There is no single best AEO tool. There are three kinds of product sold under that label, and the right one depends on which job you are hiring it for: watching where AI engines cite you, acting on what that shows (rewriting or creating pages), or checking markup and crawler access once. Most single-site owners need one paid tool at most, plus a couple of free ones.
Prices below were checked on each vendor's own pricing page on October 1, 2026, unless a line says otherwise. This category re-prices often, so treat every number as a snapshot.
Disclosure: I'm the founder of citelity, which competes with most of the products on this page. I've tried to describe every tool, mine included, by what it documents publicly, and to name what each one does better than mine where that's true. Where I haven't used a tool in depth, which is most of them, I've stuck to the vendor's own documentation rather than inventing an assessment.
The quick version
| Tool | Main job | Entry price | What the entry plan tracks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Watch | $29/mo | 15 prompts |
| HubSpot AEO | Watch | $50/mo ($45 annual) | 25 prompts; ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity |
| citelity | Watch + act | $49/mo | 25 prompts, 10 fixes; five engines |
| AIclicks | Watch + act | $59/mo | 30 prompts, 5 articles |
| LLMrefs | Watch | $79/mo | 500 prompts; 8 engines |
| Peec AI | Watch | from about €89/mo | 50 prompts; 3 models |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Watch | $99/mo | 25 prompts, 1 domain |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Watch | from $199/mo standalone | custom prompts on Ahrefs plans |
| Scrunch | Watch | $300/mo ($250 annual) | 350 custom prompts |
| Profound | Watch + act | free 7-day trial, then custom | 50 prompts/day on the trial |
| AirOps | Act (content workflows) | free Solo plan | ChatGPT insights only on Solo |
| OmniSEO | Watch + act | $89/mo | 50 prompts (third-party figure) |
| Surfer | Write | $49/mo (annual) | AI tracking from the $99 Standard plan |
| Frase | Write | $49/mo | ChatGPT and Google AI visibility |
| Writesonic | Write + watch | $79/mo (annual) | 50 prompts |
| Jasper | Write | $59/seat/mo (annual) | no AI visibility tracking listed |
Pricing checked October 1, 2026. Peec bills in euros and its live page did not render prices for me; the €89 figure is from third-party reporting. OmniSEO's own pricing page would not load (redirect loop), so its figures come from Costbench, verified August 1, 2026.
Trackers: tools that watch where you're cited
These sample AI engines for a list of prompts on a schedule and report whether your domain shows up, who else does, and how that changes. Several now go further (traffic attribution, content suggestions), but watching is the core product.
HubSpot AEO
What it does. Tracks brand visibility, sentiment, competitor share of voice and the domains engines cite, across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with AI-suggested prompts and prioritized content recommendations.
Pricing. $50/month, or $45/month billed annually, with 25 tracked prompts; more prompts can be added. Included in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise. The standalone version doesn't require any other HubSpot subscription.
Fits: anyone already on HubSpot, and anyone who wants a cheap, simple tracker from a vendor that will still be around next year. Three engines, so no Google AI Overviews or Claude.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
What it does. Brand performance analysis in AI answers, prompt research, prompt tracking (Semrush names ChatGPT and Google AI Mode) and AI-search checks inside Site Audit.
Pricing. $99/month for one domain and 25 tracked prompts. Extra prompts cost $60/month per 50; each extra domain is another $99. It can run standalone or alongside a Semrush plan. No free trial.
Fits: teams already living in Semrush who want AI visibility next to their keyword data.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
What it does. Two things: an index of hundreds of millions of pre-collected prompts you can search for brand mentions, and custom prompt tracking. Ahrefs lists AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, with Claude available on custom prompts.
Pricing. Standalone from $199/month. Paid Ahrefs plans (Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449) include 5, 10 or 20 custom AI prompts; extra prompt packages start at $50/month.
Fits: existing Ahrefs customers, and anyone who wants market-level research ("who gets mentioned for this topic at all?") rather than tracking a short list of their own prompts.
Peec AI
What it does. Prompt-based visibility tracking with a strong competitive lens: who else gets cited for your prompts, and share of voice over time. Its AI Referrals feature connects to GA4 and reports sessions, conversions and revenue from 70+ AI assistants by landing page.
Pricing. Four tiers by prompt count: Starter (50 prompts), Pro (150), Advanced (350), Enterprise. Each plan includes three models; others are paid add-ons. Billed in euros, roughly 15% off annually. Third-party sources put Starter around €89 and Pro around €199.
Limitations. Three models per plan by default, so full engine coverage costs more. No content generation.
Fits: teams with an existing content process who want to watch a defined set of competitors and tie AI visibility to GA4 numbers. (I've written a citelity vs Peec comparison with the details.)
Otterly.AI
What it does. AI search monitoring with brand mention and link tracking.
Pricing. Lite $29/month (15 prompts), Standard $189 (100), Premium $489 (400), Enterprise custom; about 15% off annually. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot are included. Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons (on Lite: Claude +$29, Gemini +$9, AI Mode +$9).
Limitations. The step from $29 to $189 is steep, and 15 prompts covers one small site at most.
Fits: solo operators testing whether tracking is worth paying for. (citelity vs Otterly goes line by line.)
LLMrefs
What it does. Citation tracking across eight engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Meta AI.
Pricing. One plan at $79/month with 500 prompts, unlimited seats and projects. A 7-day free trial, no card. There is no permanent free tier.
Limitations. A single plan leaves little room to grow into. No content or diagnostic layer.
Fits: anyone who wants a lot of prompts across a lot of engines for under $100. On price per prompt it is the cheapest tool on this page by a wide margin.
Scrunch
What it does. Enterprise-leaning AI visibility with custom and industry prompt sets, citation tracking, page audits, personas and monitoring of AI agent traffic. Covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta.
Pricing. Starter $300/month, or $250/month billed annually, with 350 custom prompts; Growth $500 ($417 annual) with 700; Enterprise custom.
Fits: brands with a budget and a reporting audience. More than a single site needs.
Watch and act: platforms that also change your pages
These combine tracking with something that produces or rewrites content. The "closed loop" pitch (find, fix, measure) is no longer rare, so compare what each loop actually covers.
Profound
What it does. The most established AI visibility platform, with competitive share-of-voice reporting across up to nine engines on Enterprise. Its Agents automate the cycle from live visibility data to publishing optimized content into your CMS, including rewriting pages whose citations are decaying. It has Google Search Console nodes for Agents (March 2026) and a GA4 integration that ties AI referrals to revenue.
Pricing. A free 7-day trial (50 prompts a day across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews), an Agency Growth plan and custom Enterprise pricing. No self-serve paid tier is published.
Limitations. Enterprise-priced once the trial ends, and built for teams with someone to run it. Overkill for one site.
Fits: marketing teams at established companies that want reporting, attribution and content agents in one contract.
AIclicks
What it does. AI visibility tracking with an emphasis on attributing traffic from AI answers, plus AI-optimized articles and an agent.
Pricing. Starter $59/month (30 prompts, 5 articles), Pro $189 (150 prompts, 15 articles), Business $499 (300 prompts, 30 articles), Enterprise custom; up to 29% off annually.
Fits: small teams that want tracking and a monthly article allowance in one tool. This is the closest like-for-like competitor to citelity's model.
AirOps
What it does. A content workflow platform: AI visibility insights feed agents and workflows that research, write and refresh content, with CMS and SEO integrations.
Pricing. Solo is free (ChatGPT insights only, single user). Pro adds insights across seven-plus answer engines and unlimited seats; neither Pro nor Enterprise lists a price.
Fits: content teams that want to build their own refresh and production workflows. The free Solo plan is a reasonable way to see ChatGPT visibility for nothing.
OmniSEO (by WebFX)
What it does. SEO and AEO platform with keyword tracking, multi-engine AI visibility, content tools and competitive analysis.
Pricing. Essentials $89/month (50 prompts, 4 AI channels, 5 seats), Professional $349 (100 prompts, 10 channels), Enterprise custom. These are third-party figures; see the note under the table.
Fits: teams running several sites or brands who want one broad platform.
citelity (my product)
What it does. Starts from your Google Search Console data, flags pages whose rankings held while clicks fell (the pattern an AI answer absorbing the visit leaves behind), writes or rewrites the page, then tracks positions, AI citations and GA4 traffic afterwards.
Pricing. Starter $49/month, Pro $99, Scale $199. Each month includes 10, 25 or 60 fixes (a fix is one generated or rewritten page), 25, 30 or 50 tracked prompts, and 1, 3 or 10 sites. A one-time pack of 10 extra fixes costs $29 and never expires. Seven-day trial, card required, with three fixes and one full citation scan.
What I think it does well.
- The starting point is pages you already have, not a keyword tool's idea of your market
- Five engines on every plan (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity) with no per-engine add-ons
- Rescue (recovering pages that lost clicks) is on all three plans, including Starter
- 25 prompts plus a fix allowance at $49
Limitations, plainly.
- No AI Mode or Copilot tracking yet; LLMrefs, Otterly (as an add-on), Ahrefs and Scrunch cover AI Mode
- Newer than everything else in this section, with less track record
- No seats, team members or white-label. If three people need logins, buy something else
- One-person company: support and roadmap move at one person's speed
- Deliberately small fix allowances; if you want to publish at volume, this isn't the tool
Fits: owners of content and affiliate sites with existing ranking pages and revenue-linked traffic to protect.
Writing tools that added AI visibility
These started as content optimization or generation products. Most now include some prompt tracking, which makes the old split between "trackers" and "writers" less useful than it was a year ago.
Surfer
What it does. Content optimization: analyzes top-ranking pages for a query, generates briefs and scores drafts. AI tracking is built into the plans: Standard tracks 25 prompts weekly, Pro 50 daily, Peace of Mind 100 daily. There's also a standalone AI Search Analytics plan at $82/month (annual).
Pricing. On annual billing: Discovery $49/month, Standard $99, Pro $182, Peace of Mind $299, Enterprise custom.
Fits: content teams already using Surfer who want AI visibility in the same place.
Frase
What it does. Content research, briefs and optimization, with AI visibility tracking: ChatGPT and Google AI on Starter and Professional, plus Claude and Gemini on Scale.
Pricing. Starter $49/month, Professional $129, Scale $299, Enterprise custom. Annual: $39, $103 and $239.
Fits: writers and small content teams who want research through to brief in one tool.
Writesonic
What it does. Now leads with GEO tracking (50, 100 or 200 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews) alongside its long-standing AI content generation.
Pricing. On annual billing: $79, $199 and $399 a month; monthly billing runs about $99, $249 and $499. No free plan; a free trial is available.
Fits: teams that need content volume and tracking together, and have an editor reviewing what goes out. Google's spam policies on scaled content abuse apply to any tool used to mass-produce pages, whoever makes it.
Jasper
What it does. AI content generation for marketing teams, with brand voice controls and collaboration. AI visibility tracking isn't part of its listed plans.
Pricing. Pro $59/month per seat on annual billing, $69 monthly. Business is custom.
Fits: marketing teams producing multi-format content where AI search is one concern among many.
Free checks worth running first
Google Rich Results Test. Google's validator for the rich result types that still exist (Article, Product, Review, BreadcrumbList and others). It dropped FAQ support in June 2026, after FAQ rich results stopped appearing on May 7.
Schema.org Validator. Validates against the spec rather than Google's feature rules, so it's now the place to check FAQPage markup.
Search Console's AI performance report. Since August 31, 2026 it's available worldwide: impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features by page, country, device and date. No clicks and no queries, but it's free and it's Google's own data.
citelity free tools (mine). Seven tools, no account needed: AI Crawler Checker, AEO Readiness Score, Schema Validator, FAQ Schema Generator, AI Prompt Demand, llms.txt Generator and GEO ROI Calculator. Three of them (AEO Score, Schema Validator and FAQ Generator) show part of the result straight away and unlock the full report with an email. Tools that call paid APIs have a daily cap and say so when it's reached.
The one I'd run first is the crawler checker. A blocked retrieval crawler makes every other improvement pointless, and it's usually an accident.
Compare cost per prompt, then check the engines
Headline prices hide the real difference, which is how many prompts you get and on which engines. Some rough arithmetic from the entry plans above:
| Plan | Price | Prompts | Per prompt | Engines included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLMrefs | $79 | 500 | ~$0.16 | 8 |
| citelity Starter | $49 | 25 | ~$1.96 | 5 (plus 10 fixes) |
| AIclicks Starter | $59 | 30 | ~$1.97 | see vendor (plus 5 articles) |
| HubSpot AEO | $50 | 25 | $2.00 | 3 |
| Otterly Lite | $29 | 15 | ~$1.93 | 4, others extra |
| Otterly Standard | $189 | 100 | ~$1.89 | 4, others extra |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99 | 25 | ~$3.96 | see vendor |
Cadence differs too (daily, weekly, or a daily allowance), and so does what a "prompt" buys: one engine or all of them, one run or several. Ask before comparing.
Which kind of tool do you need?
| Your situation | Look at |
|---|---|
| Content or affiliate site losing clicks on pages that still rank | citelity, AIclicks |
| Already on HubSpot, Semrush or Ahrefs | that vendor's AI module first |
| Just need measurement, lots of prompts, small budget | LLMrefs, Otterly |
| Watching named competitors, tying visibility to GA4 | Peec, Profound |
| Marketing team, several brands, real budget | Profound, Scrunch, OmniSEO |
| Content team building its own refresh workflows | AirOps |
| Own writing process, want optimization plus some tracking | Surfer, Frase |
| One-off audit, no spend | Search Console AI report, Rich Results Test, Schema.org Validator, free crawler checkers |
What I'd do with no tool budget yet
Start with the free checks and a spreadsheet. Pick ten to twenty prompts that matter to your business, run them by hand in two or three engines each week, and note who gets cited. A month of that tells you which prompts you actually care about and which engines your audience uses, and it costs nothing but attention. Most people find they care about fewer prompts than they assumed, which changes what they should buy.
When the manual work becomes the bottleneck, buy for the one job that's blocking you. If that's measurement, a tracker is cheaper than a platform. If it's turning findings into rewritten pages, look at the watch-and-act group, which is where citelity sits, and I'm obviously biased about it.
Caveats that apply to all of these
Most AI visibility data is sampled. No vendor has privileged access to ChatGPT, Claude or Google's AI features; they query the same public surfaces you can. Where a tool shows exact counts without describing its sampling, treat the precision as presentational.
Attribution is better than it was, and still incomplete. GA4 added an AI Assistant default channel in May 2026, and several tools above now read AI referrals from GA4. Visits from apps and API-based integrations often arrive without a referrer, so every AI traffic number is a floor, not a total.
One problem, one tool. Stacking five subscriptions adds coordination work without proportional value. Buy for the specific gap, and add a second tool only when the first shows you a new one.
FAQ
Does Google Search Console show AI Overview data now?
Is there a free tool that tracks AI citations?
Do these tools see the same ChatGPT answers my visitors see?
Sources
- HubSpot — AEO product and pricing (checked October 1, 2026)
- Semrush — AI Visibility Toolkit knowledge base (checked October 1, 2026)
- Ahrefs — pricing, including Brand Radar (checked October 1, 2026)
- Scrunch — pricing (checked October 1, 2026)
- AirOps — pricing (checked October 1, 2026)
- Profound — pricing, Agents overview, Search Console nodes, March 2026, Google Analytics integration
- Peec AI — pricing and AI Referrals documentation
- Otterly.AI — pricing
- LLMrefs — pricing
- AIclicks — pricing
- Costbench — OmniSEO pricing summary (third-party, verified August 1, 2026)
- Surfer — pricing, Frase — pricing, Writesonic — pricing, Jasper — pricing
- SE Ranking — Gemini 3's impact on AI Overviews, February 2026
- Google — FAQPage structured data documentation
- Search Engine Journal — Search Console AI reports rolled out worldwide
- Search Engine Roundtable — GA4 AI Assistant channel, May 2026
- citelity plan figures: the live pricing page and free tool pages
Updated October 1, 2026: corrected Profound (content agents, Search Console and GA4 integrations, current pricing), Peec (GA4 attribution), Surfer (prompt tracking), LLMrefs (trial, not a free tier) and Writesonic (no free plan); added HubSpot AEO, Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Scrunch and AirOps; replaced the cost-per-prompt example with real plan figures.