If you are looking at Profound and wondering whether something cheaper or better suited exists, this compares the field on what each tool actually measures rather than on feature-grid length.
Worth saying up front: we are an agency, not a tool vendor. We do not sell a tracker and we are not an affiliate for any of these. That is its own kind of bias, so weigh it accordingly. Most of the “best AEO tools” listicles you will find are published by one of the vendors ranked in them.
What all of these tools actually do
Every product below runs the same loop:
- You give it a list of prompts and your brand and competitors.
- It asks those prompts to several AI engines on a schedule.
- It parses each answer for whether you were mentioned, in what position, with what sentiment, alongside which competitors, and citing which sources.
- It stores the history and draws a chart.
That is the product. None of these tools improve your visibility. They measure it. The distinction matters because the measurement is the cheap half of the problem, and the expensive half, getting onto the third-party pages the engines actually read, is not something a dashboard does for you.
You can also run this loop by hand for free in an afternoon. We recommend doing that once before buying anything, because you will understand exactly what you are automating and you may discover a monthly check is all you need.
The field, as of 2026
| Tool | Entry price | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Profound | ~$99/mo, working tier ~$399/mo | Broad engine coverage; enterprise budgets |
| Otterly.AI | ~$29/mo | Smallest budget, a handful of prompts |
| Peec AI | Contact / per seat | Agencies running several client brands |
| Scrunch AI | Contact | Crawler-delivery focus; Sitecore shops |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier available | Enterprise-shaped AEO, trial without commitment |
| Rankscale | Contact | Multi-brand tracking |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Add-on | Existing Semrush subscribers |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Add-on | Existing Ahrefs subscribers |
| SE Ranking AI Results Tracker | Add-on | SEO agencies already on SE Ranking |
Pricing in this category moves fast and most vendors quote rather than publish. Verify before you buy; treat the numbers above as a starting point for the conversation, not a quote.
Profound, and what people are actually reacting to
Profound is the category’s best-known name and has the broadest engine coverage at the top end, including Google AI Mode alongside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and others.
The friction people report is the gap between the advertised entry price and the usable one. The starter tier exists to let you experience the product; the tier that supports a real programme is meaningfully more, and enterprise deployments get quoted in the thousands per month depending on platform count and seats. If you arrived here after seeing “$99” and then a very different number, that gap is what you ran into.
That is not a criticism of the product. It is a reason to be precise about what you need before you shop.
Choosing by the question you are actually asking
Feature grids are the wrong tool here because the products are more similar than different. Pick by your situation.
“I want to know if we have a problem at all.” You do not need a subscription. Run ten prompts across four engines three times each, by hand, and count. Free, one afternoon, and it answers the question. Buy a tool when you need the trend, not the snapshot.
“I have a small budget and want it automated.” Otterly.AI is the cheapest credible entry, around $29/month for a small number of tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Good for confirming and watching what a manual run found.
“I already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs.” Check the AI visibility add-ons in the suite you already have before buying anything new. They may be included, and the integration with your existing keyword data is real convenience.
“I run visibility for multiple clients.” Peec AI is commonly recommended for this, on transparent per-seat pricing. Rankscale is built for multi-client agency use. Profound has an agency mode.
“We are a large brand and need engine breadth.” Profound at the higher tiers, or AthenaHQ, which has a free tier so you can evaluate before committing.
“We are on Sitecore.” Scrunch AI is now part of Sitecore and leans toward the crawler-delivery side of the problem rather than pure measurement.
The questions to ask any of them
Whatever you shortlist, these separate the products more than the marketing does:
- How many engines, and which? Tracking only ChatGPT hides most of the picture. The engines disagree with each other and cite different sources.
- How many times is each prompt sampled? This is the one that matters most and gets the least attention. AI answers vary run to run. A tool that asks each prompt once per week is reporting noise as signal. Ask for the sampling frequency per prompt, not the total query allowance.
- Do you get the citations, or only the mentions? The list of URLs the engines cite in your category is the most actionable output of the whole exercise, because those pages are what you actually have to get onto. A tool that tells you your score without telling you what the engines read is selling you half the answer.
- Can you export the raw answers? If you cannot read the actual text, you cannot check the parser, and parsing sentiment and position from a paragraph is harder than it sounds.
- What is the prompt limit, really? Prompt counts are the pricing lever in this category. Work out how many buyer questions your category genuinely has before you compare tiers.
The honest caveat about this whole category
The tools are real and the measurement problem is real. What is not established is that any particular optimisation tactic reliably moves the number.
A 2025 benchmark, C-SEO Bench, found many published GEO content tactics largely ineffective at improving citation ranking and in some cases harmful. The widely quoted “40% uplift” figure comes from a 2024 paper measured on GPT-3.5 using a redistributive share metric. Google’s own position is that optimising for AI search is still SEO. All of that is indexed in our research library with what each source does and does not establish, and graded in our evidence register.
So buy a tracker to see the trend honestly, not because a dashboard will move it.
What we do instead
We run the measurement and the remediation, and we publish our own numbers, including the bad ones. Our most recent run across the same twelve buyer questions put us at 11% share of answers, down from 12.8% sixteen days earlier, over a period when we were actively publishing. That is on our tracking methodology page, and the method is written up in full so you can run it yourself.
If you want a baseline before deciding whether any tool is worth it, run the free visibility check. Send your domain and two or three competitors and we will send back which questions name you, which name them, and the sources the engines cite in your category. No tool subscription and no call required.
Found this useful? Run your own domain through our tracker, the fastest way to see where you stand.
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