot… and its prompts come from real search behavior in their keyword database rather than synthetic guesses. The killer move is the citation view crossing directly into Site Explorer. You see the AI mention, the cited source, and that source’s full backlink profile without leaving the tool. For digital PR aimed at AI answers, that closes a loop no standalone AEO tool can. Then there’s Letaido, their $99/month AI workspace with roughly $50 in monthly AI credits included. It’s an agent with access to Ahrefs endpoints you can’t even reach via the API, plus connectors to Slack, HubSpot, WordPress, and yes, even Semrush. Tell it to build a weekly AI citation report and it builds the report, the automation, and the schedule. Where it falls down: Brand Radar hands you data, then leaves the strategy to you. Recommendations are thin compared to dedicated platforms. Some prompt data refreshes slower than the category standard, and independent tests have flagged undercounting on ChatGPT mentions, so verify a sample manually before you bet budget on the numbers. Coverage of Claude, Meta AI, and Grok is inconsistent depending on which page you read… check current coverage before you commit. The bias flag: We pay for Ahrefs and use it every day. It powers five of the AI-generated reports in our audit stack, and we layer Ahrefs URL data on top of Profound citation data for YouTube work.SEMRush
Semrush’s play is proximity. Put AI visibility data next to the rankings, keywords, and backlinks your team already stares at every morning. Great at: The AI Visibility Toolkit is a $99/month add-on that covers three report families. Business Landscape estimates your share of voice against up to 50 competitors across LLMs. Brand Performance splits the positive and negative topics AI associates with your brand. Audience & Content surfaces the prompt themes where you show up and where you’re absent. Position Tracking now monitors AI Overviews and AI Mode, which matters because Google is still where most buying journeys begin. The sleeper feature is the Content Analyzer, which scores pages on extractability… opener clarity, entity coverage, schema, self-contained passages… and gives section-level rewrite suggestions a writer can act on without becoming an SEO. Where it falls down: The data is sampled and estimated, so treat it as directional. The add-on economics get ugly for agencies… extra domains run $99 per domain per month, so model the total before you roll it across a client roster. And outside the Content Analyzer, it measures more than it executes. Enterprise AIO exists for bigger orgs, but that’s a sales conversation. The bias flag: We use Semrush at Foundation. It runs the Reddit vs YouTube audit inside our AI visibility audit offer.Hubspot AEO
HubSpot did what HubSpot does. They took a complicated category and made a version your whole team can understand by Friday. Great at: The free stuff is genuinely useful. The AEO Grader gives you a one-time score out of 100 across five dimensions… sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position… across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. AI Search Sensor tracks industry-wide AI visibility trends for free. The paid product, HubSpot AEO, runs about $50/month and adds continuous tracking, a Brand Visibility Score, competitor comparison, and prioritized plain-language recommendations. Because it lives inside the CRM, it’s the closest thing on this list to Layer 5 for small and mid-market teams… AI visibility sitting one integration away from contacts, deals, and revenue. HubSpot’s own case is aggressive: they report AI-sourced leads up roughly 1,850%, converting at about three times the rate of traditional search. Where it falls down: Three engines. No Claude, no Copilot, no Grok, and AI Overviews coverage is limited. The recommendations are lighter than what enterprise platforms produce, and the Grader is a snapshot, so don’t confuse a one-time score with a trend. Serious enterprise programs will outgrow it. The bias flag: Foundation runs on HubSpot. My podcast is on the Hubspot Podcast Network. We collaborate on joint marketing. Our pipeline lives in it. I’m predisposed to like anything that shortens the distance between visibility data and revenue data. I love that Hubspot is building a centralized solution that connects to the big picture and pipeline.Scrunch
Scrunch positions itself as brand optimization for the AI era, and its most interesting features are the technical ones nobody else leads with. Great at: Two things stand out. First, hallucination detection… flagging where AI engines state wrong facts about your brand, your pricing, your product. For regulated industries, that alone justifies a meeting. Second, the traffic layer: GA4 and Cloudflare integrations that track named AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) and AI referral traffic over time. Reviewers consistently call this the most useful part of the platform, and agencies can hand clients a clean AI-traffic report without rebuilding it monthly. Their Agent Experience Platform… a machine-readable layer of your brand’s entities and verified claims that AI crawlers can consume… is a genuinely forward-looking bet. SOC 2 Type II on Enterprise seals the security review. Where it falls down: The best features are locked upstairs. Hallucination detection is Enterprise-only. The Core plan runs $250 to $300/month for four engines, and prompt credits count per engine, so 125 prompts translates to roughly 31 real queries. Claude coverage is Enterprise-gated. AXP is still in limited availability. No free trial, insights and site audits have been described as beta-stage, and default prompt sets skew branded until you manually curate them. You’re buying the roadmap as much as the product.Peec AI
Peec is the Berlin-built answer for teams that want clean daily analytics without enterprise procurement. It’s probably the most pleasant interface in the category. Great at: Speed and polish. Setup takes about 20 minutes, tracking runs daily, and the source-level citation data is strong enough to drive an outreach list on its own. Sentiment analysis is bundled into the mid-tier instead of being sold as a premium add-on. Unlimited seats on every plan is quietly generous… most competitors charge per head. Reporting flows out through CSV, Looker Studio, and API, and the Enterprise tier adds MCP access so the data plugs into AI workflows directly. Where it falls down: The engine cap. Every plan below Enterprise limits you to three models, with each additional model costing roughly $35 to $165/month as an add-on, and Claude gated to Enterprise. So the real cost sits well above the $95 headline. Recent reviews note pricing moved from euros to dollars, so older posts quoting €89 are stale. Bigger picture, Peec is a monitoring tool. It shows you what’s happening with precision and mostly stops there… the Actions feature is early. No free tier either.Otterly
Otterly is the on-ramp. An Austrian team, a 2025 Gartner Cool Vendor nod, and the lowest ticket in the category at $29/month. Great at: Getting a team from zero to tracked by this afternoon. Daily monitoring across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot on core plans, plus prompt research that converts your keywords into the questions people actually ask AI. The standout is the GEO Audit… a diagnostic that checks whether your pages are crawlable and extractable by AI systems, repeatedly called best-in-class at this price. Unlimited seats on every tier, a Semrush App Center integration for teams already in that ecosystem, and API, MCP, and Looker Studio access from the Standard tier up. For an agency that wants to trial AEO reporting across clients without a procurement cycle, this is the lowest-friction door. Where it falls down: The add-on math. Gemini, AI Mode, and Claude cost extra on every plan. One analysis put a fully loaded Lite plan around $76/month and a fully loaded Standard past $400, so compare the engine mix you’ll actually use, never the headline price. Prompt caps are tight at the entry level (15 on Lite). And Otterly diagnoses without executing… it will tell you a page is JavaScript-heavy and unstructured, then the fixing, writing, and publishing is entirely on you. Reviewers also report the sentiment feature is inconsistent in practice.How To Pick One Without Wasting A Quarter
Nine tools is too many to trial. Run this five-step filter and you will cut the list to two before you sit through a single demo.
- Name the job first. Monitoring tells you the score. Execution closes the gap. Attribution ties the gap to revenue. Pick the one you need most this year and let the rest wait.
- Match the engines to your buyers. In the Comscore data I collected on my AI visibility statistics page, ChatGPT’s share of AI prompt volume fell from 70% to 50% over 2026. Gemini climbed from 17% to 30% and Claude from 2% to 11%. A tool that only watches ChatGPT now sees a shrinking slice of the market.
- Price the loaded cost. Add the engine add-ons, extra domains, seats and credits. Otterly and Peec show the problem best: the headline price and the price of the engines you actually need can sit far apart.
- Name the owner. If nobody on your team will open the tool every week, buy the cheapest option or hand the work to an agency. I rank the agencies I would trust in The 7 Best AI Visibility Agencies.
- Sample the data by hand. Pick ten prompts and run them yourself in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Compare the answers with what the tool reports. If the gap is wide, walk.
Your Prompt Set Matters More Than Your Platform
Every tool on this list works the same way underneath. It runs a fixed set of prompts, logs what comes back, and turns the log into a chart. That is a sample. It is not a census.
I see the same mistake every week. A brand uploads prompts that mention its own name, sees itself cited everywhere, and tells the board it is number one in AI. Real buyers never type those prompts.
Build the set from sales calls, support tickets and Reddit threads. Then separate mentions from recommendations. In a Foundation test, Gong appeared in all 11 AI answers to one buying prompt and was recommended in only 3. Mentions are easy. Recommendations pay the bills.
Variance makes it harder. SparkToro ran 2,961 identical prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI and found the odds of getting the same list of brands twice were under 1 in 100. I cover both findings, with sources, on the AI visibility statistics page. Treat every dashboard as directional and watch the trend, not the single number.
Check Crawler Access Before You Pay For Any Tool
No dashboard fixes a site that AI crawlers cannot read. Spend ten minutes here first.
OpenAI documents separate bots for separate jobs. OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, GPTBot covers model training, and ChatGPT-User handles visits triggered when a person asks ChatGPT a question. Anthropic lists ClaudeBot for training, Claude-SearchBot for search quality and Claude-User for user requests. Perplexity splits PerplexityBot for search results and Perplexity-User for user-triggered visits.
Block the wrong one and you disappear from that engine’s answers while your robots.txt looks fine. Your CDN and firewall can do the same thing silently, which I walk through in my LLM SEO guide.
Google keeps it simpler. Its own AI features guide says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show a snippet. No special markup. No AI text file. The basics still carry the weight.
Where To Go Next
Want the data behind these picks? Start with the AI visibility statistics page. Read my AirOps review for the execution-first view. Then go deeper on strategy with the AEO guide and the LLM SEO guide.
One more shift worth knowing. ChatGPT cut its Reddit citations roughly in half in a single month, and it changed which tools showed movement in client reports. Here is what our data shows.