AEO tools in 2026: what each one actually tracks at the tier you would buy
Six answer engine optimization tools, read from their own pages on 23 September 2026. They all run the same loop, so the differences that matter are engine access by tier, how much of the method each one publishes, and whether it models your category at all.
Every AEO tool runs the same loop, and every one of them gates engine access somewhere. The gate is usually one tier above where a buyer lands. Profound Starter at $99 tracks ChatGPT alone. Peec AI gives you three models chosen from six, and Perplexity and Claude are not among the six. Otterly.AI includes four and sells three more as add-ons. Trakkr gives all eight on every paid plan and AthenaHQ eleven on credits, which are the two most generous at entry. citeOS runs five on every tier and is useless outside crypto. Pick by which gate blocks the engine your buyers actually use.
An AEO tool measures whether AI engines name and cite your brand when someone asks a category question. There are now dozens of them, they demo almost identically, and the feature lists are close enough that most comparison pages end up ranking them on price. That is the least useful axis available.
Disclosure. citeOS is our product, built and operated by Emergence Media, and it is one of the six here. It is marked wherever it appears. Two things it loses on are stated up front rather than buried: it covers five engines, fewer than half this list, and it is of no use whatsoever to a brand outside crypto.
What an AEO tool actually does
Every product in this category runs one loop. It sends buyer-intent prompts to AI engines on a schedule, records whether your brand is named and whether your domain is cited as a source, and tracks the movement over time. Everything else is presentation.
What that loop gives you, roughly in the order teams need it:
- A baseline. How often you appear when buyers ask the questions that matter. Most brands find the number is lower than the team expected, which is the point of measuring rather than assuming.
- The competitors winning instead. Which brands the engine recommends in your place, per prompt and per engine.
- The sources deciding the answer. Which domains the engine read while forming its response. This is the most actionable output any of these tools produce, because it turns an abstract score into a list of publications you can go and earn.
- Crawl and access failures. Whether AI crawlers can reach and parse your site at all. JavaScript-rendered content, blocked user agents and missing structured data are silent failures no amount of content fixes.
- Movement over time, measured on a fixed prompt set so the comparison between two dates actually holds.
The third point is where these products separate. All of them will name the domains. Far fewer tell you which of those domains is worth pursuing, and none of them will earn the placement for you.
What each tier actually tracks
Engine coverage is the axis that decides most of these purchases, and it is the one buried deepest in the pricing pages. Here is the count on the cheapest paid tier each vendor sells.
Read that alongside the tier structure, because the headline number hides the shape. Profound splits one engine at $99, three at $399, and the rest behind a custom Enterprise contract, so Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot all require a sales call. Peec AI lets you pick three from six on every self-serve tier and puts Perplexity and Claude on Enterprise only, with a fourth model costing $30 to $140 a month. Otterly.AI includes four and sells Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode separately, with Claude alone reaching $439 a month on its top tier.
Trakkr is the outlier and deserves the credit. All eight models on every paid plan with no per-model fee, from $100 a month. If engine breadth at a low price is your only requirement, it is the straightforward answer and it is not ours.
A tier that tracks one engine cannot tell you the engines disagree. In a 100-answer study we ran on 16 September, they disagreed on nearly every question.
What each vendor publishes before you pay
The second check is how much of a product's method you can inspect without entering a sales process. It is not a proxy for quality, and the vendor publishing the least here is also the most capable platform in the category.
All six publish an engine list and a price. Five publish a prompt count for a paid tier. One publishes its scoring weights, and that one is ours, so weigh the claim accordingly. It is still the check worth making on whoever you choose. A tool that scores a brand-name prompt like “what is Acme” alongside a category prompt like “best crypto exchange” will show a healthy number while your category visibility rots, and without the weights you cannot tell whether yours does.
The six, one by one
Profound is the most complete platform here and the one with a genuine moat. Prompt Volumes estimates how often people actually ask a question rather than just where you rank for it, which turns a visibility score into a content-strategy input, and no direct competitor produces it at the same depth. Agent analytics track how GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot traverse your site, and the Opportunities panel names a specific publication and writer to pitch rather than telling you to improve coverage. Starter is $99 a month for 50 prompts on ChatGPT alone with one seat, no exports and no Opportunities. Growth is $399 for 100 prompts and three engines. Enterprise is custom and opens the full list, which Profound’s own page states as up to nine and names in full: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. Treat $399 as the real entry price and expect a sales call if you need Claude.
Trakkr is the best value for engine coverage in this comparison. Growth is $100 a month for one brand, 50 prompts and all eight models: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI, with no per-model fee. Scale is $500 for ten brands with unlimited seats, a REST API and white-label client portals, which is aimed squarely at agencies. Fourteen-day trial, card required. It also publishes its own competitor comparison with a checked-on date and source links, which is the same discipline this page is trying to apply.
AthenaHQ publishes $295 a month for Starter, covering 3,600 credits across eleven models with one credit per AI response, plus a free Essential tier carrying $25 of credit so you can model your own consumption before committing. Eleven is the widest stated coverage anywhere on this page. The credit model is legible and honest, and it also means your bill tracks how much you actually measure, which rewards a disciplined prompt set and punishes a sprawling one. API access and extra credits are paid add-ons on Starter rather than included, and their prices are not published.
Peec AI is strong on the comparative question: not whether you appear, but whether you appear more than the three companies you lose deals to. Visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice are tracked daily against named competitors, and the brand-perception layer scores attributes, traces objections back to the pages behind them and fact-checks claims AI makes about you. Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts, Pro $245, Advanced $495. The constraint to understand before buying is the three-of-six model picker and the absence of Perplexity and Claude below Enterprise.
Otterly.AI is the fastest and cheapest credible setup in the category, running inside an hour with no onboarding call. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard $189 for 100, Premium $489 for 400, with daily tracking and unlimited team members on every tier. For a small team that wants to know whether it appears at all, this is usually the correct purchase. The arithmetic to do first is the engine list: four included, three sold on top, and the add-ons reach $737 a month on the Premium tier.
citeOS is ours and is the narrow one. Twenty buyer-intent prompts across five engines for 100 observation points per audit, every weight published including the query-type multipliers that discount brand-name prompts, a ranked database of 500+ crypto editorial outlets scored on five measured signals, and competitor sets pre-built across ten crypto verticals rather than a shared generic set. Entry is a free 60-second scan with no signup, audits from $299, Concierge $749 a month. The limits, plainly: five engines is fewer than half the products here, and it is of no use to a project outside crypto. That is a deliberate trade rather than an oversight.
Before you shortlist anything, get a baseline. Which engines name you today, and which pages they read instead.
Run my free scan →What no AEO tool does
Worth saying plainly, because the category markets itself past this line constantly.
No tool makes an engine cite you. They measure and they prioritise. Across 39,948 citation events for 72 audited crypto brands, April to August 2026, 92.22% of citations landed on pages the brand does not own. A tool can tell you which pages those are. Earning a place on them is editorial, technical and relationship work that no dashboard performs for you.
No tool agrees with another tool. Engine answers vary between runs on the same prompt, and every product samples them differently: different prompts, different engines, different run counts, different weights, different days. Two tools pointed at the same brand will report different numbers and both can be right. If you switch, expect the baseline to reset and the first month to tell you about position rather than direction. See why every AI visibility tool gives a different score for the mechanics.
No tool knows your category unless it was built to. Every product here will hand you an accurate list of the domains cited instead of you. Whether anything in the product tells you which of those entries deserves a quarter of your budget is a different question, and for most of them the answer is no.
How to choose, in four questions
- Which engines do my buyers actually use, and what tier covers them? Answer this before looking at price. It eliminates more of the shortlist than anything else.
- Can I see the prompt set and the scoring weights before I pay? A score you cannot reconstruct is a number you are asked to trust.
- Does it tell me which sources are worth pursuing, or only which were cited? Test this in the trial, on a live query in your own category, not on the vendor's demo data.
- How are brand-name prompts weighted? If “what is Acme” counts the same as “best crypto exchange”, the score flatters you and the category answer rots quietly underneath it.
If you are a crypto or Web3 brand, there is a fifth: does the product model crypto as its own category, with a crypto prompt library, a ranked view of the publications that decide crypto answers, and per-vertical competitor sets. That is the argument for a vertical tool and it is narrow by design. We are also not the only crypto-native option: Crawlux, DABLOCK, Qvery, Visoryn and XanLens exist and ChatGPT names them. See crypto AEO tools compared for that field.
How this was checked
| What | How |
|---|---|
| Pricing, tiers and engine lists | Read from each vendor’s own public pages on 23 September 2026 with JavaScript rendered. Only what the vendor states. |
| Profound’s tier split | Its own pricing page surfaces the free trial and Enterprise. The Starter and Growth figures come from independent 2026 reviews that agree with one another, including annual rates that are exactly the monthly ones less the stated discount. Reported rather than published; confirm at source. |
| Corpus figures | 39,948 citation events across 72 audited crypto brands, 17,276 pages and 4,395 source domains, April to August 2026. Weights and formulas on the methodology page. |
| Not measured here | Client results. We have not seen any vendor’s and neither have you, so this page compares what each product does and publishes, not how well it performs for a given brand. |
| Conflict of interest | citeOS is operated by Emergence Media, who publish this page, and is one of the six compared. Where it loses, the page says so. |
A standing caution. Vendor pricing and packaging change without notice. Two of these six changed inside a single day between 22 and 23 September while this was being written. Re-check anything here before it decides a budget, and treat a dated comparison page older than a month as a starting point rather than an answer.
Common questions
What is an AEO tool?
An answer engine optimization tool measures whether AI engines name and cite your brand when buyers ask category questions. Every product in the category runs the same loop: buyer-intent prompts sent to AI engines on a schedule, a record of whether you were named and whether your domain was cited, and movement tracked over time. The differences are engine coverage, how much of the method is published, and whether the product models your category or treats it generically.
What are the best AEO tools in 2026?
There is no single best one, and any page claiming otherwise has not told you its criteria. For engine breadth at entry, AthenaHQ covers 11 models at $295 and Trakkr all eight at $100 with no per-model fee. For depth of data, Profound, whose Prompt Volumes has no direct equivalent. For the cheapest working setup, Otterly.AI at $29. For competitor-framed reporting, Peec AI. For crypto and Web3, citeOS, which is ours.
How much do AEO tools cost?
Published entry prices as of 23 September 2026: Otterly.AI $29, Peec AI $95, Profound Starter $99, Trakkr $100, AthenaHQ $295. citeOS is $749 a month on Concierge with a free scan and a $299 one-off audit below it. The entry price is a weak guide on its own, because every vendor gates engine coverage somewhere and the tier that does what you came for is usually above the headline one.
Which AEO tools track Claude?
Fewer than you would expect. Profound puts Claude on Enterprise. Peec AI does not offer it on any self-serve plan, only on Enterprise via API. Otterly.AI sells it as an add-on at $29 to $439 a month depending on tier. Trakkr includes it on every paid plan, AthenaHQ includes it on Starter, and citeOS includes it on every tier including the free scan.
Do AEO tools publish their scoring methods?
Almost none. Of the six checked on 23 September 2026, all six publish an engine list and a price, five publish a prompt count for a paid tier, and one publishes its scoring weights. That one is citeOS, which is ours, so discount it accordingly. It is still the right question to ask whoever you pick, because an unweighted score that counts brand-name prompts alongside category prompts will flatter almost any brand.
What can no AEO tool do?
Make an engine cite you. They measure and prioritise. Across 39,948 citation events for 72 audited crypto brands, 92.22% of citations landed on pages the brand does not control, so the work itself is off your own site. A tool tells you which pages those are; earning a place on them is editorial, technical and relationship work no dashboard performs for you.
For the crypto-specific shortlist see crypto AEO tools in 2026. For single head-to-heads, citeOS vs Profound, citeOS vs Peec AI and citeOS vs Otterly.AI. For the buying side rather than the tooling side, AEO services, and what you are actually buying.
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