What Are the Best AEO/GEO Tools Right Now?

Every few years a category appears that nobody had a budget line for twelve months earlier. This is one of them. In the last eighteen months a few dozen vendors have shown up promising to tell you what ChatGPT says about your brand, and most marketing teams we talk to are now paying one of them without being able to explain what they bought.

So we went through the main ones properly. Not only the feature grids on their own websites, but also their pricing pages, the add-on lists, the independent tests, and the research that says whether any of this is measurable in the first place.

The short answer first, because we know you're busy.

For agencies and in-house teams whose actual job is reporting AI visibility across brands, Etyma is currently the best value on the two things you touch every day: full engine coverage without an add-on tax, and source-level transparency. Profound is the stronger buy if you have server logs, an engineering resource and a budget to match. Scrunch if you are enterprise and want an execution layer rather than a dashboard. If you already pay Semrush or Ahrefs, start there before you add a vendor. And none of them solves attribution. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling.

Why this category exists at all

The best single piece of evidence is not from a vendor. Pew Research Center tracked the actual browsing behaviour of 900 US adults across nearly 69,000 Google searches and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, whereas 15% were clicking on them prior to the era of AI summaries. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in 1% of visits. Ahrefs, looking at 300,000 keywords, found a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview was present.

Here is the part most vendor decks leave out: that decline stopped. Seer Interactive's April 2026 update, covering 5.47 million queries across 53 brands, found organic CTR on AI Overview queries climbing from a floor of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026. More usefully, they found that when the AI Overview cites your brand, surviving CTR is roughly 2.1% compared to 0.9% when it does not.

That is the whole argument for this category in one number. The traffic did not vanish. It concentrated on whoever gets cited.

Adobe's data points the same way from the commercial end: AI-referred traffic to US retail sites was up 393% year-over-year in Q1 2026, and that traffic converted 42% better than non-AI channels — a full reversal from March 2025, when it converted 38% worse.

The market has priced this in. Adobe agreed to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion in cash. Profound raised $96M at a $1B valuation in February. Berlin's Peec AI went from a €7M seed to roughly $10M ARR in sixteen months. When an incumbent pays nearly two billion dollars to get into brand visibility measurement, the category is real even if half the products are not there yet.

The measurement problem nobody wants to lead with

Before comparing tools, understand what you are measuring. It moves.

Conductor ran 14,000 API calls across four models and ten industries. At purchase intent, out of every ten unique brands appearing across any two runs, only four showed up in both. Profound's own research found that 40–60% of domains cited in AI responses are completely different one month later for identical questions. And a 2026 preprint decomposing 12,933 responses found that brand identity explained just 1.5% of answer variance, while query language explained 26.5%. The reliability of any single answer sits near zero.

The operational conclusion is unglamorous: reliability comes from the frequency and breadth of sampling, not from a prettier chart. Daily collection across five engines beats weekly collection across two, and a tool that only tests English is measuring a fraction of your exposure. Judge these products on their collection design first and their dashboard second. Most buyers do the opposite.

The six criteria

Criterion	Who wins	Etyma's position
Engine coverage per euro	Etyma	Five engines on every plan, queried daily
Source-level transparency	Etyma (Peec close)	Source weight and relevance scoring
Multi-client agency economics	Etyma	One account, several clients, white-label reports
Demand-side prompt data	Profound, then Semrush	Weak — prompts are inferred, not observed
Bot logs and the agent layer	Scrunch, then Profound	Absent by design
Attribution to revenue	Nobody; Scrunch closest	Absent

1. Engine coverage per euro — Etyma

The headline price in this category is rarely the price.

Peec's self-serve plans let you pick three engines from seven; a fourth costs $35–165/month depending on tier. Otterly starts at a very attractive $29/month, but Claude is an add-on running $29–439/month by tier, and Gemini and Google AI Mode are extra too. Profound's $99 Starter tracks ChatGPT only. Ahrefs bundles Brand Radar into plans you may already hold, which is genuinely useful, but gives you 5–20 prompts per day below Enterprise.

Etyma tracks ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Claude and Perplexity on every plan, queried separately, every 24 hours, with the full answers stored. Given the variance data above, that design choice matters more than any individual feature. It is also the difference between a €200 line item and a €600 one once you have bought the add-ons everywhere else.

2. Source-level transparency — Etyma, narrowly

Knowing you are invisible is useless. Knowing which eleven domains the model built its answer from is actionable, because those are the pages you go and influence.

This is where the academic work earns its place. The original GEO paper from Princeton and Georgia Tech, published at KDD 2024, tested content tactics against generative engines and found quotation addition lifted visibility 41%, statistics 32%, and citing sources 27%, while keyword stuffing reduced visibility by 8%. That last result is the clean empirical break between SEO and GEO, and it means your source list is your work queue.

Etyma scores each answer for cited sources and ranks them by weight and relevance. Peec is genuinely close here, splitting "used" versus "cited" sources at domain and URL level, and we would call it a coin toss for a single-brand team. For an agency reporting across clients, Etyma's presentation is the one clients actually read.

3. Agency economics — Etyma

Most of these platforms were architected for one brand. Profound's single-account structure has no rolled-up multi-brand view, which reviewers flag consistently. Semrush's AI toolkit needs a separate $99 licence per domain, which is fine for one company and absurd for an agency with fourteen clients. Otterly has no multi-brand pricing at all.

Etyma runs several clients from one account, offers white-label reports on higher plans, bills in local currency, and needs no API keys, tags or code on the client's site. Setup is measured in minutes. If you sell AI visibility as a retainer line, that is the model.

4. Demand-side prompt data — Profound, clearly

Here Etyma loses, and it is not close.

Profound's Conversation Explorer draws on panel data from opted-in consumers — what people are actually asking assistants, with regional and demographic breakdowns. Nobody else has that. Semrush's Prompt Research brings volume, difficulty and intent from its keyword corpus, and Ahrefs offers a 475M-prompt database.

Etyma generates prompts from your description of your brand, market and competitors. That is inference, not observation. It is a sensible starting point and most teams edit the list anyway, but if your question is "what are buyers actually typing", buy Profound.

5. Bot logs and the agent layer — Scrunch

Scrunch's crawler analytics show which AI bots fetched which pages, with crawl-health and error detection, and its AXP layer generates a machine-readable parallel version of your site for agents. Profound's agent analytics read server logs with IP verification to filter spoofed bots. This is best in class, genuinely.

This matters more than it sounds. Adobe found only 66% of retail product pages are machine-readable. Etyma's zero-code promise is exactly why it cannot see any of this: nothing touches your infrastructure, so nothing observes your infrastructure. That is a real trade, made deliberately, and if your bottleneck is technical rather than editorial, buy the tool that reads logs.

6. Attribution — nobody

Scrunch's GA4 integration for AI referral traffic is the closest anyone gets, and Profound's log data gets you to the visit. None of them cleanly attributes an AI mention to a conversion. Do not buy on that promise, from anyone.

How we would actually buy

• One brand, learning the space: start at Otterly's $29 tier, and expect to outgrow it within a quarter.
• Agency or consultancy reporting across clients: Etyma, on the annual plan.
• Enterprise with engineering capacity and server logs: Profound for demand data, Scrunch for execution. Possibly both, which tells you something about the category's maturity.
• Already paying Semrush or Ahrefs: use what is bundled for a quarter before adding a vendor.

Whichever you pick, insist on daily collection, check whether it tests more than one language, and give it ninety days before you judge the numbers. In a system where only four of ten brands survive from one run to the next, a month of data is noise wearing a suit.

The prize has not changed shape as much as people claim. It is still about being the source the answer is built from. What has changed is that you can now measure whether you are.

Sources

• Pew Research Center — Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (22 July 2025)
• Ahrefs — AI Overviews reduce clicks by 34.5% (17 April 2025)
• Seer Interactive — AI Overview impact on Google CTR, 2026 update (24 April 2026)
• Adobe — AI traffic surge and machine-readability of retail sites (16 April 2026)
• CNBC — Adobe to acquire Semrush for $1.9bn (19 November 2025)
• Fortune — Profound raises $96M at a $1B valuation (24 February 2026)
• TNW — Peec AI in talks at a $200M valuation (29 June 2026)
• Conductor — AI recommendation consistency analysis (17 July 2026)
• Profound — AI search volatility research (17 July 2025)
• Żatuchin — Variance-components decomposition of non-determinism in LLM brand answers, arXiv preprint (14 July 2026)
• Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024
• Vendor pricing pages: Peec, Otterly, Profound, Scrunch, Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Etyma