Best AEO tools in 2026: who each one is for

Search for the best AEO tool and you'll find a dozen lists, most written by one of the tools on them. This one is too: Keats wrote it. So it follows a few rules. Every fact about another company comes from that company's own page, read on 12 November 2026 and listed under Sources. Every tool gets a line on where it beats Keats. And the answer to "which one" depends on what you need to get out of it, so that's how the list is organised.

What changes when you buy one

All of these tools ask AI assistants your buyers' questions and count how often you're named. The differences are in what you can do afterwards:

• See it: a dashboard of mentions, citations and share of voice, daily or weekly.
• Fix it: recommendations, briefs or drafted content for the gaps.
• Prove it: a way to tell whether a change you made caused the movement.

Most tools do the first well, many now do some of the second, and few attempt the third. Measuring AI visibility explains why one answer per question isn't a measurement, which is worth knowing before you compare anyone's numbers.

The list, by who it suits

Profound: large brands with a security review. Up to ten engines on Enterprise, including Claude and DeepSeek, refreshed daily, with an AI Marketer that drafts content and SSO and SOC 2 on the contract. No public price; a free 7-day trial. Keats compared with it.

Peec AI: marketing teams that want daily analytics. Starter is $95/mo for 50 prompts on three engines you choose, with crawl insights, AI referrals, sentiment and an MCP server; the API starts on Pro at $245/mo. How it compares.

Otterly.AI: small teams and freelancers on a tight budget. Lite is €29 a month for 16 prompts with unlimited seats and brands, a 7-day trial with no card, and daily checks. The API and MCP start at Standard, €189 a month. The side-by-side.

Gauge: developer-tool companies that want content shipped. Growth is $599/mo for 600 prompts a day on ChatGPT, AI Mode and Copilot, plus 18 publish-ready articles a month sent to Webflow, Framer, Sanity or GitHub. It also evaluates coding agents. Read the comparison.

AthenaHQ: teams that want many engines, starting free. A free plan on five engines, then eleven engines at $295/month on credits, with Shopify, GA4 and a content agent. The API is an add-on. Compared with Keats.

Scrunch: B2B brands that think in personas. Seven engines on every plan, persona tracking, agent traffic and AXP, from $250 a month billed annually ($300 month to month). Owned by Sitecore since June 2026. Our page on it.

HubSpot AEO: teams already running HubSpot. $50/month per brand ($45 a month annually) for 25 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with a free trial and no card. On Marketing Hub it uses your CRM data in its recommendations.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: teams already in Semrush. $99/mo per domain, billed annually, for 25 prompts with daily rankings on ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, next to the SEO data you already have.

Rankscale: many engines for little money. Essentials is $20 a month (yearly only) for up to 480 answers across 17 or more engines with MCP; Pro is $99 for 4,800 answers, and the REST API arrives on Pro+ at $229.

Keats: teams that have to show the work paid off. Keats reads Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and both of Google's AI answers once a week, puts a noise band around every move, turns each gap into a card with a brief, and judges shipped work against control questions on days 21 and 35. Plans run from $49/mo to $399/mo; API and MCP access come with all of them, and there's a 14-day trial.

In one table

Entry plans as each vendor listed them on 12 November 2026.

How to choose

Start from the outcome you're accountable for. If it's coverage of every assistant, look at Rankscale, AthenaHQ, Scrunch or Profound. If it's a daily view for a marketing team, Peec AI or Otterly.AI. If it's content produced for you, Gauge or Profound. If you're already paying for HubSpot or Semrush, try their add-on before buying another tool. If it's a defensible answer to "did our AEO work pay off?", that's what Keats is built for, and proving AEO results shows the method so you can judge it, or apply it with any of the others.

Whichever you pick, the numbers are only as good as the questions behind them. Choosing the questions to track is the step to get right first.