AI Visibility Tools (2026): Which AEO Tracker Earns Its Price

AEO tracking tools run from $29 a month to enterprise contracts you have to book a demo for, and the price tells you almost nothing about which one fits your company. Six tools own this category in 2026: Peec AI, SE Ranking, Opttab, Otterly, Scrunch, and Profound. Here is who each is for, and where the money stops making sense.

If a buyer asks ChatGPT for the best tool in your category and you are not in the answer, you lose the sale before your site ever loads. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) tracking tools exist to tell you whether that is happening: how often ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and the rest cite your brand versus your competitors, on the exact questions your customers ask. The work of getting cited is a separate job (the 14-day GEO playbook covers that). These six tools are the scoreboard.

The fastest way to read this market: Otterly is the cheapest real entry at $29, Peec AI is the established pick for an in-house team, SE Ranking folds the same tracking into a full SEO suite, Opttab includes the most AI models for the money, Scrunch wants to fix your pages and not just grade them, and Profound is the enterprise standard you call sales for. The right pick turns almost entirely on two numbers, how many prompts you need to track and how many AI engines you need covered, and the table below sorts it.

The tools that actually own AEO tracking in 2026

Prices are the current published tiers as of June 2026 (SE Ranking added August 2026; Opttab added, and Peec and Otterly re-checked, September 2026). Two things separate these from the dozen lookalike tools in the same search results. First, all of them track the engines that actually move revenue right now (ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews at minimum), not just one. Second, each has a real point of view about who it serves, which is what lets you rule three of them out fast.

A quick word on what "prompt" means here, because it is the unit you pay for. A prompt is one tracked question, for example "best project management software for agencies" or "top dentist in Austin." The tool runs that question through the AI engines on a schedule and records whether you got named, where, and against whom. More prompts means more of your money queries watched. That is why a 15-prompt plan and a 400-prompt plan are priced an order of magnitude apart.

What an AI visibility tool actually does (and what it does not)

It answers one question on repeat: when AI engines respond to the questions your buyers ask, do they mention you, and how do you stack up against rivals? Concretely, a tracker logs in to (or simulates) ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and others, fires your tracked prompts daily or weekly, and reports three things: whether you were cited, your "share of voice" (the percentage of answers in your set that name you versus competitors), and which sources the AI pulled from to build its answer.

That last part is the useful one. If Perplexity keeps citing a Reddit thread and two competitor blog posts to answer "best CRM for solar installers," you now know exactly which pages to go earn a mention on. A B2B SaaS growth lead can point a dozen prompts at their category's buying questions and watch, week over week, whether a new comparison page actually moved them into the answer.

Here is the honest limit, and it is the line the listicles skip: a tracker measures, it does not fix. None of these tools earns the Reddit mention or gets your page quoted for you, and the two that go past tracking (Scrunch's page optimizations, Opttab's content generation) hand you a worklist and drafts, not citations. They tell you the score and where the gaps are. The fixing is GEO work you or your team still has to do. Buying a $489 plan and changing nothing is how people conclude "AEO tools don't work."

1. 1

   List your real money questions

   Write the 10 to 15 questions a buyer actually types before choosing someone like you: "best [category] for [your customer type]," "[competitor] alternatives," "is [your product] worth it." These, not your brand name, are the prompts that matter.

2. 2

   Add two or three competitors

   Every tool here lets you track rivals on the same prompts. Add the two you lose deals to most. Share of voice is meaningless without them.

3. 3

   Pick only the engines your buyers use

   For most US businesses that is ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Adding Claude or Gemini coverage often costs more (Peec and Otterly both sell extra engines as paid add-ons), so do not pay for engines your customers do not ask.

4. 4

   Wait two weeks before judging

   AI answers shift daily. A single snapshot tells you nothing. The trend over two to four weeks is the signal you bought.

Peec AI: the established pick for an in-house marketing team

Peec AI is the one to start with if more than one person on your team needs to see the data, because every plan includes unlimited users and daily tracking. Unlimited users is no longer unique here (Otterly and Opttab include them too, while SE Ranking's plans carry one to three seats), but Peec pairs it with clean per-prompt pricing that scales by brand, which is why it is the default for a growth team rather than a solo operator.

Plans run $95 a month (Starter, 50 prompts, 1 project), $245 a month (Pro, 150 prompts, 2 projects), and $495 a month (Advanced, 350 prompts, 5 projects), each with daily tracking. Every self-serve tier tracks three AI models of your choice; more models are a paid add-on, and the full model list is reserved for the Enterprise plan. "Projects" are separate brands or sites, so the jump from Pro to Advanced is really about how many brands you watch, not how many prompts. Peec says it is trusted by more than 3,000 brands and agencies, and there is separate agency pricing for shops tracking many clients at once.

The sweet spot is Pro at $245. A B2B SaaS growth lead tracking 150 prompts across their category's buying questions, with the whole marketing team logged in and no per-seat tax, gets daily data on the three engines their buyers use most. At $245 for 150 prompts that is about $1.63 per tracked prompt, with no seat count to manage as the team grows.

Skip it if you are one person tracking one brand on a tight budget. The unlimited-users advantage is wasted on you, and Otterly's $29 plan does the core job for a fraction of the cost.

SE Ranking: AEO tracking inside the SEO suite you already pay for

SE Ranking is the pick when you would rather not run a standalone tracker alongside your SEO stack, because the AEO scoreboard lives inside the same platform as your rank tracking, keyword research, backlinks, and site audits. It tracks brand mentions and website links across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, benchmarks you against competitors, and surfaces which sources each answer pulled from, including pages that cite a rival but not you.

What the pure AEO plays do not do is connect that AI data to the organic rankings and traffic behind it. SE Ranking ties AI share of voice to your organic performance and, through a GA4 integration, the traffic it moves.

Plans are $129 a month for Core (100 AI prompts tracked per day, 1 seat) and $279 a month for Growth (250 AI prompts per day, 3 seats), with 20 percent off on annual billing. All five engines are included on every plan, and so are the rest of the SEO tools, the API, and MCP access. If you need more AI coverage than your plan carries, the AI Search add-on (from $89 a month) adds 200 more prompts a day, unlimited AI competitor research, and access to SE Visible for deeper LLM monitoring. There is a 14-day free trial, no card required. Prices are SE Ranking's published monthly tiers as of August 2026.

Skip it if all you need is a single-purpose tracker, or seat count is your deciding number. The suite is the point; if you will not use the SEO side, you are paying for tools you do not need.

Opttab: the most AI models for the money

Opttab is the pick when you want broad engine coverage without the add-on math. Its Starter plan tracks 150 prompts across 8 AI models every day for $99 a month, with unlimited users, where Peec and Otterly include three and four engines and bill the rest as extras. Opttab bills itself as an AI visibility optimization and agentic commerce tool: beyond brand mentions, citations, and sentiment across AI answers, it generates content, reports on AI crawler and visitor traffic, and on its Growth plan adds product optimization for stores that want their catalog surfaced in AI shopping answers.

Plans are $29 a month for Lite (30 prompts, ChatGPT and Gemini only, weekly or monthly tracking, 1 workspace), $99 a month for Starter (150 prompts, 8 AI models, daily tracking, 2 workspaces), and $499 a month for Growth (450 prompts, 10 AI models, daily tracking, 5 workspaces), with about two months free on annual billing ($25, $84, and $415 a month). Every plan includes unlimited users, Starter and Growth come with a 7-day free trial, and each plan carries a monthly content-generation allowance (2, 10, and 40). "Workspaces" are separate brands with their own data and team access. Prices are Opttab's published monthly tiers as of September 2026.

The number to check before you buy is the response cap. Each plan also lists a monthly ceiling on the AI responses it collects: 6,000 on Lite, 24,000 on Starter, and 48,000 on Growth. Tracking 150 prompts on all 8 models every day for a month is 36,000 prompt-model checks, more than Starter's 24,000, so plan on daily tracking for a subset (about 100 prompts on 8 models, or 150 prompts on 5) or a slower cadence for the rest, and ask Opttab how responses are counted for your setup. One more thing to confirm: Opttab's product page names Google AI Overviews, but the model list on its pricing table does not (it lists Google AI Mode), so if AI Overviews is the engine your buyers see most, check that it is in your plan. Its feature list is the widest here (tracking, content generation, AI bot and web analytics, a website builder, and commerce tools); breadth is not the same as depth, so run the 7-day trial on your own buyer questions before you commit.

Skip it if your budget stops at $29. Opttab Lite covers two engines (ChatGPT and Gemini) on a weekly or monthly schedule, while Otterly's $29 plan tracks four engines daily, so at the entry price Otterly covers more, even though Opttab Lite holds more prompts (30 to Otterly's 15).

Otterly: the cheapest real entry point

Otterly is the tool to pick when budget is the deciding factor, because its Lite plan is $29 a month and still tracks the engines that matter. Most "cheap" AEO tools are free spot-checkers that show you one snapshot and stop. Otterly Lite gives you ongoing tracking of 15 prompts across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, which is genuinely enough for a small operator watching a handful of money queries.

The ladder is $29 a month (Lite, 15 prompts), $189 a month (Standard, 100 prompts), and $489 a month (Premium, 400 prompts), with 15 percent off if you pay annually (which drops Lite to $25 and Standard to $160 a month). On Standard and Premium you can bolt on 100 extra prompts for $99. The catch worth knowing: the plan tiers track Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot, but Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on every plan, so if your buyers lean on those engines, price the add-ons before you commit.

For a local-services owner, say a dental clinic or a realtor, 15 prompts on Otterly Lite covers "best dentist in [city]," a few procedure questions, and two competitors for $29 a month, which is the right amount of tool for the job. A DTC ecommerce brand doing 50 orders a day can sit on Standard at $189 and watch 100 product and category prompts without overbuying.

Skip it if you need Gemini, Claude, or Google AI Mode in the base price, or more than a handful of prompts on a small budget. Otterly includes unlimited team members, but those three engines are add-ons and the lower tiers track few prompts.

Scrunch: the optimize-not-just-track play (now a Sitecore company)

Scrunch is the pick when you want the tool to tell you what to fix, not only that you are losing. Where most of the others stop at measurement, Scrunch Core bundles in site audits and page optimizations, so the $250 a month buys you a path to action and not just a dashboard. As of this year Scrunch is a Sitecore company, folded into the enterprise content and experience platform, which is a signal about where it is heading: upmarket, toward larger content operations.

Core is $250 a month and includes 125 unique prompts, 5 site audits a month, 5 user licenses, and 1 page optimization a month, with a 7-day free trial. Above that sits Enterprise, which is custom-quoted and adds unlimited prompts and seats, product-level observability (useful if you sell many SKUs and want to see AI search at the product level), and full site audits. The five included user licenses are generous for a team without paying Peec's "everyone gets in" model, and the audit-plus-optimization loop is what you are really paying the premium for.

The fit is a content team that already knows it is behind in AI answers and wants a worklist. A 12-person content shop at a mid-market SaaS company can run 125 prompts, get monthly audits that flag which pages an AI cannot cleanly quote, and work the optimization queue. If all you want is a score, you are overpaying; the audit and optimization features are the reason to choose Scrunch over a cheaper tracker.

Skip it if you only want tracking, or you are a solo or small team. At $250 to start, with its center of gravity now inside Sitecore's enterprise stack, Scrunch is aimed at content operations, not a founder checking a few prompts.

Profound: the enterprise heavyweight

Profound is the answer when AEO is a company-wide priority with a budget to match, and it is the name you will see cited most often inside Google's own AI Overviews about this category. It is the most enterprise-built tool of the six, with deep integrations, an AEO research report, agent templates, and reporting aimed at marketing, PR, and brand teams that need to defend their visibility across every answer engine at once.

Profound runs three tiers, Starter, Growth, and Enterprise. Pricing is not posted as a flat number on the page: Starter and Growth are self-serve with a free trial (Starter is built around 9,000 responses analyzed and 400 credits a month), while Enterprise is custom and gated behind a sales call. Annual billing comes with two months free. The honest read is that Profound is positioned for buyers who will talk to sales, so if you want a price on the page before you commit, that friction tells you something about who it is for.

You choose Profound when a large brand needs governance, integrations into an existing martech stack, and reporting a CMO will actually look at, across a wide set of engines and a high volume of tracked responses. For a solo agency owner or a single founder, it is more platform than the job requires, and the demo-gated pricing is a poor fit for a fast, self-serve decision.

Who should pick what: the decision rule

The choice comes down to two thresholds: how many prompts you need to track, and how many AI engines you need covered. Run your situation through this table.

The rule that flips most decisions is engine coverage, because that is where the extra cost hides. Peec includes three AI models of your choice per plan, Otterly includes four engines and sells Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode as add-ons, SE Ranking includes all five of its engines on every plan, and Opttab's $99 Starter lists eight models. Count the engines your buyers actually use, then price each tool with those engines included. Seats matter in one place: Peec, Otterly, and Opttab include unlimited users, while SE Ranking carries one seat on Core and three on Growth, and Scrunch Core includes five. The second rule is prompts: under 15 tracked questions, Otterly Lite is plenty; 50 to 350, Peec and Opttab are the value plays; once you need the tool to hand you a fix-it list, you are paying Scrunch or Profound for the action layer, not the tracking.

On pure price per tracked prompt, the math lands close at the top: Peec Advanced is about $1.41 a prompt, Otterly Premium about $1.22, and Scrunch Core about $2.00, though Scrunch's number includes audits and optimizations the others do not. Opttab Starter is the lowest here at about $0.66 a prompt ($99 for 150), with its monthly response cap as the fine print. Cheap entry goes to Otterly; cheapest at scale goes to Otterly Premium and Peec Advanced; the established pick for a team goes to Peec; the lowest price per prompt, with eight engines included, goes to Opttab Starter.

Are there free AI visibility or AEO tools?

For spot checks, yes. Free AI Overview checkers and the free tools several vendors publish will tell you, once, whether an engine cites you for a given question. For ongoing tracking, no: the paid plans exist because the value is in watching change over weeks, comparing against competitors, and seeing which sources the AI pulls from. Use free tools to confirm you have a gap, then pay to close and monitor it.

What is an AI visibility score or AEO score?

It is a vendor's composite of how often AI answers cite you and how prominently, usually expressed as a share of voice against the competitors you track. Treat it as a trend line, not an absolute grade: a score of 40 means little on its own, but a score climbing from 20 to 40 over a month is real evidence your content work is landing. Each tool calculates it differently, so do not compare scores across tools.

Do I need a dedicated AEO tool if I already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs?

The big SEO suites are adding AI-visibility features, and if you already pay for one, start there to see if it covers your engines and prompt volume. Dedicated tools like Peec, Otterly, and Opttab typically track more answer engines and give you more tracked prompts for the money, plus the source analysis that tells you where to earn citations. Decide by depth: light monitoring, use what you have; serious AEO program, buy the dedicated tool. SE Ranking is the suite worth knowing here: its AI Visibility Tracker covers five engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and AI Mode) on every plan, so a team already on it gets the scoreboard without a second subscription.

Is AEO different from GEO and SEO?

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are near-synonyms for the same goal: getting cited in AI-generated answers. Classic SEO is about ranking in the ten blue links. The content work overlaps heavily, but the scoreboard is different, which is exactly why these tracking tools exist. The GEO versus SEO breakdown walks through where they diverge.

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