AEO tools compared

Start free, because you can: AthenaHQ's Essential tier covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude for nothing, and will tell you whether you have a problem before you buy anything. It is metered rather than perpetual, so treat it as a five-engine trial. After that the market splits cleanly by what you are buying. Measurement, small: CiteRank $3/mo for ten questions on three engines, Otterly.AI $29/month for fifteen prompts on four. Measurement, more of it: Peec AI $80/mo for fifty prompts on three chosen models, with the best comparison views here and no charge for extra countries. Enterprise software: Profound, where $99/month is "ChatGPT tracking only" and the real product, nine engines, agents, AI-traffic attribution, SSO and SOC 2, sits above $399/month. Omnia is the one here that does not stop at measurement: Growth is €79/month for twenty-five prompts and an agent it calls Omnio that drafts the fix for you to approve, which is a different purchase from a report and priced like one. Check its engine row before you compare it with anything else, "Monitor 4 AI engines by default, unlock up to 7", with Claude, Gemini and Copilot each "(available on request)". The one figure nobody prints next to their price is engines, and it is the figure that decides the comparison: fifty prompts on one engine and fifteen on four are sold within thirty dollars of each other and are not the same product. CiteRank publishes this table and is a row in it, which is why every competitor's cell names the page it was read off and the day it was read.

The category split into two tiers almost immediately. The top tier, Profound, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, Otterly's upper plans, is enterprise software: multi-seat, agency-shaped, sold to brand teams with a budget line for it, running from a few hundred a month upwards. The bottom tier used to be nearly empty. It is filling in: Otterly sells a $29/mo Lite plan, Mangools published an add-on from $15.60/mo on annual billing when its price was last readable in August 2026, and we are at $3 month to month. A founder tracking one product has real choices now, and this page would be lying if it still said otherwise.

The cheapest way to see five engines is not a paid plan at all, and as of 21 August 2026 there are three free ways in rather than one. AthenaHQ's Essential tier is free across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude, with unlimited members, more engines, at zero, than our own $3 plan covers, but it is credit-metered: $25 of free credit, 300 credits, and then it stops. SE Ranking's AI Visibility Tracker page runs a check against AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity with no account at all, capped at "5 free attempts left for today", which resets rather than running out. And HubSpot gives away a one-shot check, "Free One-Time AEO Brand Check, No Account Required", across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. This page said until tonight that AthenaHQ's free tier was the cheapest way to see five engines; a metered trial and a daily allowance are not the same offer, and the honest version names both.

One step above free, the cheapest way to see more than five engines is not a subscription either. Surmado sells its AI Visibility report as a single research Job at $50, with no membership: "PAYG Jobs ($50) never expire", read on its pricing page on 6 September 2026, and that Job buys "Scout access for 14 days". That one report covers seven platforms, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok and DeepSeek, which is the widest engine list on this page. Two things to check before comparing it with a monthly figure. Google AI Overviews is not one of the seven. And the unit is the report rather than the month, so it answers what the engines say today and it does not watch the number move.

What none of the three buys you is the thing everything below is priced for. Competitor tracking is not part of AthenaHQ's free tier, its pricing page attaches "Unlimited competitor tracking, impersonation, and benchmarking" to the $295 Starter tier, not to Essential, as read on 5 August 2026, though SE Ranking's free check does take up to five competitors, which is the most generous free thing in this market and worth using before you pay anyone, us included. HubSpot's grader is one check with no schedule behind it. All three are excellent ways to find out whether any of this matters to you, and none of them watches a number move week after week. Which tools sell competitor share of voice, and at which tier reads every tier in this table against that one question.

What separates the cheap tier is not the price, it is what the price includes. Read the engine list before the number. Profound's $99 Starter is ChatGPT alone, and the second engine costs $399. Otterly's $29 Lite covers four engines but only 15 prompts, with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode charged on top. Peec caps every tier below Enterprise at three models. Two tools at the same headline price can be measuring very different amounts of the internet. Tracked engine by engine, that gap gets stark: the most expensive entry plan in this table is the one that does not cover Perplexity. It is starker still inside a single vendor's "Google", AI Overviews and AI Mode are priced as two separate surfaces almost everywhere.

That gap is not a technical one. The underlying mechanism is scheduled prompting of answer engines and parsing which domains get cited. Nothing about that costs $99/mo per customer. What costs money at the top of the market is enterprise sales, SOC 2, seats, and years of stored history, all real, all irrelevant if you are one person trying to find out whether ChatGPT names you.

Three questions settle it faster than any feature matrix.

1. How many people will open the report? If the answer is more than two, you are buying seats and workflow, and the enterprise tier is priced for that. If the answer is one, you are buying a number, and paying enterprise prices for it is a mistake.
2. Do you need it daily or weekly? Answer engines do not change their minds hourly. Anything faster than weekly is mostly noise, and a single run is genuinely unreliable, since only about 2.2% of cited domains recur across three runs of the same prompt. Weekly cadence is a feature, not a limitation.
3. Do you want to be told what to do about it? Some of these tools sell strategy alongside measurement. That is a real service and it is priced like one. Measurement alone is cheap.

Every tool in this list measures. None of them changes the answer. The thing that changes the answer is being mentioned somewhere other than your own domain: branded web mentions correlate far more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do, and on commercial "best X" questions the engines overwhelmingly cite listicles and comparison pages, a large share of them on small, young domains rather than the big publishers.

Which is why the useful half of any of these reports is not your own score. It is the list of domains the engine cited instead of you. That list is a work queue. What to do with it is here.

Before paying anyone, us included, it is worth seeing what one of these reports actually says about your own domain. The free AI visibility checker asks one real buyer question on a real signed-in session and gives you the answer your buyer would have got, on a page you can share. No account, and no obligation to come back.

A tool that measures whether answer engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, name your product when someone asks a buying question. It works by re-asking a defined set of prompts on a schedule and recording whether you were cited, named or absent, and which third-party pages the engine read to answer. It is not an SEO rank tracker: there is no stable ranking to track, so what is measured is presence across repeated runs, and a single run is noise.

From nothing to several hundred a month, and the spread is mostly about how many engines you get rather than how much measurement. On their own pricing pages: AthenaHQ Essential free (five engines, credit-metered) and SE Ranking's AI visibility check free (five engines, five attempts a day, no account); CiteRank Solo $3/mo (ten questions, three engines); Otterly.AI Lite $29/month (fifteen prompts, four engines); Monde AI Starter €75/month (25 prompts, five engines, unlimited seats and countries); Omnia Growth €79/month (25 prompts, four engines by default); Peec AI Starter $80/mo (fifty prompts, three chosen models); Profound Starter $99/month (fifty prompts, ChatGPT only); SE Ranking Core $129/mo (100 prompts daily, inside a whole SEO platform); Scrunch Core $250/mo (125 prompts, four engines); AthenaHQ Starter $295/month (ten models); Profound Growth $399/month (three engines). Read on 14 August 2026, except the SE Ranking, Scrunch and Monde AI figures, read on 21 August 2026.

Nothing paid, if you only need to look once: SE Ranking's AI Visibility Tracker page checks AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity against up to five competitors with no account, capped at five attempts a day, and AthenaHQ's free Essential tier covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude, metered by credit, with no competitor tracking. Read 21 August 2026 and 5 August 2026 respectively. Among paid plans it is Monde AI's Starter at €75/month, which is the only entry tier in this table carrying five engines; Otterly.AI's Lite at $29/month covers four and is the cheapest paid way to see more than one; Peec AI includes three chosen models at $80/mo out of six on offer, with a fourth buyable from $30/mo; Scrunch's $250/mo Core covers four; and Profound's $99/month Starter covers one. Omnia's Growth is €79/month and includes four, ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with Claude, Gemini and Copilot "(available on request)", so it is not the engines-per-euro pick even though it sits near Monde AI on price. Engines are the row that moves most between vendors at the same price, and it is the row none of them puts next to the headline.

Not to find out whether you have a problem, a free check or AthenaHQ's Essential tier answers that in an afternoon. You need one when the answer has to be watched rather than looked at once, because a single run is noise: the same prompt asked twice can name you once. What a paid plan buys is repetition on a schedule and a record you can compare week to week. If your product has eight buyer questions and you are being sold a fifty-prompt plan, the honest answer is that you need a smaller instrument, not a cheaper version of a large one.