AEO and AI visibility tools compared

An AI visibility tool measures how AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity mention or cite a company. The tools fall into six kinds: search engines' own reports, web analytics, prompt trackers, prompt databases, one-time graders, and crawler logs with technical audits. Each measures a different part of visibility, and none sees every assistant's answers to every buyer.

This page describes what each kind can and cannot measure. Facts about each vendor come only from its own pages, as they read on September 27, 2026. The page does not rank tools or recommend one. AEO HQ sells audits, including a $499 automated audit, and other services; it does not sell a tracking tool, and this page has no affiliate links. AEO HQ's automated audit uses data from Ahrefs, one of the vendors below, as the methodology page describes. Prices are in the pricing index, and the metrics these tools report are defined in AEO metrics and KPIs.

Scope and definitions

The tools here are sold for answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of appearing in AI answers. The directory G2 treats the two as one software category, described as "Answer engine optimization (AEO) software, also known as generative engine optimization (GEO)" (opens in a new tab), and it listed 642 products in that category (opens in a new tab) on September 27, 2026. This page covers a sample of widely listed tools, named as examples of each kind. Inclusion is not an endorsement, and leaving a tool out is not a judgment of it.

• A prompt is a question sent to an assistant. A run is one answer to one prompt. An engine is an assistant or AI search feature, such as ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews.
• A mention is a company's name in an answer. A citation is a link to one of its pages shown with the answer.
• A consumer interface is the app or website people use. An API (application programming interface) lets software send prompts to a model directly. The two can give different answers: for the same queries, the API and the consumer interface shared only 12.0% (ChatGPT) and 14.8% (Gemini) of cited domains (opens in a new tab) (preprint; September 2026).

The six kinds at a glance

1. Search engines' own reports

Google and Microsoft report AI appearances to site owners from their own data, in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

• Google Search Console. Its generative AI performance report counts impressions of your links in AI Overviews and AI Mode, not clicks, and has been available to all websites since August 31, 2026 (opens in a new tab). Clicks from these features are counted with other Web search clicks and are not shown separately (opens in a new tab).
• Bing Webmaster Tools. Its AI Performance report shows total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries, and page-level citations across Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries, and "select partner integrations" (opens in a new tab). Grounding queries are the phrases the AI used to retrieve the content it cited. Its Citation Share metric, added in June 2026, does not expose competitor domains (opens in a new tab).

What they can measure. Appearances of your own site, counted by the engine itself. Google's guidance on third-party tools says that "Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data," (opens in a new tab) and that Google "strongly encourage[s]" (opens in a new tab) site owners to use Search Console.

What they cannot measure. Answers from assistants that neither company reports on, answers that name you without linking to you, and your competitors' results. Microsoft does not name the "select partner integrations" its report covers. How each figure is counted is set out under first-party metrics.

2. Web analytics

Analytics tools count visits that start from a link in an assistant's answer.

• Google Analytics 4. Its AI Assistant channel counts visits from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot, or Grok, and excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode (opens in a new tab), which count as organic search. Setup is covered in how to track AI referral traffic in GA4.
• Microsoft Clarity. It separates clicks on organic links (AIPlatform) from clicks on paid ads (PaidAIPlatform) within AI platforms' chat experiences (opens in a new tab).
• Add-ons in trackers. Several prompt trackers connect to analytics. Peec AI lists AI referrals, "Visits arriving on your site from AI assistants" (opens in a new tab); Profound's Agent Analytics offers to "Track AI-sourced traffic and attribution across your domains" (opens in a new tab); AthenaHQ lists a Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console integration "to connect AI visibility with site traffic" (opens in a new tab); Goodie lists revenue attribution and integrations with Google Analytics, Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools (opens in a new tab); and Ahrefs offers free Web Analytics that finds "the pages AI search already sends traffic to" (opens in a new tab).

What they can measure. Visits, and what visitors do next, for the assistants whose links carry a referrer.

What they cannot measure. Answers that produce no click, and visits that arrive without a referrer: traffic referred by Claude's native app does not include a Referer header (opens in a new tab) (network measurement). The numbers are small: 0.17% of the average site's visitors came from AI chatbots (opens in a new tab) in a February 2025 study of 3,000 sites (vendor study).

3. Prompt trackers

A prompt tracker sends a set of prompts to several engines on a schedule and records whether each answer names or cites you and your competitors. Profound, for example, says it "runs structured prompts across AI platforms, analyzing where and how your brand appears in responses, tracking citations, sentiment, ranking, and competitive presence" (opens in a new tab).

The table records what each vendor's own pricing or product page said on September 27, 2026. "Not stated" means the page we read did not say; the vendor may say so elsewhere.

HubSpot's tool is covered in detail in AEO for HubSpot users.

What prompt trackers can measure

For the prompts and engines you choose, a tracker can show how often answers name you, how often they cite your pages, which other sites they cite, and how you compare with a set of competitors. Many of the pages above also list breakdowns by country, language, topic, or competitor.

What prompt trackers cannot measure

• Prompts you did not track. Buyers word the same need very differently: 142 prompts written by people for one intent had a mean semantic similarity of 0.081 (opens in a new tab) (vendor study). A tracker's figures hold for its panel, not for every buyer question.
• Answers shaped by the buyer. A user's revealed identity significantly changed chatbot recommendations (p < 0.001) (opens in a new tab) (peer-reviewed). A tracker's standard prompts do not carry each buyer's own history or identity.
• What buyers see, if answers come from an API. Of the pages above, Peec AI marks several engines "API" (opens in a new tab) and aeoh says its agent "observes ChatGPT-style recommendations through OpenAI" (opens in a new tab). The other pages did not say whether answers come from the consumer interface or an API. Given the overlap figures above, ask.
• A stable daily figure. Peec AI defines an AI answer as "one chat result per model" and gives the example of 25 prompts on 3 models for 30 days making 2,250 answers (opens in a new tab), one per prompt, model, and day. Ahrefs says each prompt uses one check per platform, location, and update (opens in a new tab), so a day's result for one prompt on one engine rests on one answer. In one panel, the standard error of a brand's detection rate fell below 0.10 only at seven runs per prompt, and below 0.05 when daily runs were pooled over 24 days (opens in a new tab) (preprint). Read trends over weeks, not days.
• An error range. None of the ten tracker pages we read mentioned a confidence interval or margin of error for its figures.
• Revenue. Only through an analytics or CRM connection, with the limits described in section 2.

Plans cap the number of answers, so prompts, engines, and runs trade off against each other. AthenaHQ's Starter allowance of 3,600 credits a month, at one credit per AI response (opens in a new tab), covers, for example, 40 prompts on three engines once a day for 30 days, or 120 prompts on one engine (AEO HQ calculation).

4. Prompt databases

A prompt database is a large prebuilt set of prompts that a vendor runs for many brands, so you can see results without choosing prompts yourself.

• Ahrefs AI Visibility Index. Ahrefs describes it as covering 449 million or more prompts, of which 311,784,614 are for AI Overviews and between 30 million and 31 million each for Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot, with 14,448,221 for AI Mode (opens in a new tab). It says "Every prompt is modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs' keyword database" (opens in a new tab) and that the index is "Best once your brand already appears in AI search" (opens in a new tab).
• Prompt volume estimates. Profound offers "Prompt Volumes" to see what users are prompting AI answer engines (opens in a new tab); AthenaHQ offers numerical prompt volume estimates, with the example "XX,XXX searches on AI platforms for 'Athena' in last month" (opens in a new tab); and Peec AI scores the relative demand for the topic behind each tracked prompt from 1 to 5 (opens in a new tab). Of these pages, only Ahrefs said where its prompts come from.

What they can measure. A broad picture of which brands and sources appear across many generic prompts, with no setup.

What they cannot measure. Your buyers' own questions. A researcher at Ahrefs wrote that "it's likely that the terms people enter into Google might not be the perfect representation of what is entered in a chat platform. Unfortunately, AI platforms don't provide that data directly." (opens in a new tab) (vendor blog).

5. One-time graders

A grader gives a single, free snapshot. HubSpot's AI Search Grader is a free, one-time check of what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini say about a brand "based on their training data" (opens in a new tab). It says it currently queries GPT-5.4 mini (OpenAI), Perplexity, and Gemini, returns a result in under two minutes (opens in a new tab), and publishes its weights: sentiment up to 40 points, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10, and market competition 10 (opens in a new tab). Semrush and Ahrefs also link free checkers from their product pages: Semrush lists a free "AI Visibility Checker" (opens in a new tab), and Ahrefs invites you to "Preview your AI visibility for free" (opens in a new tab). We did not test these checkers.

What they can measure. How a few models describe a brand at one moment. Because HubSpot's grader reads the models' training data, it shows what the models remember, not what an assistant finds when it searches the web.

What they cannot measure. A rate over repeated runs, or change over time. Answers vary from run to run: it took about 1 in 1,000 runs to see two brand lists in the same order (opens in a new tab) in one study (vendor study).

6. Crawler logs and technical audits

These tools check whether AI companies' crawlers can reach and read your pages.

• Bot analytics. Peec AI lists crawl insights showing "Which AI bots hit which pages, how often, and the status code returned" (opens in a new tab). Ahrefs offers Bot Analytics to watch AI crawlers "when they read your pages and which ones they visit most," free while in beta (opens in a new tab). Profound's Agent Analytics connects to Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel, and WordPress, among others (opens in a new tab). OtterlyAI, Scrunch, and Goodie also list agent or bot traffic analytics (OtterlyAI (opens in a new tab); Scrunch (opens in a new tab); Goodie (opens in a new tab)).
• Technical audits. Peec AI's crawlability audit shows which AI bots your robots.txt "allows, partially allows, or blocks, across 40+ bots" (opens in a new tab). Semrush lists a site audit for AI readiness (opens in a new tab), OtterlyAI a Generative Engine Optimization Audit (opens in a new tab), and Scrunch five site audits a month on its Core plan (opens in a new tab). AEO HQ's own $499 automated audit also checks crawler access, and the methodology page lists its limits, such as checking only whole-site blocks.

What they can measure. Which crawlers and fetchers requested which pages, the status codes they received, and whether your robots.txt rules allow them. The difference between index crawlers and user-initiated fetchers is explained under crawler and fetcher requests.

What they cannot measure. Whether an answer used, cited, or recommended the page. Some crawlers cannot be identified by name: Brave's crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent (opens in a new tab).

What these tools do besides measuring

Several trackers also sell work as well as measurement. The pages we read list, for example, content writers and outreach agents (Goodie (opens in a new tab)), a content optimization agent and a feature that manages AI crawler access through robots.txt and llms.txt files (AthenaHQ (opens in a new tab)), page optimizations and content generation (Scrunch (opens in a new tab)), recommended and agent-generated actions (Peec AI (opens in a new tab)), and agents that "Research, write, report" (opens in a new tab) (Profound). HubSpot's recommendations and their projected "citation lift" are discussed in the HubSpot guide linked above.

Two trackers also follow advertising inside AI answers: Peec AI's ads library shows prompts "where AI answers carry a sponsored placement, and which advertisers appear" (opens in a new tab), and OtterlyAI lists ChatGPT ads tracking (opens in a new tab).

What the evidence says about such work:

• No platform validates it. Google lists services "Promising improvements for AI experiences and search formats (also known as 'AEO' or 'GEO' tools)" (opens in a new tab) among those to think critically about, and says of third-party tools: "They can't guarantee performance. Any predictions are their own and like predictions generally, may not happen." (opens in a new tab)
• Generic rewriting rarely helps. A 2025 benchmark of conversational SEO methods found statistically significant ranking improvements in only three of 54 cases (opens in a new tab) (peer-reviewed), and a 2026 review of 45 studies found that no reviewed technique shows a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability (opens in a new tab) (preprint).

Our recommendation: treat a tool's suggested changes as ideas to test, and judge each one against pages you did not change. AEO examples shows why that comparison matters.

How to compare tools

The questions in the measurement guide linked at the top of this page apply to any tool. The table shows which of them the pages we read already answered.

What the evidence shows and does not show

Antipatterns

An antipattern is a practice that looks helpful but fails or backfires.

1. Choosing a tool by its headline score. None of the tracker pages we read gave the formula for its score, and a score is defensible only when its weights match a stated objective (opens in a new tab). Instead, compare the rates behind the score.
2. Comparing numbers across tools. Tools differ in engines, prompts, runs, and how they count a mention. Instead, compare one tool's figures over time.
3. Reading daily changes as trends. A single run per prompt is a noisy estimate (opens in a new tab). Instead, read four-week windows.
4. Treating API answers as what buyers see. APIs and interfaces cited different sources (opens in a new tab). Instead, ask how the tool collects answers, and spot-check the consumer interface.
5. Skipping the search engines' own reports. Google encourages site owners to use Search Console whether or not they use a third-party tool (opens in a new tab). Instead, connect Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools before paying for a tracker.
6. Crediting a tool's suggestions without a comparison. Instead, track changed pages against unchanged ones.

Checklist

FAQ

What is an AI visibility tool?

Software that measures how AI assistants mention, cite, or describe a company. Most such tools send a fixed set of prompts to several assistants on a schedule and count the answers that name or link to you. G2 files them under answer engine optimization software, "also known as generative engine optimization (GEO)" (opens in a new tab).

What is the best AI visibility tool?

This page does not rank tools, and we found no independent study that compares their accuracy. The right choice depends on which assistants your buyers use, how many prompts you need, whether answers come from the consumer interface, how many runs each prompt gets, and whether you can export the raw answers. Use the comparison questions above.

Are there free AI visibility tools?

Some. HubSpot's AI Search Grader is a free, one-time check (opens in a new tab), Semrush lists its AI Visibility Checker among its free tools (opens in a new tab), and Ahrefs offers free Web Analytics and, while in beta, free Bot Analytics (opens in a new tab). Google's and Microsoft's own reports come with Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity count AI referral visits. None of these tracks a panel of prompts over time.

Do AI visibility tools use the real ChatGPT?

It depends on the tool, and most of the pages we read did not say. Peec AI marks some engines "API" (opens in a new tab), and aeoh says it observes ChatGPT-style recommendations "through OpenAI" (opens in a new tab). Ask each vendor, because API and consumer-interface answers can cite different sources (opens in a new tab).

How much do AI visibility tools cost?

Published prices, each linked to the seller's page, are in the pricing index. Price usually rises with the number of prompts and engines tracked.

Can a tool guarantee that AI assistants will recommend me?

No. Google says of third-party tools that "They can't guarantee performance" (opens in a new tab). A tool measures answers; it does not control them.

Should I buy a tool or hire an agency?

A tool measures; an agency or your own team does the work. How to choose an AEO agency covers the choice.

Does AEO HQ sell an AI visibility tool?

No. AEO HQ sells audits and AEO services. Its $499 automated audit is a one-time technical check with a small sample of one model's answers, not a tracking tool, as the methodology page explains.

Next steps

AEO HQ's Instant AEO Audit ($499) is a one-time, automated check of crawler access, key pages, and schema, with a five-question sample from one AI model. It does not replace a tracking tool or the search engines' own reports above.

Change log

• September 28, 2026: First published. Vendor pages checked on September 27, 2026.