Answer engine optimisation
Best AEO tools in 2026
Answer engine optimisation tools cluster into a few real shapes. This guide sorts them by the job, and covers which run competitor intelligence on the businesses AI recommends instead of you, with claims taken from each vendor's own pages on a stated date.
Last reviewed: Vendor pages checked
Illustrative. Not a screenshot and not real data.
The short answer
Which tool should you choose?
If you want AEO measurement joined to a team that will act on it every month, Goodie AI and Profound are built that way: monitoring, prioritised recommendations and, in Goodie AI's case, a monthly quota of optimisation actions and attribution back to traffic and revenue. If you need one enterprise contract with governance and integrations around the work, Conductor and AthenaHQ are the two to shortlist.
If you want the analytics without the platform weight, Peec AI and Otterly AI publish plans and open data access, and Scrunch AI adds persona and region segmentation plus control over what AI retrieval bots read on your site. If you own one business and want a plain answer rather than a dashboard, GetRanked AI reports whether the assistants recommend you, who they name instead, and what evidence was missing.
One warning before the list. AEO is not a standard, and the vendors below do not agree on the word. Everything here is dated and sourced, and no product has been given a score we invented.
Start here
Measure the outcome before you choose a tool
Answer engine optimisation tools cluster into a few real shapes: analytics platforms built for programme teams, monitors that watch a prompt set daily, and SEO suites that have added AI reporting alongside the rankings.
They answer how visible a brand is. The commercial question underneath is narrower: when a prospective customer asks an assistant who to choose, does the answer contain your business or somebody else's?
Measure that first. It costs nothing, it takes minutes, and it tells you which of the platforms below is worth paying for, if any. Where GetRanked AI differs is the competitor intelligence: the GetRanked Algo names the businesses the assistants recommended in your place through Competitor Capture, builds a dossier on each with Competitor Radar, and prints the reason and sources with Decision Trace, all from the answers themselves rather than a list you supply. Staying ahead is the ongoing half: tracked competitors are re-read on the ongoing plans and Recommendation Delta measures which answers you gained and lost between two comparable readings, so you can see whether the gap to the businesses AI names is widening or closing. Those plans are listed on the pricing page and are not open for self-serve purchase yet.
The category
AEO, GEO and SEO: what the words actually mean
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It describes the work of getting a brand named, cited and described correctly inside the answers AI assistants write, rather than inside a list of ten blue links. Conductor uses the term for its enterprise platform, Goodie AI calls itself a full-stack AEO platform, and Profound positions itself as an answer engine optimisation platform with marketing agents on top.
GEO, generative engine optimisation, describes the same broad work with a different word. Vendors use the two interchangeably, and some use both plus "AI search optimisation" on different pages of the same site. Otterly AI publishes GEO audits and GEO recommendation types while measuring much the same things Profound and Peec AI measure. Neither label is standardised, so the useful question is not which word a vendor uses but what its product reports.
SEO is genuinely different. It is about where a page ranks in a results list, measured against keywords. AEO is about whether a brand appears inside a written answer, and where in that answer, for questions that vary between two identical asks. Some SEO platforms now report both; several of the products below report only the AI side.
GetRanked AI is narrower again. We call its category AI Recommendation Intelligence, and that is our term rather than an industry one. AEO platforms measure visibility across a prompt set a team defines. GetRanked AI measures whether leading AI assistants recommend one business when its prospective customers are looking for one, names the businesses recommended instead, and shows what evidence the assistants could not find.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimisation: getting a brand named, cited and described correctly inside AI answers.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimisation. Used by many vendors for the same work as AEO. The two overlap and neither is a standard.
- Share of voice
- A brand's share of mentions in AI answers compared with the competitors a team names.
- Citations
- The sources an assistant drew on or linked when writing an answer, and what most AEO products analyse.
- AI Recommendation Intelligence
- GetRanked AI's term for measuring whether assistants recommend a specific business to its prospective customers, who they recommend instead, and what evidence was missing.
How we evaluated
What we looked at, and what we did not
We read each vendor's own website on the date shown and recorded what it advertises: what the product is for, which AI platforms it names, what it measures, who it says it is for, and whether prices are published. We did not buy and run every product, and we do not hand out scores. Where a vendor's pages do not mention something, the table says "not publicly advertised", which describes the pages we read rather than the product.
Because the AEO label is applied loosely, we sorted these products by what they report and who they are sold to, not by the word on the homepage. GetRanked AI appears in the table under the same criteria as everyone else.
- Principal purposeWhat the product is built to do, in its own terms.
- Recommendation outcomeWhether it tells a business that AI recommends it, rather than counting mentions.
- Starts from your businessWhether you can begin with your website instead of building a prompt project.
- Recommendation GapWhether it shows the buying questions where a business could be named and is not.
- Competitor CaptureWhether it names the businesses the assistants recommend instead.
- Competitor discoveryWhether competitors surface from the answers, or must be known and added first.
- Evidence CoverageWhether it shows which sources shaped the answer and what was missing.
- What to do firstWhether it produces a prioritised list of things to change.
- Plain-English verdictWhether the output is a decision a business owner can act on, not only analytics.
- Try before committingWhether a business can learn something real before paying for a subscription.
- Traditional SEO suiteKeyword research, rank tracking, site audits, backlinks.
- Keyword researchA keyword database and research workflow.
- Backlink databaseA link index and link analysis.
- Content productionWriting, briefs and on-page optimisation.
- Technical auditingCrawling and technical site health.
- Multi-client dashboardsManaging many sites or clients in one place.
- Enterprise integrationsAPIs, warehouses and BI connectors.
- Prompt managementBuilding and maintaining a tracked prompt set at scale.
- Intended customerWho the vendor says the product is for.
- Public pricingWhether prices are published, so a buyer can size a plan before a sales call.
The shortlist
Grouped by what each one is, not by a score
These products are not substitutes for each other. They are grouped by the kind of tool they are, so you can see which group you are actually shopping in. There is no ranking, no rating and no paid placement.
Recommendation-first intelligence
Large-scale AI analytics
Monitors in more than 30 languages and more than 150 regions, reports citations, sentiment and accuracy issues, and hands briefs to agents that research, write and publish into a connected CMS.
Read the Profound comparisonBest for governed AEO across brands and marketsAthenaHQMeasures presence, mentions, citations and sentiment across the models on the plan, ranks the opportunities and routes each gap into a content, outreach or commerce workflow, with SSO, an audit log and a free starting tier.
Read the AthenaHQ comparisonBest for source analytics against named competitorsPeec AIReports which URLs and domains AI engines access and cite, classifies each source, and ranks by Gap Score the sources where competitors are cited and the brand is not. Plans are published and users are unlimited.
Read the Peec AI comparisonEnterprise search platforms
Lightweight AI monitoring
Describes itself as a full-stack AEO platform running research, monitor, act and measure as one loop, with every plan carrying a monthly quota of optimisation actions and attribution through analytics and CRM.
Read the Goodie AI comparisonBest for AEO analytics at a low entry priceOtterly AITracks mentions, share of voice, average rank, sentiment and every cited URL for the prompts you choose, with a public API, an MCP server that exposes raw response runs and published plans from a low monthly figure.
Read the Otterly AI comparisonThe platforms
What each one is, and who it fits
GetRanked AI
GetRanked AI is AI Recommendation Intelligence: one clear verdict per business, across as many websites as you run. Enter a website and it measures how leading AI assistants respond when prospective customers are looking for a business like yours, then reports an AI Trust Score, the Recommendation Gap, Competitor Capture and Evidence Coverage with a prioritised list of fixes in plain English.
Fits: Owners and marketing leads who want the answer to one question rather than an AEO programme to run.
Worth knowing: It is not an AEO platform: no prompt sets, no content production, no workflows and one report per website. Ongoing plans are listed on the pricing page but are not yet open for self-serve purchase.
Goodie AI
Goodie AI describes itself as a full-stack AEO platform built on a research, monitor, act and measure loop. It tracks citation frequency, position, sentiment and share of voice across the models on the plan, and its Optimization Hub produces prioritised recommendations with an estimated visibility lift. Brand Command is described as showing whose story wins the recommendation instead of yours.
Fits: Enterprise marketing teams and agencies with the capacity to work an action list every month and a need for revenue attribution.
Worth knowing: Plans are priced per brand and start with a demo above the entry tier, and the billing cadence of the agency plan differed between two reads of the pricing page.
Profound
Profound is an answer engine optimisation platform with marketing agents on top. Answer Engine Insights reports how often a brand appears in AI answers with citations, sentiment and FactCheck accuracy issues, across more than 30 languages and more than 150 regions. Aim produces briefs and hands them to agents that draft and publish into a connected CMS.
Fits: AEO, content and PR teams and agencies running the work as an ongoing programme across engines and markets.
Worth knowing: Only yearly-billed rates were visible on the pricing text read, and the entry plan covers one engine.
Conductor
Conductor is an enterprise platform that measures AI and search visibility together and connects it to traffic, conversions and revenue. It tracks mentions, citations and sentiment in answer engines, compares AI market share against configured competitors, monitors sites around the clock for AEO and SEO issues, and exposes data through an API, an MCP server and agents.
Fits: Enterprise content, SEO and IT teams that need governance, integrations and one supplier.
Worth knowing: No numeric prices were shown on the pricing page when it was read, and what one AI Search Credit buys is not defined there.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ measures AI search visibility for enterprise teams and turns the gaps into governed action. It reports presence, mentions, citations, sentiment and competitive movement, traces each result back to the sources and claims behind it, then ranks opportunities and routes them into content, outreach or commerce workflows.
Fits: Enterprise and agency teams managing several brands or markets who need SSO, an audit log and multi-region support.
Worth knowing: Pricing is credit based, where one credit is one AI response, and extra credits and API access are paid add-ons on the entry paid tier.
Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI collects actual responses from major AI platforms and reports share of answer, position, sentiment and citations, filtered by topic, persona, model and region, with competitor share of voice. Its Agent Experience Platform intercepts AI retrieval bots at the CDN layer and serves them a simplified version of each page.
Fits: Marketing teams that want persona and region segmentation, and site teams that want control over what AI bots read.
Worth knowing: Its FAQ page and its pricing page disagreed on plan names and trial terms, so the pricing page was treated as authoritative.
Peec AI
Peec AI is AI search analytics. It tracks visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice for the prompts you set up, across the active models and countries, and its source analytics reports which URLs and domains AI cites, ranking by Gap Score the sources where competitors appear and you do not. Peec Actions turns that into opportunity-scored next steps.
Fits: SEO and marketing teams that want measurement they can export, and agencies that want isolated client workspaces without per-seat fees.
Worth knowing: Plans were displayed in euros when the pricing page was rendered, and per-plan country, language and competitor limits could not be read reliably.
Otterly AI
Otterly AI tracks brand mentions, share of voice, average rank, net sentiment and every cited URL for the prompts you choose, then queues on-page and off-page actions per engine ranked by impact. Its citation tracking records which rival an answer names instead of you, and a public API, MCP server and Looker Studio connector open the data up.
Fits: Small teams, agencies and technically minded owners who want AEO analytics without an enterprise commitment.
Worth knowing: Four engines are included on the entry plan and three more are sold as paid add-ons, with the add-on prices only captured as a range.
The buying question
Which of these is built around the recommendation outcome?
Read from each vendor's own pages on the date shown on its comparison page. "Not publicly advertised" means the pages we read do not mention it, not that the capability is absent.
| Product | Recommendation outcome | Starts from your business | Recommendation Gap | Competitor Capture | Competitor discovery | Evidence Coverage | What to do first | Plain-English verdict | Try before committing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goodie AI | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial | Yes | Partial | Not publicly advertised |
| Profound | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Different focus | Not publicly advertised |
| Conductor | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Different focus | Not publicly advertised |
| AthenaHQ | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes | Partial | Not publicly advertised |
| Scrunch AI | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Different focus | Not publicly advertised |
| Peec AI | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| Otterly AI | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| Writesonic | Partial | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| GetRanked AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Everything else
Broader platform capabilities
Broader does not mean better for every job. Several of these platforms are far wider than GetRanked AI, and where they are, this table says so plainly. GetRanked AI deliberately does not recreate an SEO suite: it specialises in the measurement above.
| Product | Traditional SEO suite | Keyword research | Backlink database | Content production | Technical auditing | Multi-client dashboards | Enterprise integrations | Prompt management |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goodie AI | Different focus | Different focus | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Profound | Different focus | Different focus | Not publicly advertised | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Conductor | Yes | Partial | Not publicly advertised | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| AthenaHQ | Different focus | Different focus | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Scrunch AI | Different focus | Different focus | Not publicly advertised | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Peec AI | Different focus | Different focus | Different focus | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Otterly AI | Different focus | Different focus | Not publicly advertised | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Writesonic | Partial | Different focus | Different focus | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial |
| GetRanked AI | Different focus | Different focus | Different focus | Different focus | Different focus | Yes | Different focus | Different focus |
Which fits which buyer
Match the tool to the situation
An owner who wants one clear answer
Run the free scan, then the Professional AI Report if the answer matters. You get whether the assistants recommend your business, which businesses they named instead, and what to fix, with no prompts to define.
An enterprise that needs governance and one contract
Both are sold to large teams. Conductor ties AI and search visibility to revenue with site monitoring and an API layer; AthenaHQ routes ranked opportunities into governed workflows with SSO and an audit log.
Those are analytics for a programme. The business-level question underneath is what the free scan answers.
A marketing team that will work an action list every month
Goodie AI puts a monthly quota of optimisation actions on every plan and connects visibility to traffic and revenue. Profound produces briefs and hands them to agents that draft and publish.
Run the free scan alongside it and you will know whether the presence you are tracking is turning into a recommendation.
An SEO team that wants analytics it can export
Both publish their plans and open the data up through exports, APIs and MCP servers. Peec AI leads on source analytics and Gap Score; Otterly AI adds technical audits and a low published entry price.
Keep it for the ongoing reporting, and use a GetRanked AI report when you need the verdict and the priority order.
A site team that wants to shape what AI bots read
Scrunch AI is the one product here that changes what AI retrieval bots receive, serving them a simplified page at the CDN layer while ordinary search crawlers keep seeing the normal site.
Those are analytics for a programme. The business-level question underneath is what the free scan answers.
Where GetRanked AI differs
Built for the moment a customer asks AI
AI Recommendation Intelligence is our term for measuring whether the assistants recommend one business when its customers are looking for one.
One business, not a prompt set
AEO platforms report visibility across prompts a team defines and maintains. GetRanked AI measures how leading AI assistants respond when prospective customers are looking for a business like yours.
Competitor Capture is discovered, not configured
You do not name competitors in advance. The report names the businesses the assistants recommend instead of you.
Evidence Coverage explains the why
The report shows what the assistants could and could not find about your business, so the fixes are about the evidence behind the answer rather than a queue of optimisation tasks.
Start free, buy once
A free scan and a one-off Professional AI Report for one website. No subscription is needed for either.
Questions
Questions buyers ask about this category
What is AEO?
AEO is answer engine optimisation: the work of getting a brand named, cited and described correctly inside the answers AI assistants write. It covers what your content says, which sources back it up, and whether the assistants can reach and understand any of it. Several vendors on this page use the term for their whole product.
What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
AEO and GEO are two labels for broadly the same work, used interchangeably by vendors and standardised by nobody. Conductor and Goodie AI lead with AEO, Otterly AI publishes GEO audits, and Profound calls itself an answer engine optimisation platform while measuring much the same things. SEO is different: it concerns where pages rank in a results list rather than what an assistant writes in an answer.
Which AEO tool should I choose?
Match the tool to the job rather than the label. For a monthly action loop with attribution, Goodie AI. For scale across engines and languages, Profound. For enterprise governance, Conductor or AthenaHQ. For exportable analytics, Peec AI or Otterly AI. For control over what AI bots read, Scrunch AI. For a plain-English read on whether assistants recommend your business, GetRanked AI.
Do AEO tools tell me what to fix?
Most of them produce some kind of action list, and the depth varies. Goodie AI, AthenaHQ, Peec AI and Otterly AI all describe prioritised or opportunity-scored recommendations on their pages, while Profound describes alerts and briefs. Each comparison page linked here records what that vendor's own pages state.
Does GetRanked AI do AEO?
Not in the way the platforms here do. It does not manage prompt sets, write content, run workflows or change your site. It measures whether leading AI assistants recommend your business, names who they recommend instead, and shows what evidence was missing, which is the read you would use to decide where AEO effort should go.
Do any of these tools guarantee AI will recommend my business?
No. Nobody can guarantee what a model will say. Every product here measures and reports, several help produce content or fixes, and the recommendation itself is still earned by the business.
How did you evaluate the tools?
We read each vendor's own pages on the date at the top of this guide and recorded what they advertise against nine buyer-relevant criteria. We did not hand out scores and we did not run paid trials of every product. Where a page does not mention something, the table says not publicly advertised.
Why is GetRanked AI in its own list?
Because we own this site and you should know that before you read a word of it. GetRanked AI sits in the table under the same criteria as every other product, and each comparison page linked here carries the sources so you can check us.
How current is this guide?
The vendor pages were read on the date shown at the top. Plans, prices and model coverage move quickly in this category; confirm on the vendor's site before buying.
Keep reading
Related guides and comparisons
Sources and trust
Every third-party claim on this page comes from the vendor's own website, read on the date shown, and is repeated with its sources on the linked comparison page. Nothing here is a paid placement and no vendor has been scored. GetRanked AI's own method is set out on the methodology page.
Vendor sources for every product on this page are listed on its comparison page: Goodie AI, Profound, Conductor, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, Peec AI, Otterly AI.
What this guide deliberately leaves out
- Any ranking of AEO tools against each other: the products are sold to different sizes of organisation and we did not test them under one protocol.
- A tidy definition of AEO as a settled discipline: the vendors use AEO, GEO and AI search optimisation for overlapping work, so the terminology is described as it is rather than cleaned up.
- Model and engine counts per plan for most vendors: the pages name models unevenly, several sell them as add-ons, and two vendors listed different counts on different pages.
- Case study outcomes, customer counts and review ratings printed on vendor sites.
- Semrush, Ahrefs and the other SEO suites: they report AI answers alongside rankings and are covered on the AI visibility guide and their own comparison pages rather than here.
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