9 Answer Engine Optimization Tools Compared by Price and Caps

A buyer asks ChatGPT before opening Google now, and that's usually the moment a one-product founder or the one marketer at a small SaaS gets asked whether the company shows up in AI answers. Answer engine optimization tools exist to turn that question into a number, but most of the pages ranking for this search won't tell you what the number costs. Profound's own roundup of nineteen AEO platforms never states a price for any of them, and its own product sits at number one on the list. TechRadar Pro's hands-on test does quote prices for seven tools, but the real bill shows up later, in the prompt caps, per-engine add-ons, and seat limits the marketing pages don't lead with.

Answer engine optimization tools track how often ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity mention a brand, then show which pages get cited. Entry prices start around $29 a month and top out near $2,000, and every plan caps the prompts, engines, or seats you get for that price.

Answer engine optimization tools compared by price and caps

Nine platforms cover the range worth knowing about, from $29 a month to roughly $2,000 a month before custom enterprise pricing takes over on several of them. This list covers dedicated AEO platforms only; the broader set of AI SEO tools for writing, optimizing, and tracking that also help with rankings and content sits in a separate comparison. The table below lists the entry price and the cap that usually forces an upgrade first.

HubSpot AEO

HubSpot AEO costs nothing extra for teams already on Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise, which makes it the cheapest real option here for existing HubSpot customers. HubSpot launched the tool in April 2026, built on technology from xFunnel, an Israeli startup it acquired in late 2025, according to TechRadar Pro's test. It tracks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini describe a brand and turns the findings into a prioritized task list rather than a bare visibility score. On Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise, that task list draws on real sales calls, support tickets, and site searches pulled from HubSpot's CRM. Buying the standalone plan instead costs $50 a month, or $45 a month billed annually, and the CRM feed disappears along with the case for the higher price; standalone also caps at 25 prompts a month. HubSpot also runs a free AEO Grader that needs no signup for a quick first look. The product is still in beta, and the content-creation side isn't finished: it recommends what to write, and producing it is still up to the team.

Mentions

Mentions fits an agency that needs to hand a client a finished report instead of a raw dashboard. It sets up faster than the rest of TechRadar Pro's test by scraping a domain, building a brandbook of offerings and competitors, and drafting starter prompts automatically. It tracks up to eight engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, and Google's AI Overview, more than any other tool here. The Starter plan costs $49 a month for 25 prompts across three engines; the $99-a-month Pro plan is the one that actually unlocks every engine. Business runs $199 a month for 100 prompts, and the $399-a-month Agency plan adds white-labeled reports, a pitch workspace for prospects, and unlimited client sites. Mentions watches and recommends, then leaves the writing and publishing to the team.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit only pays for itself if a team already runs Semrush's SEO suite, since the AI data sits right beside the keyword and backlink tools they use daily. It costs $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for one user, 25 tracked prompts, and five engines, plus an AI-readiness site audit that flags pages blocking LLM crawlers, according to TechRadar Pro's test. Daily prompt tracking runs on ChatGPT and Google's AI answers specifically. Add a teammate and that's another license; add domains or prompts and the bill climbs toward several hundred dollars a month, sometimes past a thousand. Buying the full SEO suite alongside it, Semrush One, starts around $199 a month. There's no standard free trial, though anyone can browse demo reports first.

Surfer

Surfer treats content creation as the main job and visibility tracking as the add-on, the reverse of most tools on this list. Its core content editor runs $99 a month for Essential, $79 a month billed annually, up to $219 a month for Scale, scoring a single draft against a Google SEO score and an AI search score as it's written. Tracking across five engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews, is a separate AI Tracker add-on at roughly $95 a month for 25 prompts, with daily refresh and sentiment reserved for higher tiers, according to TechRadar Pro's test. The AI-generated draft still needs real editing, and leaning too hard on the content score can make the writing read robotic. For a team whose bottleneck is producing content that has to rank and get cited at once, Surfer is built for exactly that job.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs Brand Radar needs zero setup: type in any brand and it shows AI visibility right away, because its prompts come from Ahrefs' own keyword database instead of a user configuring anything. It draws on more than 200 million real search queries, weighted by search volume, and shows how six AI engines answer, though Claude and Grok aren't among the six. Pricing runs $199 a month per engine, or $699 a month for all six bundled, on top of a required Ahrefs base plan starting at $129 a month for Lite, according to TechRadar Pro's test. That means tracking one engine costs at least $328 a month before any content or fix gets built. There's no sentiment analysis here: it shows whether AI mentions a brand, and nothing about how AI describes it.

Scrunch

Scrunch tracks a question the other eight tools skip: what an AI crawler actually sees on a page, and whether that visit ever becomes a customer. Its own pricing page lists the Core plan at $250 a month, covering 125 unique prompts, one brand workspace, five user licenses, five site audits a month, and four LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Copilot), according to Scrunch's pricing page. Enterprise adds five more engines for nine total, SAML SSO, API and MCP access, and a dedicated account team. A quote on that page attributed to Jessie Dawson, Senior Director of Web Strategy and Operations, credits Scrunch with a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts. Its most distinctive feature, the Agent Experience Platform, serves AI crawlers a compressed, machine-readable version of a page; Scrunch's own example shrinks a pricing page from roughly 124,000 tokens to about 1,300, as reported in TechRadar Pro's test. That feature is Enterprise-only and still in limited release.

AirOps

AirOps builds and publishes the fix itself instead of just flagging the problem, and that extra step is also why it costs more than anything else here once the free tier runs out. It starts with a free single-user tier; the paid plans then jump from a Solo plan around $200 a month to a Pro plan around $2,000 a month, with almost nothing in between, and billing is usage-based, charging per AI task, according to TechRadar Pro's test. Its Quill agent turns visibility data into a content campaign that runs, publishes to a CMS, and then tracks whether citations actually improved. It expects a team that already knows SEO, and setup runs in weeks, not minutes. For a solo marketer or small team, that combination of price and learning curve is hard to justify.

Otterly

Otterly's Lite plan is the cheapest usable entry point in this list, built for a solo marketer or small team making a first move into AEO. It costs $29 a month, or $25 a month billed annually, for 15 search prompts across four included engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, according to Otterly's pricing page. Standard runs $189 a month for 100 prompts, and Premium runs $489 a month for 400 prompts, with Enterprise starting at $1,000 a month. Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Claude aren't included on any tier; they're paid add-ons ranging from $9 a month on Lite to $439 a month for Claude on Premium. Otterly also offers a free trial for new users, per its own FAQ, and picked up a 2025 Gartner Cool Vendor nod for AI in Marketing, according to Profound's roundup. It has no real prompt-volume data behind its prioritization and no content generation built in, so it stays a monitoring tool.

Peec AI

Peec AI's own pricing page claims more than 3,000 brands and agencies as customers, and the product backs that up with one of the cleaner dashboards in this list. Starter costs $95 a month for 50 prompts and a choice of three tracked models across one project; Pro runs $245 a month for 150 prompts and two projects; Advanced runs $495 a month for 350 prompts, five projects, multi-country tracking, and a Looker Studio integration, according to Peec AI's pricing page. Every self-serve tier tracks only three of the six available models at once, ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini, and tracking a fourth costs an extra $30 to $140 a month depending on tier, billed annually. Enterprise removes that limit entirely, tracking up to 13 LLMs with API access and single sign-on.

How to choose

Most one-product companies don't need to buy anything until they've checked what's already free, and the free path covers more ground than the pricing pages above suggest.

Check what's already free

Google's Search Central documentation says a page needs nothing beyond standard indexing and snippet eligibility to show up as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode: "there are no additional technical requirements," and "specific optimization isn't required," according to Google's documentation, last updated 10 December 2025. The same documentation confirms that AI-feature appearances are already counted inside Search Console's Performance report, under the "Web" search type, so a founder can check today whether AI Overviews send any traffic before paying for a tracker.

Free citations count too: the research that introduced the term "generative engine optimization" found that adding citations, quotations, and statistics to a page, with no software involved, can lift its visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, though the effect varies by domain, according to the GEO study published on arXiv. Getting cited from other sites is part of that same work, and a reviewed launch listing is one cheap source of it. This post runs on bunny.directory, a launch directory where a submitted product gets reviewed by a person and, once live, keeps its dofollow link for as long as the bunny badge stays on the product's site. That kind of citation is free too, and it counts before any tracking tool gets a monthly charge. For the fuller zero-budget case, see Startup SEO for Founders With No Budget and No Traffic.

Start free, then pay for one seat

Otterly's Lite plan, at $29 a month, is enough to see whether AI mentions a brand at all before committing to more. Once that check shows something worth tracking daily, pick one paid seat that matches the actual job: HubSpot AEO if already paying for Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise, Mentions if the job is client reporting for an agency, or Surfer if the job is writing content that has to rank in Google and get cited by AI at the same time. A one-product founder deciding what to build around any of this can start with The SaaS SEO Plan for a One-Product Founder.

What's new (as of 2026-09-17)

• Profound published its own guide to nineteen AEO platforms on 28 July 2026. The word "pricing" never appears on the page; the only dollar figure is a banner about the company's $180 million Series D, per Profound's roundup.
• TechRadar Pro published a hands-on test of seven AEO tools with real per-tier prices on 30 July 2026, scoring each on tracking depth, setup time, insight clarity, ease of use, and value for money.
• Google's Search Central documentation on AI features was last updated on 10 December 2025, confirming that appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode requires nothing beyond standard indexing and snippet eligibility.
• Otterly, Peec AI, and Scrunch's own pricing pages were checked directly for this comparison on 17 September 2026; entry prices for the three ranged from $29 a month at Otterly's Lite tier to $250 a month at Scrunch's Core tier.

Key takeaways

• Entry prices for dedicated AEO platforms span from $29 a month at Otterly's Lite tier to roughly $2,000 a month at AirOps' Pro tier, according to the vendors' own pricing pages and TechRadar Pro's test.
• Google's Search Central documentation says a page needs nothing beyond standard indexing and snippet eligibility to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that traffic already shows up for free inside Search Console's Performance report.
• Prompt caps and per-engine add-ons decide the real bill more than the sticker price: tracking one engine on Ahrefs Brand Radar costs at least $328 a month once its required base plan is included, and adding Claude to Otterly's Premium tier costs $439 a month on its own.
• The research behind generative engine optimization found that adding citations, quotations, and statistics to a page can lift its visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, with no paid platform required.
• Profound's own roundup of nineteen AEO platforms never states a price for any of them, so checking a vendor's actual pricing page stays necessary before choosing between tools.

FAQ

Do I need a paid AEO tool to start?

No. Google's own documentation confirms that AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic already shows up for free inside Search Console's Performance report, so the first move costs nothing. TechRadar Pro's testing reaches a similar conclusion: a free checker is enough to confirm whether AI mentions a brand, and a paid tool earns its place once there's daily tracking, competitor comparison, or sentiment worth paying to watch.

Are AEO and GEO the same thing?

Not exactly, though most tools now use the terms interchangeably. Answer Engine Optimization is about becoming the answer an AI assistant gives directly. Generative Engine Optimization, the term introduced by the original GEO research paper, is about getting cited inside a generative engine's response. The two overlap enough in practice that TechRadar Pro's review treats them as one category.

Will AEO tools replace SEO tools?

No. Google has stated that optimizing for its AI features is still just SEO, using the same index and the same fundamentals. None of the nine platforms above work without a site that already ranks and gets crawled; they add visibility tracking and, on some tiers, content workflows on top of standard SEO work rather than replacing it.

What do prompt caps and engine limits mean on a pricing page?

A prompt cap is the number of tracked questions a plan allows before the tool stops refreshing new ones or charges extra, and it's usually the first limit a growing brand hits: Otterly's Lite plan caps at 15 prompts a month, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit caps at 25 prompts on one domain, and Scrunch's Core plan caps at 125. An engine limit works the same way for which AI systems get checked. Otterly includes four engines and charges $9 to $439 a month per extra one, while Ahrefs charges $199 a month per additional engine or $699 for all six. Compare both numbers, not just the headline price, before picking a tier.

If none of that fits the budget yet, run bunny.directory's free llms.txt generator before spending on anything else.