The best AEO tools for 2026 fall into three groups. Enterprise tracking platforms like Profound and Conductor sit at one end, and self-serve monitors like Peec AI and Ahrefs Brand Radar sit at the other. We built OmniGro as a third option: a managed service pairing tracking with the content and technical fixes that change what AI engines say. According to Conductor's 2026 State of AEO/GEO report, 94% of enterprises plan to increase AEO investment this year.
1. Profound — Enterprise AI Answer Tracking
Profound tracks how AI answer engines describe your brand, at what position, and against which competitors. According to Profound's pricing page, Starter costs $99 a month billed yearly and tracks ChatGPT only. Growth costs $399 a month billed yearly and adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise is custom-priced and adds up to nine engines, including Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and Claude.
Profound raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Its customer page names Ramp, MongoDB, and Docusign. That client base shapes what the tool is built for: clean dashboards a marketing team can report from.
The same pricing page shows Profound moving past reporting: Growth includes 400 monthly credits for Agents that generate and optimize content. Those agents run inside your team's workflow, so someone on your side still owns the brief, the review, and the technical fixes.
2. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs Brand Radar extends a tool most SEO teams already use into AI citation tracking, so there is no new dashboard to learn. According to Ahrefs' own pricing, a single AI Visibility Index costs $199 a month. All indexes together cost $699 a month, or $6,990 a year. Indexes are sold per platform for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Claude sits in a separate product, Custom Prompts, which starts at $50 a month.
If your team already pays for Ahrefs for keyword and backlink data, Brand Radar is the cheapest entry point on this list. Coverage splits across two products, so check which one carries the engines you care about before you buy.
3. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit tracks daily AI rankings for a set list of prompts against a single domain. According to Semrush's pricing page, the Base plan costs $99 a month per domain, billed annually, and tracks 25 custom prompts. It covers ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity, and enterprise coverage beyond that requires a custom quote.
Twenty-five prompts covers a handful of core queries, and a full catalog or multi-market brand will hit that cap fast. Teams already inside the Semrush ecosystem get this as a low-cost add-on. Teams starting from zero should size the cap against their query list first.
4. Peec AI
Peec AI is built for teams that want to choose their own tracking scope rather than accept a vendor's fixed engine list. According to Peec AI's pricing page, the Starter, Pro, and Advanced plans each let you pick three AI models to track. The menu includes ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini, with paid add-ons for more. Enterprise plans add up to eleven models, including Claude Sonnet 4.
The choose-your-models structure suits a brand that already knows which two or three engines drive its category. Adding models beyond the three included costs extra.
5. Conductor
Conductor markets itself as "the only all-in-one enterprise AEO platform," built from four connected products. Creator handles AI-assisted content drafting, and Intelligence covers AI and traditional search visibility reporting. Monitoring runs site auditing and change alerts. AgentStack adds agentic AEO: native integrations inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, plus an MCP server for custom builds.
According to Conductor's pricing page, the three tiers scale by volume. Essentials includes 500 tracked keywords and 100,000 monitored pages across three sites. Growth includes 5,000 keywords and 500,000 pages across five sites, while Enterprise covers 60,000-plus keywords across ten-plus properties. Every tier requires a sales call; no dollar figure is published.
Creator drafts content and AgentStack automates AEO workflows, which puts Conductor closer to execution than the trackers above. Access runs through enterprise procurement: expect a sales call before signup.
6. BrightEdge AI Catalyst
AI Catalyst is BrightEdge's answer engine layer, bundled into every BrightEdge SEO Platform subscription at no separate cost. It tracks brand visibility and sentiment across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Its Copilot feature recommends prompts to track by analyzing your site content alongside historical search queries. BrightEdge does not name Gemini or Claude among the engines AI Catalyst tracks.
The value case here is consolidation: a team already running BrightEdge for SEO gets AEO tracking without a second vendor contract. A team starting fresh would be buying the whole SEO platform just to reach the AEO layer inside it.
7. OmniGro — Tracking, Content, and Technical Fixes in One Service
Every tool above tells you where your brand is missing from AI answers. We built OmniGro to close that gap directly. It combines AI citation tracking, competitor intelligence, and a content and technical team that acts on what the tracking finds. All of it runs as one managed service instead of a tool you operate yourself.
We also cover technical work most tools on this list skip entirely. The fixes that matter most are the ones stopping AI crawlers from reading a page at all. Client-side rendering serves bots an empty shell, and accordions and tabs keep answers out of the raw HTML. We fix those directly, and that is where we see the biggest difference. None of it changes what a visitor sees. The page looks the same, and its content becomes readable to the engines. Our content engine then writes and ships whatever the tracking turns up.
In our Three Squared Nine case study, that combination moved a client from 4 of 15 tracked queries to 15 of 15. That happened over a ten-week engagement with no new backlinks added.
We price the managed service from $1,500 to $3,000 a month for SME brands, and $3,000 a month and up for enterprise, in USD. The minimum engagement is six months, and twelve-month clients get 50% off the first month. Ahrefs' all-index Brand Radar coverage costs $699 a month for tracking on its own. Our figure covers the tracking plus the people who act on it.
AEO Tools vs. SEO Tools: What's the Difference?
SEO tools measure whether a page ranks in Google's search results: position, backlinks, crawl health, and keyword volume. AEO tools measure something different: whether an AI engine cites, quotes, or recommends your brand inside a generated answer. There is no ranked list, and a single answer may name one brand only.
The two do not move together. According to Ahrefs' analysis of AI-cited URLs, only 12% of the URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity rank in Google's top 10. That average spans all four engines. A page can rank first on Google and still never appear in an AI-generated answer. We covered the mechanics of that split in why your brand ranks on Google but not in ChatGPT.
The two also do not source citations the same way. According to Chen et al.'s University of Toronto study, earned third-party sources make up 63.4% of Gemini's citations for well-known brands. That figure climbs to 95.1% of ChatGPT's citations for niche brands. Ranking your own page well does not help if independent sources never mention you, and no rank tracker has a field for that.
How to Choose an AEO Tool
Start with which engines you actually need tracked instead of which the vendor leads with. Ahrefs Brand Radar is the only tool here that tracks Claude on a self-serve plan. Profound and Peec AI put Claude behind an enterprise contract, and BrightEdge AI Catalyst names neither Claude nor Gemini. If either engine drives real traffic in your category, that alone rules some tools out.
Match the tool to who will act on its output. A self-serve tracker is only as useful as the person who reads its weekly report and rewrites a page in response. If that person does not exist on your team yet, a managed service closes more of the gap for the same or lower monthly cost.
Check the pricing structure against your catalog size. Prompt-capped tools like Semrush's 25-prompt base plan work for a narrow product line and stop working once you have more queries than prompts.
FAQs
What is an AEO tool?
An AEO tool tracks whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity mention, cite, or recommend your brand in their answers. It also shows how that compares to competitors named in the same responses.
Are AEO tools the same as GEO tools?
Not quite. AEO covers the broader shift toward answer-based search, including voice assistants and AI Overviews. GEO is the narrower practice of optimizing content so LLMs specifically cite it. Most tools marketed as "AEO tools," including every one on this list, actually track the GEO-specific citation layer. See our guide to what AEO is for the full breakdown.
Do AEO tools track Claude?
Some do. Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks Claude via Custom Prompts, from $50 a month, while Profound and Peec AI include it only at enterprise tier. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit and BrightEdge AI Catalyst do not name Claude at all, so confirm coverage before buying if it matters to your category.
How much do AEO tools cost?
Self-serve tracking starts at $99 a month billed annually, on Profound's Starter plan and Semrush's Base plan. Enterprise platforms like Conductor and Profound's top tier are custom-quoted and require a sales call to get a number. A fully managed service like ours runs $1,500 to $3,000 a month for SME brands, and $3,000 and up for enterprise, in USD. That price includes the content and technical work a tracking tool does not.
Can one tool cover both SEO and AEO?
Ahrefs, Semrush, and BrightEdge all bundle AEO tracking into platforms built primarily for SEO. Existing customers of those tools can add AI citation tracking without a new vendor. Whether that coverage is deep enough depends on which AI engines your category depends on: Semrush and BrightEdge both leave Claude out.
The Bottom Line
Tracking tools and managed services solve different problems. If you already have a content and technical team ready to act on gap data, a tracking tool gets you that data cheaply. Profound's Starter plan and Semrush's Base plan are the cheapest way in, at $99 a month billed annually. If you need someone to close the gaps the data finds, that is what we built OmniGro to do. Get a free AI visibility assessment to see where your brand stands before choosing either path.