AEO Tools: Six Products Under Two Category Names

Which answer engine optimization tools do which job

Say you have already priced a GEO tool and now somebody tells you that you also need an AEO tool. You do not. Search both terms and the same six products come back: Otterly, Peec AI, Profound, Scrunch AI, Semrush and Writesonic.

Three names, and one of them has a paper behind it. Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande introduced generative engine optimization at KDD 2024. What they measured was your share of a generated answer, not your traffic.

The category name is a label on a search result, not a description of a product. All six run prompts against AI assistants, records whether your brand is named, and reports the movement.

So the buying question isn’t which category you are in. It is which of these you can afford to run, on the engines your buyers use, often enough to mean something.

The cheap end, and what the ladder above it costs

1. 1Fifteen prompts at the entry price. That is the number to hold against your catalogue before the price looks cheap.
2. 2The engines are the same across all four plans. What climbs with the price is how many questions you may ask, not where they are asked.
3. 3The jump from 29 to 189 buys 85 more prompts. Pricing in this category is priced per question, whatever the feature list says.

What separates them is coverage and cadence

Feature lists barely help here, because every product describes the same job in the same words. Two things do separate them, and both are printed on the pricing pages: how many engines a plan watches, and how many questions it asks.

Say you sell running shoes and your buyers ask ChatGPT. A plan that watches four engines but allows twenty-five questions gives you six questions per engine. A plan that watches one engine and allows fifty gives you fifty on the one that matters. Neither is better until you know which engines your buyers use.

Say you sell one product line and your buyers ask about it in three or four ways. Twenty-five questions is generous. Say you carry nine categories and each one has its own set of buying questions. The same twenty-five is under three per category, and a reading built on three questions moves when nothing has changed.

Coverage is a real trade because the engines disagree about you. Orbit Media Studios read 13,184 citations across 1,765 answers from four models. All four named the same domain for the same question in 30 of 1,792 query and domain combinations.

Count your own questions before you look at any plan. Write down what a buyer would type, category by category, and stop when you run out. That number is the plan you need, and it is the only number in this purchase that comes from your business, not from a vendor.

Then check the suite you already pay for, because that is the cheapest answer available. Ahrefs and Semrush both fold prompt tracking into their main SEO plans now. Semrush states 50 daily prompts on its $199 tier and 100 on its $299 tier, read 8 September 2026.

A third vendor, the same two dials

1. 1The plan names differ from every other page in this comparison and the dials do not. Prompts tracked and engines covered, climbing together.
2. 2Each plan prints its own engine list instead of promising coverage in general, and that is the line to read before you compare two prices.
3. 3Put this beside Otterly and Scrunch and the category resolves: three vendors, three price points, one product shape.

Whether any of this is worth paying for at all is a question about the method behind the name, and GEO tools works through what has been tested.

What the cheapest and the dearest give you

The two ends of that chart are the comparison worth making. The gap between them is not a feature list, it is what the plan is shaped for, and the shape tells you which one you are.

That is the choice in one line. If you want to know what an assistant says about your brand, start at the cheap end. If you want to know what an assistant’s crawler does on your site, that is a different product and the price reflects it.

The dear end, and why it is a different product

1. 1Site audits appear on the plan, and no tracker in this category sells those. That line is the tell: this product watches your site, not only the answers.
2. 2Four engines at Core against nine at Enterprise. Coverage is the upgrade path here, where Otterly sells prompts.
3. 3A hundred and twenty-five prompts for 250 dollars is $2.00 a prompt; fifteen for 29 is $1.93. Per question the two are within a few cents, and the 250 buys site audits the 29 does not.

Who each one is wrong for

Every product here is a poor fit for somebody, and the fit is decided by something you can settle before you look at any of them. This comes from what each vendor publishes, not from running them side by side, which nobody has published either.

Otterly.AI

Cheapest published subscription at $29 a month, with a free tier above it. If you are testing whether this measurement is worth anything to your store, start with Mangools’ free grader and pay only once that has told you something.

Skip it if you need one dashboard for several brands. The plans climb to $489, so the cheap entry is the start of a ladder, not the whole product.

Profound

At $99 the Starter plan tracks ChatGPT and fifty prompts, and its frequency is daily. Nothing else in the chart above reaches fifty questions below $199, so at this price the count is the reason to look at it.

Skip it if ChatGPT is not where your category gets asked. One engine at that price is a deliberate trade and it only pays if you picked the right engine.

Semrush

Four engines and a published refresh rate for $99, with the terms next to the price. If you already pay Semrush for keywords, the prompt tracking sits inside plans you hold.

Skip it if twenty-five questions is thin for your catalogue. Say you carry nine categories: that is under three questions each.

Scrunch AI

A different job at $250. It watches what AI agents do on your site, not only what answers say about you.

Skip it until you have read your own logs. That check costs nothing and tells you whether there is agent traffic to watch.

What answer engine optimization tools cannot show you

Everything above is what these vendors publish about their own measurement. The harder question is what happens after a reading arrives, and that is where the published evidence stops.

No vendor publishes a test of its own recommendations. Not one shows pages that took its advice, comparable pages that did not, and what happened to citations across both.

What an outcome claim looks like without a sample

1. 1The dashboard half is the measurement, and it is the same measurement every product on this page sells: a visibility percentage and a sentiment line.
2. 2The line under it is the other half: leads from AI convert at three times the rate. No sample, no comparison group and no period.
3. 3Three times what, measured on whom, is the question to put to any vendor. It is not a reason to dismiss the product; it is the difference between the half you can check and the half you cannot.

That gap has a size. Puerto and colleagues published C-SEO Bench at NeurIPS 2025, running the AEO and GEO edits across more settings. Three of fifty-four combinations beat making no edit at all. It tests the method and not any product, so it bounds the claim instead of settling it. GEO tools carries the full reading.

Your own reporting will not close the gap either. Google folds visits from its AI features into overall search traffic under the Web search type, so an answer that names you without sending a click never reaches the number at all.

One more thing is worth doing before any of this, and it costs nothing. Ask an assistant the questions yourself, from a signed-out window, and write down what comes back. Ten minutes of that tells you whether your category gets answered at all, which engine answers it, and whether your name appears anywhere near the answer. A subscription measures that continuously. It does not tell you anything the first ten minutes will not.

What the subscription buys is repetition. Inspeccia measured how far the answers move: across 167 domains read twice, the visible ones swung by an average of 30.8 points.

One reading of a number that swings that much is an anecdote, so repetition is worth paying for. That half of the pitch carries enough published detail to check. The other half, that the tool will move your number, carries none.

So ask any vendor one question before the optimisation half of the pitch: what did you change, on how many pages, compared against what, over how long. A vendor who can answer that has done the expensive part.

Suppose you want that half answered with pages changed and no dashboard: that is our answer engine optimization engagement.