Best AEO tools in 2026

The most useful thing to know about this category is that it stopped being expensive to enter.

Two of the seven tools below now offer a genuinely free tier, and one of them tracks 100 prompts. A year ago, finding out whether AI answers mentioned your brand cost a few hundred dollars a month. Today the honest first recommendation for most teams is to spend nothing and run a diagnostic.

The short answer

Start free with AirOps or AthenaHQ. If you need the widest published engine coverage, AthenaHQ at $295 covers ten models. If you need transparent specs and a clear ladder, Profound. If you want the same coverage at every tier with no gating, Scrunch or Peec AI. If budget is the binding constraint, Otterly starts at $29.

If your constraint is that nobody has time to act on what any of them reports, none of these is the purchase you need.

Key takeaways

• The entry price is now zero. AirOps and AthenaHQ both offer free tiers, so the first step costs a day rather than a budget cycle.
• AthenaHQ leads on published engine coverage, with ten models at $295 monthly.
• Published pricing is a minority position. Three of seven publish a full ladder; the rest gate some or all of it.
• Every tool here measures and none of them execute. Muck Rack found 84% of AI citations come from earned media, which no tool performs at any price.
• AEO, GEO and LLM SEO are the same practice. Google states AEO and GEO are part of SEO, so treat vocabulary differences as marketing.

A note on where this comes from. We run organic for more than 250 enterprises and track over 10 million prompts across every major engine. What follows is shaped by that, by the client reviews we sit in weekly, and by conversations with buyers at the events we run. It is our read on the category, informed by working in it.

What is an AEO tool?

An AEO tool runs a defined set of prompts across AI engines on a schedule. It reports whether your brand was mentioned, whether a page from your domain was cited, which competitors appeared instead, which URLs fed the answer, and how sentiment reads.

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. GEO, generative engine optimization, describes the same work, as does “LLM SEO” and “AI search optimisation”. The terms came from different corners of the market and converged on one practice. Google’s May 2026 guidance states that AEO and GEO are part of SEO. It also states that AI Overviews and AI Mode run on core Search ranking systems, with no separate AI index. Our answer engine optimization guide covers the mechanics, and GEO vs SEO vs AEO covers where the distinctions genuinely matter.

Three metric names are worth fixing, because vendors use different words for the same things. Brand Visibility is how often engines mention your brand by name. Domain Prompt Presence is how often they cite a page from your domain. Share of Voice is your slice of all brand mentions in the category. The gap between the first two is the diagnostic worth reporting. Engines that know you but cite somebody else to describe you have a citability problem, not an awareness one.

Best AEO tools at a glance

Pricing and engine coverage checked at each vendor’s own pricing page on 31 August 2026.

How we weighted this ranking

Insight to action carries the most weight because it decides outcomes. The most common state we inherit is accurate dashboards and nothing moving. That is not a vendor failure. It is a capacity problem the tool cannot solve.

Our GEO agency ranking methodology explains how we build weightings like this one.

The best AEO tools, ranked

1. Pepper, in its own category per the disclosure above, is an agentic organic growth engine rather than a measurement tool. Customers log into the platform themselves: they set up a workspace, define brand profile, competitors and personas, connect GA4 and Search Console, manage themes and prompts, read GEO analytics, and build and run their own agents in the Agent Atlas.

And a growth team is attached to the account and does the work alongside them, which covers the execution and earned media lines that no tool on this list includes at any price. We track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews.

Where it falls short: we do not publish pricing, so budget discovery is a conversation rather than a page. We are built for teams running organic as a long-term function, so a one-off audit is not what we are for. Our depth sits in content, authority and AI search rather than large technical migrations, so raise that early if it is your primary problem.

If you want the diagnostic run against your category before you shortlist anyone, book a growth audit and we will show you which sources decide your answers today.

2. AthenaHQ covers the most engines at a published price. Its free Essential tier includes $25 of credit and five models: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Starter at $295 covers ten, adding AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. Enterprise adds a knowledge base and discrepancy detection. Where it falls short: the step from free to $295 is steep with nothing between, so a team outgrowing the free tier has no natural next move.

3. Profound publishes the clearest specifications in the category. It names prompts and monthly responses at every tier, rather than only engines. Starter is $99 for ChatGPT only, 50 prompts and 1,500 monthly responses. Growth is $399 for three answer engines, 100 prompts and 9,000 responses. Enterprise is quoted, reaches up to nine engines, and names SSO, SAML and SOC 2. Where it falls short: engine coverage is the most heavily tier-gated here. The entry tier measures one engine accurately, while your buyers may be asking three.

4. Scrunch publishes $300 Starter and $500 Growth and covers the same seven engines at both: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta. Its GA4 integration for AI referral traffic makes attribution conversations easier than most. Where it falls short: the highest entry price in this set, with no free or low tier to test with first.

5. Peec AI is the only tool here that does not gate engines by tier, covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode and Copilot from Starter through Enterprise. It reports 3,000+ brands and agencies as customers, with tiers differing by project count and support. Where it falls short: no figures are published at any tier, so a buyer cannot build a business case without a sales conversation.

6. Otterly has the lowest published entry point at $29 for 15 prompts, and includes unlimited team members on every plan, which is unusual and genuinely useful for a large marketing team. Four engines are included: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Where it falls short: Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude are paid add-ons at $9, $9 and $29 monthly on Lite. Full coverage therefore costs about $76, not the advertised $29.

7. AirOps positions as “AI Search for Enterprise” and offers the most generous free tier here: Solo covers 100 tracked prompts and pages with ChatGPT insights and monthly opportunity reports. Pro adds multi-engine insights across Google, Perplexity, OpenAI and Google AI Studio, with unlimited seats. Where it falls short: the narrowest engine coverage in this set, and paid pricing is quoted rather than published.

What AEO tools cost

The spread runs from free to $300 at the entry tier, and the price does not predict quality. It predicts what the tier includes.

Two specs matter more than the headline figure. Prompt volume caps what you can watch: 15 prompts on Otterly Lite or 50 on Profound Starter establishes whether a category matters and does not run one. Response volume is what separates a real change from noise, and Profound is unusually transparent in publishing it.

The largest cost is on none of these pages. A tool surfacing two hundred opportunities a quarter creates two hundred pieces of work. Priced at a loaded hourly rate, that lands several times above the subscription. Our cost breakdown of platforms against hiring models that line, and which gives better value works through the unit-cost arithmetic.

What every tool on this list leaves undone

Muck Rack analysed more than 25 million cited links across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in May 2026, spanning 17 industries, and found earned media accounted for 84% of AI citations against 0.3% for paid and advertorial.

Every tool here will identify precisely which publications, review sites and communities decide your category. None of them will pitch one. That gap is why a tool purchase so often produces accurate reporting and no movement. Name it before you buy, not after.

The second gap is technical. Retrieval failures caused more than 70% of chatbot errors in a Stanford-led evaluation of six commercial chatbots across 2,100 questions in May 2026. Fixing rendering and crawler access takes engineering time, which is a different queue from the marketing one.

What nobody should promise you

Guaranteed citations. Google advises against providers guaranteeing rankings, because third parties cannot access internal ranking systems. The same holds for AI answers.

That a tool will improve your visibility. Every product here measures. Improvement takes technical fixes, content and earned media.

A comparable engine count. Tier-gating, paid add-ons and counting two Google surfaces separately make headline numbers non-comparable until you read the tier row.

A single composite AEO score worth reporting. It hides the gap between Brand Visibility and Domain Prompt Presence, which is the finding you could act on.

How to choose the right AEO tool for your team

I would establish what your constraint actually is before comparing a single feature, because the answer decides whether you should buy a tool at all.

Google’s May 2026 guidance is the anchor. Google states that AEO and GEO are part of SEO, and that AI Overviews and AI Mode run on core Search ranking systems with no separate AI index. That is correct for Google, and Google is one engine. ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve and cite differently. Hold both. The fundamentals carry over from work your SEO team already does, so a tool sold as a wholly separate discipline overstates its novelty. The measurement layer is genuinely new, because rank tracking cannot see an answer.

Score the decision before a demo.

Those weights sum to 100. Score your own constraint first: if the honest answer is that nobody has hours to act, no tool on this page fixes it.

The live test, and it now costs nothing. Take 30 real commercial prompts from your category, written the way a buyer would type them. Four worked examples: “what are the best AEO tools for a B2B company”, “how do we find out if ChatGPT recommends our product”, “which platform tracks brand mentions across AI assistants”, “is answer engine optimization worth doing in house”. Load them into a free tier from AirOps or AthenaHQ, let it run for a month, then hand the identical list to every vendor on your shortlist.

Ask for five things back. Where do we appear and where do we not. Which competitors appear instead, consistently. Which sources influence those answers, sorted by frequency. Why are those sources winning. What would you change in the next 90 days, and who does it. Compare their output against your own run, because the discrepancies tell you more than the demo does. Engines are probabilistic, so require more than one run on more than one engine.

The weak playbook against the strong one. The weaker sequence is cheap to deliver and widely sold: buy a tool, find some prompts, rewrite a few pages into question-and-answer format, add FAQ schema, sprinkle statistics, and hope for a citation. It is entirely on-site and entirely owned media, aimed at the smallest share of the citation pool.

The stronger sequence runs eight steps: demand intelligence, technical discoverability, entity and brand authority, content, earned-media authority, distribution, visibility measurement, revenue attribution. Measurement is one of the eight, which is the correct way to size a tool purchase. The distinction matters because the weak version can be delivered by software plus a junior writer. That is precisely what much of this category sells.

Red flags, each one something you will genuinely hear. “We track all major AI engines”, quoted from a marketing page when the tier row says one. “We guarantee citations in ChatGPT”, which Google’s own guidance advises against. “Here is your AEO score”, offered as a composite with no competitor share of voice beside it and no audit path. “We track your branded prompts”, which always looks healthy because those answers were already yours. “Unlimited prompts”, which caps somewhere the contract mentions and the page does not. “AEO is a completely new discipline”, contradicted by Google’s published position. And the quiet one: a proposal listing engines that never states monthly response volume.

Five questions for the first call.

1. Which engines does this specific tier return, and which cost extra? A good answer reads the tier row aloud and names add-on prices. A weak one points at the feature list.
2. How many responses per month at this tier? A good answer is a number. A weak one calls it sufficient for most customers.
3. Can we export raw answers and cited URLs? A good answer is yes, with a format and a sample. A weak one explains why the dashboard is enough.
4. How did you choose the prompts in this sample report? A good answer describes a documented method and admits which segments are thin. A weak one cannot say.
5. When this shows us we are invisible, what happens next and who does it? A good answer names roles and hours. A weak one describes a recommendation engine.

It all comes down to one principle: buy the narrowest tool that covers the engines your buyers use with enough response volume to trust, then budget separately for the hours it will create. The tool is the cheap half of this purchase and the easy half of the decision.

One closing note that costs us something. Very few providers are equally strong across measurement, execution, earned authority and attribution, ours included, and the good ones will tell you which of the four is their weakest. If you have capacity in house and an existing PR function to borrow, a free tier may be all you need, and we would say so on a call.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best AEO tools in 2026?
AthenaHQ leads on published engine coverage with ten models at $295. Profound publishes the clearest specifications. AirOps and AthenaHQ both offer free tiers, which makes starting free the sensible first step for most teams rather than any paid purchase.

Are there free AEO tools?
Yes. AirOps offers a free Solo tier tracking 100 prompts and pages on ChatGPT, and AthenaHQ offers a free Essential tier covering five models with $25 of credit. Both are limited in scope, so treat a quiet result cautiously.

How much do AEO tools cost?
Published entry pricing runs from free to $300 monthly, with higher tiers between $189 and $500 and enterprise pricing quoted. Three of the seven tools here publish a full ladder. The rest gate some or all of their pricing.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO tools?
Nothing meaningful. AEO, GEO and LLM SEO describe the same practice of getting cited inside AI answers. Google states AEO and GEO are part of SEO, so treat vocabulary differences as marketing rather than as a product distinction.

Which AEO tool covers the most AI engines?
AthenaHQ, with ten models on its $295 Starter tier. Profound reaches up to nine at a quoted Enterprise tier. Counts are not directly comparable, because vendors gate engines by tier, sell some as add-ons, and count two Google surfaces separately.

Can an AEO tool improve my AI visibility?
No. Tools measure mentions, citations and competitor share of voice. Improving visibility takes technical retrievability work, content and earned media, and Muck Rack found earned media drives 84% of AI citations across its dataset.

How many prompts should I track?
Around 30 real commercial questions establishes whether AI answers matter in your category. Running a category properly usually needs several hundred across brands, regions and personas, which is what the higher tiers actually sell.

Do AEO tools work for small teams?
Yes, and the free tiers suit them best. The risk for a small team is not the subscription cost but the execution time each finding creates, which is why starting free and measuring the workload first is sensible.

Where to go next

Start free and spend a day rather than a budget cycle. Load 30 real commercial prompts into a free tier, let it run, and sort the cited domains by frequency. That single list tells you whether your gap is measurement, execution or authority.

Then buy against the gap you found, not against a feature grid. Most teams end up buying something narrower than they planned.

Our guide to tracking brand mentions in AI search covers the five methods and what each misses. Which GEO platform covers the most AI engines works through coverage in detail, and best AI visibility platforms for enterprise applies procurement criteria to the same vendor set.

If you are deciding between buying software and buying help, do you need an AEO agency or an AEO tool covers that directly, and is a GEO platform worth it without an agency covers the four conditions that decide whether you can act on findings. Our SalesHood case study documents AI Overview keywords moving from 14 to 97 across five months.

The honest exit. If nobody has protected hours to act on what a tool reports, you do not need to buy one this quarter. Fix the ownership question, run the free diagnostic, and revisit with data.

Sources

Every vendor figure was checked at that company’s own pricing page on 31 August 2026, not taken from another roundup. Every study cited was published in 2026.

• Muck Rack, Earned media still drives 84% of AI citations, 7 May 2026. More than 25 million cited links across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, 17 industries. Muck Rack sells PR software, so read it as an interested party with a large dataset.
• Suzgun et al., Evaluating Commercial AI Chatbots as News Intermediaries, arXiv, 21 May 2026. 2,100 questions across six commercial chatbots. Tested on news rather than commercial queries, so read the mechanism rather than the exact rate.
• Google Search Central, AI features and your website, 15 May 2026, including the guidance against providers guaranteeing rankings.