AEO tools measure whether the AI engines your customers use name your business when buyers ask, what those answers cite, and how much of each answer competitors hold, with July 2026 pricing for Otterly.ai, Peec AI, Knowatoa, Trakkr, Semrush, and Profound.
By Heather Laskin · Published July 18, 2026
You did the AEO work. You rewrote service pages to answer real buyer questions, added schema markup, cleaned up your listings, and asked for reviews. Now the harder question: is any of it working? Your rank tracker will not tell you. Your analytics will not tell you. Answering "is it working" is the whole job of an AEO tool.
AEO tools track whether the AI engines your customers use name your business when buyers ask for what you sell. They also show which sources those answers cite, so you know what earns each mention and where competitors are taking share.
Answer engine optimization tools sit on the measurement side of AEO. A rank tracker watches a list of links. An AEO tool watches the answer itself. The good ones measure four things:
If a tool does these four things, you are looking at an AEO tool. Tools focused on fixing your site rather than measuring it belong to a different lane, covered in the GEO tools guide linked below.
Six tools cover the useful range, from a $29 entry point to enterprise contracts. Every price below is as of July 2026 and comes from the vendor's published pricing page.
Otterly.ai monitors where your brand shows up in AI search, tracking both mentions of your business and citations of your website. Lite runs $29 per month for 15 prompts across four AI engines, Standard $189, and Premium $489, with a 7-day free trial and no credit card required. The Lite tier is one of the cheapest entry points in the category, though you still interpret the prompt-level results yourself.
Peec AI tracks brand visibility, position, and sentiment in AI search for marketing teams and agencies, and claims 2,000+ marketing teams on board. Four tiers run from Starter up to a contact-sales Enterprise plan, and pricing is published on their site. A free trial is available, and the product assumes a team fluent in prompts and models.
Knowatoa monitors your visibility across up to seven AI search surfaces and opens with a free 60-second audit, no card required. Starter is $59 per month and Growth is $199 per month. A friendly option for small teams, though the positioning leans toward B2B and SaaS marketers more than local service businesses.
Trakkr watches how your brand appears across eight AI engines, tracks competitor rankings, and turns findings into a prioritized action list. Growth is $100 per month and Scale is $500 per month, with a 14-day free trial and no permanent free tier.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit adds AI measurement inside the Semrush suite: daily AI rankings for tracked prompts, AI competitor analysis, and prompt research. The toolkit is $99 per month per domain billed annually and covers 25 custom tracked prompts, with a 7-day free trial. Pick this only if your team already works in Semrush.
Profound anchors the enterprise end, built for large marketing, PR, and comms teams measuring up to ten answer engines. Starter is $99 per month for one answer engine and 50 prompts, and Growth is $399 per month for three engines, both shown as billed yearly, with a custom Enterprise tier above. The workflow assumes a staffed marketing team, not an owner with a spare hour.
A subscription is not the only way to know whether you show up. Three approaches work at zero or fixed cost.
Run manual spot-checks monthly. Write down 10 to 15 questions your buyers ask before they call, phrased the way a real person talks. Ask the AI engines your customers use those exact questions once a month. Record three things each time: were you named, what did the answer say about you, and who else appeared. Thirty minutes a month builds a real trend line for free.
Know what Search Console misses. Search Console reports impressions and clicks from traditional search results. When an AI answer names your business and the buyer calls without clicking anything, nothing shows up in your analytics. Zero-click visibility is exactly the gap AEO measurement exists to close, so treat Search Console as a partial view, not the scoreboard.
Schedule a professional audit. AIFindMyBusiness offers a free preview audit, and a $400 one-time AI Visibility Audit measures 50 real buyer prompts, scores your visibility 0 to 100, and delivers a competitor appearance report, a website readiness review, and a list of specific visibility blockers. For a local business without an in-house marketer, a periodic done-for-you audit replaces both the subscription and the spreadsheet.
Match the tool to who will read the reports.
This guide stays in the measurement lane. For every category of AI visibility software in one place, see the full tools comparison. For the tools doing the optimization work an AEO tool measures, see GEO tools. And if you want your number without buying anything, run a free preview audit. The best AEO tools earn their fee only after you know a gap exists.
See also: What Is AEO? and AEO vs GEO.