11 Best Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Software in 2026

The best answer engine optimization (AEO) software in November 2026 is Orchly, Profound, AirOps, Writesonic and AthenaHQ, with Scrunch, Search Atlas, Frase, Semrush, Goodie and Conductor worth a look for narrower jobs. We judged all 11 on what they do after tracking: content briefs and refreshes, on-page and technical fixes, citation outreach and agents, and whether that work runs on its own or waits for your team.

Most AI visibility tools stop at a report that ChatGPT skipped you. The tools below go further, and the table shows how far, with price, engines and refresh rate for the plan that includes the optimization features. Prices checked in November 2026.

AEO software compared

AEO software compared, from each vendor's pricing page and docs, checked November 2026. Monthly billing unless noted. Engines are for the plan in the price column.

Tool	Starting price	AI engines on that plan	Tracking refresh	Optimization features	Acts on findings automatically
Orchly	$49/month	ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, with Gemini, AI Mode, Claude, Grok and Copilot as add-ons; also tracks Meta AI and DeepSeek+5 add-ons	Daily	Content briefs, new articles and refreshes; ranked technical fixes; backlink, citation and Reddit outreach; agents	Yes, agents run on a schedule (approval optional)
Profound	Custom (Enterprise); free 7-day trial	Trial: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews; Enterprise: 9 enginesEnterprise: 9	Daily	Agents draft and refresh content, write outreach and publish to your CMS	Yes, agents run on schedules or triggers
AirOps	Free Solo; Pro price on request	Solo: ChatGPT only; Pro: 7+ answer enginesPro: 7+	Not published	Agent workflows that write, refresh and publish; Offsite placements	Partly, with review steps in an Inbox
Writesonic	$79/month billed yearly	ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews	Daily	AI articles, site audits with automatic fixes; Action Center and outreach drafts from Growth	Partly: audit fixes; actions are a trial on Growth
AthenaHQ	Free; Starter $295/month	Free plan: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot; Starter: 11 models	Not published	Content optimization agent, on-page and off-page actions, Shopify Shopping Pages	Partly, agent from Starter
Scrunch	$250/month	ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot	Daily for 14 days, then every 72 hours	Site audits, 1 page optimization a month; AXP on Enterprise	Partly: AXP serves AI agents on Enterprise
Search Atlas	$99/month; AI tracking from $199	Growth: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode	Not published	OTTO deploys technical and on-page fixes; Content Genius articles	Yes, OTTO deploys fixes (approval mode optional)
Frase	$39/month billed yearly	ChatGPT, Google AI	Daily	Agent writes and refreshes, Content Guard decay alerts, site audit, backlink prospects with drafted emails	Partly, the agent works on request
Semrush	$99/month per domain, billed yearly	ChatGPT Search, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini	Daily prompt tracking; weekly Brand Performance	Recommendations and AI Search Site Audit	No, recommendations only
Goodie	$295/month	ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, AI Mode, Copilot	Daily	Content, outreach, technical and social agents; 50 actions a month	Partly, agents spend monthly action credits
Conductor	Custom	AI search tracking from Growth: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Grok, Copilot, PerplexityFrom Growth	Not published	Writing Assistant, content scores, internal link suggestions, website monitoring	No

1. Orchly: best AEO software with agents that run the optimizing on their own

Orchly is an agentic AI search optimization platform that tracks your brand in AI answers every day and runs agents that do the AEO work on their own: content, technical fixes and outreach.

It reads answers from the engines' real interfaces rather than through APIs. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are included on every plan, with Gemini, Google AI Mode, Claude, Grok and Microsoft Copilot as paid add-ons, and it also tracks Meta AI and DeepSeek.

The agents run on a schedule, without being asked. They analyze your AI visibility, your competitors, your SEO and your Search Console and GA4 data, decide what to write and which pages to refresh, and do it in your brand voice. They keep Brand Brain up to date, find the sites, people and Reddit threads worth reaching, run the outreach and draft the replies, and audit your site with the fixes ranked. You decide whether each agent runs on its own or waits for your approval.

Most tools on this list give you a tracker plus a to-do list, even when the list is a good one. Orchly's agents run the work end to end.

Content that answer engines can use

• Content Agent. Looks at the prompts you're losing and the pages slipping in Search Console, then writes new articles and refreshes existing pages.
• AI article writer. Drafts in your brand voice using Brand Brain, your stored facts about products, pricing and audience, and publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Framer, Wix, Sanity or Ghost, directly or after your approval.

• Query fan-outs. AI engines run several related searches before answering. Orchly shows those fan-out queries, so your page covers what the engine actually looked up.

Technical AEO

• Site Health Agent. Audits your pages for technical SEO and AI search issues and ranks the fixes by priority.

• Page scores. Every page you track gets separate SEO, AEO and GEO scores, so you can see which ones aren't answer-ready.
• AI crawler tracking. On Pro, see when GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others crawl your pages, plus the real visitors AI sends you.

Off-site AEO

• Activation Agent. Finds the pages, Reddit threads and YouTube videos AI cites for your topics, drafts the outreach and the Reddit replies, and sends outreach from your own inbox, directly or after your approval.

Proof it worked

• Search Console, GA4 and AI visibility, side by side. See whether a refreshed page picked up AI citations, clicks and revenue. The Search Console integration puts that in one view.

Where Orchly falls short

• No schema generator or llms.txt builder. Google's guide says neither is needed for its AI features (more on that below), but some teams want them for other engines.
• Other engines cost extra. ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews are included. Gemini, AI Mode, Claude, Grok and Copilot are paid add-ons.
• No prompt volume estimates. Orchly suggests prompts from your market and site, but doesn't estimate how often each one is asked. Profound and Semrush do.

Orchly pricing

• Essential: $49/month for 25 prompts refreshed daily, 20 articles, 1 site and 1 user
• Pro: $125/month for 100 prompts, 50 articles, 3 sites and 5 users, with AI traffic analytics, custom agents and white-label reports
• Enterprise: custom, with a customer success manager
• There's a 7-day free trial, and yearly billing saves 25%.

See Orchly pricing or start a free trial.

2. Profound: best enterprise AEO platform

Profound is an enterprise AI visibility platform whose agents draft and refresh content, write outreach and publish to your CMS on a schedule or when a metric moves, which suits large brands with a team and a budget for a sales-led contract.

We tested it on the 7-day trial. Profound picked 50 prompts for our industry and we couldn't edit them, so the data showed us the product more than our own market. The trial runs ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews daily, with a small allowance of agent credits.

The optimization side is the agents. Profound's docs describe them drafting content for topics where you're losing ground and writing outreach to a source that repeats a wrong claim about you. They can start on a schedule, from a connected app, from a change on the web or when a metric crosses a threshold, such as a 10% drop in your Visibility Score.

Its Webflow integration shows how far that goes. An agent can save a refreshed page as a draft for review, or publish it on its own once you trust the pipeline.

Brands can only buy Profound through sales now. It removed its $99 and $399 self-serve plans in September 2026, the same month it raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation.

Key features

• Agents. Recurring marketing work run on schedules or triggers, priced in credits per run.
• CMS publishing. Agents create, update and publish CMS items, including a Webflow integration.
• Context Manager. Brand knowledge the agents draw on.
• Nine engines on Enterprise. ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, AI Overviews and Exa.
• Prompt Volumes and Agent Analytics. Demand estimates for prompts, and AI crawler visits to your site.

Where it falls short

• No self-serve plan for brands.
• The trial runs 50 preset prompts on three engines, and you can't customize them.
• No classic SEO toolkit for keyword research or rank tracking, so most teams keep an SEO tool next to it.

User reviews

Most of Profound's G2 reviews are already quoted in our other comparisons, so these are parts we hadn't used much.

“For content refreshes we can pick the newest models, which matters in our technical space.” (Source)

“The writing feature optimizes our articles for AI on its own.” (Source)

“Some features take a while to understand, and certain integrations could be more developed.” (Source)

Pricing

• Enterprise: custom pricing through sales, with up to 9 engines, daily tracking and agent credits for the team
• Agency Growth: a separate self-serve plan for agencies, with 400 credits a month per client workspace
• Trial: 7 days free, with 50 preset prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews

3. AirOps: best for building custom AEO workflows

AirOps is a content engineering platform where teams build agent workflows that research, write, refresh and publish pages, with offsite placement help, which suits content ops teams that want to design their own AEO pipeline.

We haven't used AirOps ourselves, so this section is based on its pricing page, product pages, docs and G2 reviews.

Its AEO work is mostly on your own pages. Agents research, create, publish and refresh content, and AirOps tracks every page they create or refresh. Where you want a check, agents pause, send the work to an Inbox and resume after someone edits or approves it.

Offsite covers the third-party pages and publishers AI engines cite. AirOps finds them and makes the case for a placement, your team reviews the reasoning, and AirOps measures the visibility change after the placement goes live.

The trade-off is setup. You build the workflows, usage is billed in tasks, and the free Solo plan only gives ChatGPT insights. Pro covers 7+ answer engines, but neither paid plan has a published price.

Key features

• Agent workflows. Research, drafting, publishing and refreshes, with review steps routed to an Inbox.
• Offsite. Ranks the publishers AI engines trust and supports placements.
• Content readiness scores. Readability, claim support and SEO/AEO checks before content ships.
• Brand kits and knowledge bases. 1 brand kit and 3 to 5 knowledge bases on Solo and Pro.
• CMS publishing to Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, Ghost and Strapi.

Where it falls short

• Solo tracks ChatGPT only, and Pro's price comes from sales.
• Workflows take real setup time before they pay off.
• AirOps doesn't publish how often its AI visibility data refreshes.

User reviews

“The opportunities section gives me plenty of content ideas, by prompt or by page.” (Source)

“We run content refreshes and offsite brand-mention workflows in AirOps, but we've caught wrong stats and product details before publishing.” (Source)

“Even with the required human review step, it still saves me time. Expect the first setup to take a while.” (Source)

Pricing

• Solo: free, with ChatGPT insights, 35,000 tasks a month and 1 user
• Pro: price on request, with 7+ answer engines, 100,000 tasks and unlimited seats
• Enterprise: custom task limits and custom agent builds
• Extra tasks on Solo cost $0.025 each.

4. Writesonic: best for AEO on a mid-size budget

Writesonic is an AI writing and GEO platform that tracks your brand daily, writes 15 to 50 articles a month, runs site audits and, on higher plans, ranks on-page, off-page and technical actions with outreach email drafts, which suits content teams that want tracking and writing in one tool.

We signed up and had tracking running within a few minutes. You pick topics, trim the suggested prompts, add competitors, and citation share starts filling in day by day.

The optimization tools split by plan. Every plan gets AI articles, site audits with automatic fixes and AI bot analytics. The Action Center, which ranks opportunities such as citation gaps by effort and impact, is a trial on Growth (5 on-page and 5 off-page actions a month) and only in full on Enterprise.

The off-page part works the way we'd want. Its docs show third-party pages that mention competitors but not you, with each page's domain rating, and a "Draft email" button for outreach. What held us back was the engine list. Self-serve plans track ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews only, and the prices shown are yearly.

Key features

• AI articles. 15, 25 or 50 a month, with a WordPress integration.
• Site audits. 10 to 50 a month, with automatic AI fixes on every plan.
• Action Center. On-page, off-page and technical actions, a trial on Growth and full on Enterprise.
• Citation opportunities. Pages that cite competitors, with drafted outreach emails.
• AI bot analytics and a Reddit data source on every plan.

Where it falls short

• Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Copilot and AI Mode are Enterprise only.
• Starter includes 1 user with no option to add more.
• Content optimization, GA4 and Looker Studio are Enterprise only.

User reviews

“Watching citations and mentions shift after schema or HTML fixes is a big help.” (Source)

“The drafts give me a structured start, but some statements need fact-checking, especially on technical topics.” (Source)

“You have to pay extra fees on top of tokens you already bought, which feels predatory.” (Source)

Pricing

• Starter: $79/month billed yearly for 50 prompts on 3 engines, 15 articles and 1 user
• Basic: $199/month billed yearly for 100 prompts, 25 articles and 2 users
• Growth: $399/month billed yearly for 200 prompts, 50 articles, 3 users, sentiment and an Action Center trial
• Enterprise is custom, with all 9 AI platforms. You can start free with no card, and there's a 7-day refund.

5. AthenaHQ: best for Shopify and e-commerce AEO

AthenaHQ is a Y Combinator-backed AI search platform with a content optimization agent, on-page and off-page actions and Shopify-synced Shopping Pages from its $295 Starter plan, which suits e-commerce brands that want AEO work tied to their catalog.

AthenaHQ asked us to book a sales call before giving access, so this section is based on its pricing page, release notes, docs and G2 reviews.

Starter is where the optimization starts. It adds the content optimization agent, on-page and off-page actions, brand voice rules, citation intelligence and smart robots.txt and llms.txt files. The Recommendation Engine and the ACE citation engine sit on Enterprise.

The e-commerce part arrived in August 2026. Shopping Pages build product listing pages from a reusable template, sync prices and variants from Shopify, and go live behind experiments so you can measure the lift before rolling them out.

Usage runs on credits, one per AI response. Starter's 3,600 credits a month cover about 10 prompts a day if each one runs on all 11 engines, and AthenaHQ doesn't publish how often its data refreshes.

Key features

• Content optimization agent. Drafts content fixes from Starter, with an advanced version on Enterprise.
• On-page and off-page actions from Starter.
• Shopping Pages. Product listing pages synced with your Shopify catalog and published behind experiments.
• 11 models on Starter, including AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral.
• Free Essentials plan. 300 credits on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot.

Where it falls short

• No plan between free and $295 a month.
• Credits go fast across 11 engines.
• The Recommendation Engine, ACE, personas and SSO are Enterprise only.

User reviews

AthenaHQ's G2 reviews are all five stars, arrived in batches, and are mostly quoted in our other comparisons already, so we've kept to two.

“Other tools gave us charts and left us guessing. The Action Center says which content to create or update, and why it matters.” (Source)

“There are no industry templates pre-loaded, so we set up every tracked query from scratch.” (Source)

Pricing

• Essentials: free, with 300 credits on 5 engines
• Starter: $295/month for 3,600 credits a month on 11 engines, 17% off yearly
• Enterprise: custom credits, the Recommendation Engine and ACE
• API access and extra credits are paid add-ons on Starter.

6. Scrunch: best for AI crawler experience

Scrunch is an AI customer experience platform, owned by Sitecore since June 2026, that pairs AI visibility tracking with site audits, page optimizations and, on Enterprise, AXP, which serves AI agents a version of your pages built for them, so it suits technical teams at larger brands.

We used Scrunch on the 7-day trial. Onboarding is guided. Scrunch drafts a brand description from your site, you confirm it, add competitors, a persona and topics, and start from suggested prompts.

The data is detailed, and the Explorer lets you dig into each answer and its sources. New prompts run daily for 14 days, then every 72 hours, and you can trigger a fresh run by hand.

On the optimization side, Core includes 5 site audits and 1 page optimization a month, and Agent Traffic shows AI bot visits from your CDN or host. AXP, which detects AI agents and serves them a lighter, structured version of each page while people see your normal site, is Enterprise only. Scrunch doesn't write articles or run outreach.

Key features

• AXP (Agent Experience Platform). AI-ready versions of your pages served to AI agents, on Enterprise.
• Site audits and page optimizations. 5 audits and 1 page optimization a month on Core.
• Agent Traffic. AI bot visits from your CDN or host.
• Personas and the Explorer. Filter answers by persona and dig into every source.
• GA4 AI referrals. AI-referred visits next to visibility.

Where it falls short

• AXP, Claude, Gemini, AI Mode, the API and MCP are Enterprise only.
• Data refreshes every 72 hours once a prompt is two weeks old.
• No content writing or outreach.

User reviews

Most Scrunch G2 reviews are already quoted in our other comparisons, and it has none on Capterra or TrustRadius, so we've kept this to two.

“What I pull out of Scrunch has shaped a lot of our content strategy for showing up in LLMs.” (Source)

“I'd like more help with prompt research in the platform, and the agent traffic tool is difficult to connect to our clients' CMS.” (Source)

Pricing

• Core: $250/month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses and 5 users on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot
• Enterprise: custom, with 9 engines, custom prompts, AXP, API and SSO
• There's a 7-day free trial on Core.

7. Search Atlas: best for automated on-page fixes

Search Atlas is an all-in-one SEO platform whose OTTO agent deploys technical and on-page fixes to your live site through a pixel, with LLM Visibility tracking from the Growth plan, which suits lean teams and agencies that want fixes applied for them.

We haven't used Search Atlas, so this section is based on its pricing page, feature pages, archived copies and Capterra and Trustpilot reviews.

OTTO is the reason it's on this list. You add a pixel, it scans the site and, in Search Atlas's words, "runs on autopilot and deploys optimizations on its own." If you want to sign off first, you switch on approval mode, and changes stay live even after you cancel.

That saves a small team hours, but a script editing live pages is a hard sell for a cautious dev team. AI tracking starts on Growth at $199 with 100 queries on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode, and Pro at $399 adds Copilot, Perplexity and Claude. Every tool draws on one pool of Universal Credits.

Key features

• OTTO SEO. Technical and on-page fixes, schema and internal links deployed through a pixel, with optional approval mode.
• LLM Visibility. Mentions, position in AI answers, sentiment and share of voice.
• Content Genius. AI articles and content edits.
• Atlas Agent. A conversational agent across the platform.
• White-label reporting from Pro.

Where it falls short

• No AI tracking on Starter, and three engines on Growth.
• It doesn't say how often LLM Visibility refreshes.
• Trustpilot holds it at 3.9 from 352 reviews, with billing and cancellation complaints among them.

User reviews

“OTTO handles a huge share of our technical SEO and on-page fixes almost on autopilot, which frees up hours every week.” (Source)

“It's a tool, not a magic button. If you treat it as set-and-forget, you won't get results.” (Source)

“Automation sometimes broke site functionality, and schema implementations were incorrect or duplicated, which made more cleanup than value.” (Source)

Pricing

• Starter: $99/month for 1 project and 1 seat, with no AI tracking
• Growth: $199/month for 3 seats and 100 AI queries on 3 engines
• Pro: $399/month for 5 seats, 6 AI platforms and white label
• Agency: from $999/month. Every self-serve plan has a 7-day trial.

8. Frase: best budget AEO content tool

Frase is a content research and optimization platform with an AI agent that researches, writes, scores and publishes pages, Content Guard alerts for decaying pages and daily AI visibility tracking from $39 a month billed yearly, which suits small content teams on a budget.

We haven't used Frase ourselves, so this section is based on its pricing page, changelog and Capterra and Trustpilot reviews.

Frase was rebuilt in early 2026. You ask the agent for what you want in plain words, and it researches, drafts, scores the draft for SEO and GEO and can publish it, including to Wix and its own FraseCMS.

The AEO additions keep coming. September 2026 brought a rebuilt site audit and Backlinks, which finds outreach prospects and drafts the email for you. In October, AI Visibility was rebuilt with a Recommendations tab, sentiment and location tracking.

The cheaper plans are light on engines. Starter tracks ChatGPT and Google AI only, Perplexity arrives on Professional, and Claude and Gemini need the $239 Scale plan.

Key features

• Frase agent. Research, briefs, drafts and optimization from plain-language requests.
• SEO and GEO scores on every draft.
• Content Guard. Watches 10 to 300 live pages for decay, depending on plan.
• Backlinks. Outreach prospects with a drafted email.
• AI Visibility. 20, 50 or 75 prompts tracked daily, with recommendations since October 2026.

Where it falls short

• Starter tracks only ChatGPT and Google AI.
• AI crawler monitoring starts on Professional.
• The agent works when you ask it to, and lifetime-deal customers were moved to a legacy app.

User reviews

Most recent Frase reviews on Trustpilot are already quoted in our other comparisons, so these are the ones we'd quoted least.

“Using its API and MCP server, we built competitor comparison pages that ranked quickly in Google and in LLMs.” (Source)

“It gives us good AEO visibility and suggestions on what to improve.” (Source)

“It still feels unfinished, and the AI writer repeats text.” (Source)

Pricing

• Starter: $39/month billed yearly ($49 monthly) for 1 seat, 10 articles and 20 prompts on ChatGPT and Google AI
• Professional: $103/month billed yearly ($129 monthly) for 3 seats, 40 articles and 50 prompts, adding Perplexity
• Scale: $239/month billed yearly ($299 monthly) for 5 seats, 100 articles and 75 prompts, adding Claude and Gemini
• Every plan has a 7-day free trial with no card. Enterprise is custom.

9. Semrush: best for technical AEO audits

Semrush is an SEO suite whose AI Visibility Toolkit adds prompt research, daily prompt tracking, brand recommendations and an AI search site audit, which suits teams that already run their SEO in Semrush and want AEO diagnosis next to it.

We used the AI Visibility Toolkit ourselves. We liked the AI Visibility Score out of 100, which is easy to explain to a manager, but 25 prompts per domain went fast.

Its optimization help is diagnosis. The AI Search Site Audit checks whether robots.txt blocks AI crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and Perplexity's bot, and flags missing schema, crawlable navigation, internal links and llms.txt. Brand Performance adds AI-generated recommendations for your positioning.

You still do the work yourself. The toolkit doesn't write content, change pages or run outreach, though the SEO Writing Assistant and the rest of the suite sit one tab away.

Key features

• AI Search Site Audit. AI crawler blocks in robots.txt, plus schema, internal linking and llms.txt checks.
• Prompt Research. Volume and intent from a database of 317 million+ prompts.
• Prompt Tracking. Daily on ChatGPT Search, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini.
• Brand Performance. Share of voice, sentiment and narratives, with recommendations.

Where it falls short

• Recommendations only. Nothing gets written or fixed for you.
• 25 prompts per domain, and each extra domain costs another $99.
• No standalone free trial of the toolkit.

User reviews

Few Semrush reviews are about its AI tools, and we've quoted both of these before, so we've kept to two.

“It shows us where we're losing ground to competitors, and the AI Visibility score gives our AEO work a direction.” (Source)

“The recommendations are useful but sometimes too high-level. I'd like specific next steps and more prompts on the entry tier.” (Source)

Pricing

• AI Visibility Toolkit: $99/month per domain, billed annually, for 25 prompts
• Extra prompts: 50 more for $60/month
• Semrush One: from $199/month with 50 prompts, or $299 for Pro+ with 100

10. Goodie: best for retail and commerce AEO

Goodie is an AEO platform for e-commerce and retail brands with content, outreach, technical and social agents that spend monthly action credits, plus SKU-level tracking on Pro, which suits mid-market brands that want optimization work and a strategist from $295 a month.

We haven't used Goodie ourselves, so this section is based on its pricing and product pages, archived copies of them and G2 reviews.

Core dropped from $399 to $295 a month in October 2026. It covers 110 prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, AI Mode and Copilot, tracked daily, with unlimited seats, 50 optimization actions a month and a 30-minute strategist call.

The agents are the AEO part. Goodie lists an AEO content writer, an outreach agent, a technical agent that repairs llms.txt files and sitemaps, and a social agent. The retail pieces sit higher up, with SKU tracking on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, Alexa and Walmart's Sparky from Pro at $999.

Key features

• Agents. AEO content writer, outreach, technical (llms.txt and sitemap repair) and social agents.
• Action credits. 50 optimization actions a month on Core, 100 on Pro.
• Agentic commerce. SKU-level tracking on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, Alexa and Sparky, from Pro.
• Agent analytics. How AI bots and crawlers use your site.
• MCP server on every plan.

Where it falls short

• Core's strategist time is one 30-minute call.
• Gemini and SKU tracking start at $999 a month.
• Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, full revenue attribution and the API are Enterprise only.

User reviews

“Digging into the data showed us our gaps and our next steps straight away.” (Source)

“I'd like the new agent to be able to run scheduled tasks.” (Source)

“It's helped my business a lot. It's a little too expensive, but I think it's worth it.” (Source)

Pricing

• Core: $295/month for 110 prompts on 5 models and 50 actions
• Pro: $999/month for 250 prompts on 8 models, by demo
• Enterprise: custom, up to 14 models
• Core has a 7-day free trial, and yearly billing gives 2 months free.

11. Conductor: best for enterprise SEO teams adding AEO

Conductor is an enterprise SEO and AEO platform that puts AI search tracking, an AI Writing Assistant with content scores and round-the-clock website monitoring in one product, which suits enterprise SEO teams adding AEO to an existing program.

We haven't used Conductor ourselves, so this section is based on its pricing page, documentation and announcements.

Its AI Search Performance reports cover ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Grok, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity in more than 160 countries. AI search credits start on Growth with 2,500 a year, and Essentials has none.

The optimization side is content and site health. Every plan includes content scores, content profiles and internal link recommendations, the Writing Assistant drafts 60 to 600 articles a year depending on plan, and Website Monitoring watches from 100,000 pages. AgentStack opens Conductor's data to ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot through MCP and an API. We found no outreach tools.

On September 24, 2026, Chief Product Officer Wei Zheng became CEO, and Conductor said AEO would be its focus.

Key features

• AI Search Performance. Mentions, citations, share of voice and sentiment by engine, topic, persona and country.
• Writing Assistant. 60, 180 or 600 AI drafts a year, with content scores and internal link suggestions.
• Website Monitoring. Round-the-clock page monitoring with alerts.
• AgentStack. Conductor data inside your own AI tools through MCP and an API.

Where it falls short

• No published prices on any plan.
• AI search tracking needs Growth or Enterprise.
• No outreach, and it doesn't make changes on your site.

User reviews

Most Conductor reviews cover its SEO suite from before Conductor AI. This one, which we've quoted before, is about its AI data.

“I'd like deeper AI search data in the platform, and daily updates instead of once or twice a week.” (Source)

Pricing

• Essentials: price on request, with 60 drafts a year and no AI search credits
• Growth: price on request, with 2,500 AI search credits and 180 drafts a year
• Enterprise: custom, with 2,500+ AI search credits and 600 drafts a year
• Essentials has a free trial button, and Growth and Enterprise go through sales.

What actually works in AEO right now

Google's guide to its generative AI features (last updated July 10, 2026) says you don't need llms.txt or other AI text files, special schema.org markup, or content broken into small chunks to appear in Google's AI features.

It also says creating separate content for every variation of a search, to manipulate rankings or AI answers, violates its scaled content abuse policy.

So what does move the needle?

• Cover the questions people and AI actually ask. Use fan-out data to find gaps in your existing pages, not to spin up thin new ones.
• Get mentioned where AI looks. In Ahrefs' Perplexity data, Reddit and YouTube had the highest mention share among the 50 most-cited domains, at 21.6% and 20.8%.
• Keep pages fresh. AirOps' 2026 State of AI Search report (vendor research) found about 83% of commercial citations come from pages updated within the last year.
• Don't just chase Google rankings. Grow & Convert found about 60% of ChatGPT citations don't rank on Google or Bing for the fan-out queries.

The GEO paper from Princeton and others found that adding citations, quotations and statistics could lift visibility in generative engine answers by up to 40%. Note the "up to."

AEO vs SEO vs GEO

• SEO gets your pages ranked in search results.
• AEO gets your content used as the answer, in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and voice assistants.
• GEO is a newer name for much the same thing, focused on generative AI answers.

Most teams now do all three together, which is why tools that combine SEO data with AI visibility and the work that follows save a lot of switching.

How we picked

Every tool here helps you improve AI answers, not only track them. We checked each vendor's pricing page and docs in November 2026 and compared them on:

• Starting price, and which plan the AEO features need.
• Engines on that plan, since many tools keep Claude, Perplexity or AI Mode for enterprise plans.
• How often tracking refreshes, from daily to every 72 hours, and whether the vendor says at all.
• Optimization features. Content briefs and refreshes, on-page and technical fixes, citation outreach and agents.
• Whether it acts on findings automatically, or hands you a list to work through.
• User reviews on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and TrustRadius.

Which AEO software should you choose?

• You want agents that run AEO end to end on their own, from content to technical fixes to outreach: Orchly.
• You're an enterprise brand with a budget for agents and a sales-led contract: Profound.
• You want to build your own content workflows with review steps: AirOps.
• You want tracking, AI articles and outreach drafts in one tool: Writesonic.
• You sell on Shopify and want AEO pages tied to your catalog: AthenaHQ.
• You have engineering help and want AI agents served a version of your site built for them: Scrunch.
• You want on-page and technical fixes deployed for you: Search Atlas.
• You're on a tight budget and mainly need content: Frase.
• You already run SEO in Semrush and want AI diagnosis next to it: Semrush.
• You're a retail brand that cares about Alexa or Walmart: Goodie.
• You're an enterprise SEO team adding AEO to an existing program: Conductor.

For the wider category, see our list of AI search optimization tools.