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    The Best AEO Tools to Optimize Your Brand Visibility on LLMs

    Quotes in this category range from $29 to $2,000 a month and there is no way to tell from a pricing page whether the expensive one is ten times better. Here is the shortlist, the three kinds of product hiding behind one label, and what we would not pay extra for.

    Etyma Team
    September 8, 2026
    9 min read
    The Best AEO Tools to Optimize Your Brand Visibility on LLMs

    A friend running marketing at a mid-sized SaaS company called us last month with a very specific version of this question. She had a shortlist of four vendors, quotes ranging from $29 to $2,000 a month, and no way to tell whether the expensive one was ten times better or just better at selling. Her board had asked for "our AI visibility number" by the end of the quarter.

    We told her the number does not exist, which was not what she wanted to hear. What does exist is a set of tools that measure different things reasonably well, and knowing which of those things you actually need is most of the decision. Here is the shortlist we gave her, and the reasoning behind it.

    For what it is worth, her board was not wrong to ask. Adobe surveyed 5,000 US consumers this March and found 39% had used AI to shop, with 27% completing purchases through it, and AI-referred visitors generating 53% more revenue per visit than other traffic. The behaviour is real. It is the measurement that is immature.

    There is no single "LLM visibility"

    The models do not behave like one system, and treating them as one is the first mistake. Semrush's index of 126 million prompts found ChatGPT pulls an average of 15 sources into a response while Gemini uses 3. Over four months, only 36 brands managed to hold top-100 visibility across all four major platforms every single month. A brand can be everywhere in ChatGPT and absent from Gemini, and both statements are true at the same time.

    The sources differ just as much. Similarweb analysed roughly 600,000 citation events and found Wikipedia and Reddit together account for 25.1% of ChatGPT citations, whereas Google AI Mode's single most-cited domain is Fandom. If your plan is built around one engine's citation habits, you are optimising for a quarter of the market.

    There is a further distinction most dashboards blur, which is that being mentioned and being cited are not the same outcome. The same Semrush index found the overlap between brands mentioned in Gemini answers and the domains cited alongside them runs as low as 30%. You can be recommended without your site being the source, and sourced without being recommended. Only the first one sells anything, and only the second one is directly fixable by publishing.

    So the first thing a tool has to do is query each engine separately and show you each result separately. Any product that blends five engines into one composite score is hiding the only detail that tells you what to do next.

    Three kinds of product are wearing the same label

    "AEO tool" currently covers three different businesses, and most of the frustration we hear comes from someone buying one and expecting another.

    • Monitors. They ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, every day, and record what comes back: whether you appear, how you are described, who appears beside you, and which sources the answer was built from. This is the majority of the category and, for most teams, the right first purchase.
    • Execution platforms. They also touch your infrastructure: reading server logs to see which AI crawlers fetched which pages, or generating a machine-readable version of your site for agents. More powerful, more expensive, and they need someone technical to act on the output.
    • Bundled SEO suites. AI visibility added to a tool you may already pay for. Cheapest way in if you are already a customer, thinnest on prompt volume.

    Pick the category first. Comparing a $29 monitor with a $2,000 execution platform on price is comparing a thermometer with a boiler. And be careful with headline prices across all three, because the number on the pricing page and the number you pay for full engine coverage are rarely the same. Add-ons for individual models are where the margin in this category quietly lives.

    The shortlist

    Etyma — best for source-level monitoring and client reporting

    This is where we would start most teams. Etyma queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Claude and Perplexity separately every 24 hours, on every plan rather than as paid add-ons, and stores the full answer rather than a score derived from it. Each answer is then scored for brand presence, sentiment, competitor share and cited sources, with the sources ranked by weight and relevance.

    That last part is the reason it leads this list. The sources are your work queue. A visibility percentage tells you that you have a problem, whereas a ranked list of the domains the model actually read tells you which pages to go and influence this month.

    The practical points: nothing is installed, no API keys or tags, so you are collecting data the same afternoon you sign up. Several brands run from one account with white-label reports on the higher plans, which is why agencies keep it. Fourteen-day trial, no card.

    What it does not do: no server-log analysis, no panel data on what people are really asking, and no execution layer. It tells you where you stand and where to work. It does not do the work.

    Profound — best for demand data and bot analytics

    If your question is "what are buyers actually typing", Profound is the only one with a real answer. Its Conversation Explorer draws on panel data from opted-in consumers, with regional and demographic breakdowns, and its agent analytics read server logs with IP verification to filter spoofed bots. Both are best in class.

    The catches are structural. There is no rolled-up multi-brand view, which makes it awkward for agencies, and the $99 entry plan tracks ChatGPT only, so the realistic starting price is $399 and the enterprise conversation goes well beyond that.

    Peec AI — best citation depth for a single brand

    Berlin-based, and the closest competitor to Etyma on the thing that matters most. Peec splits sources into "used" versus "cited" at both domain and URL level, which is a genuinely useful distinction, and every tier comes with unlimited seats. For one brand and a team that wants everyone looking at the same screen, it is excellent.

    The limitation is engine coverage. Self-serve plans let you pick three engines from seven, and a fourth costs $35 to $165 a month depending on tier. Given how differently the engines behave, three is not a picture of your visibility, it is a sample of it.

    Scrunch — best for enterprise execution

    Scrunch is the clearest example of the second category. Alongside monitoring it runs crawler analytics with crawl-health and error detection, and its AXP layer generates a machine-readable parallel version of your site for AI agents while your human-facing site stays as it is. Entry is $250 a month annually, and the parts most people want sit in the enterprise tier.

    Buy it if you have engineering capacity to act on what it finds. Without that, you are paying for diagnostics nobody has time to fix.

    Otterly — best cheap start

    Otterly begins at $29 a month with fully public pricing, no sales call, and unlimited seats even on the cheapest tier. As a way to learn what this data looks like before spending properly, it is hard to argue with.

    Read the add-on list before you compare it with anything, though. Claude runs $29 to $439 a month on top depending on tier, and Gemini and Google AI Mode are extra as well. The $29 headline and the real cost of full coverage are different conversations.

    Semrush and Ahrefs — best if you are already paying them

    Semrush's AI toolkit is $99 a month standalone and brings something none of the pure plays have: prompt research with volume, difficulty and intent, built on its keyword corpus. Ahrefs Brand Radar comes bundled into plans you may already hold and carries a 475-million-prompt database behind it.

    Both are thin where it counts for a dedicated programme. Semrush gives you 25 prompts standalone and needs a separate licence per domain, which is fine for one company and painful for an agency. Ahrefs allows 5 to 20 prompts a day below enterprise. Use them to find out whether you have a problem, then buy something dedicated when you know you do.

    What we would not pay extra for

    Three features get demoed hard and deliver little.

    • Automated "optimization recommendations". In every demo we have sat through these came back as generic content advice that could apply to any company in any industry. The specific, useful version of this is the source list, which you already have if you are on Etyma.
    • Revenue attribution. Nobody has solved it. A critical survey of the field rates the evidence that AI citations predict clicks or conversions as very low confidence. Treat any dashboard putting a euro figure on a mention as decoration.
    • Sentiment scores with nothing underneath them. A number saying your sentiment fell from 7.2 to 6.8 is useless without the answers that moved it. Ask to see the stored responses, not the average.

    One question worth asking every vendor, which almost nobody asks: do you force web search when you run prompts? Research from Graphite found that forcing search shifted measured brand visibility by an average of 20 percentage points on prompts that rarely trigger search on their own. If the tool forces it and does not tell you, your whole trend line is an artefact of the measurement.

    So which one?

    For a single brand with a marketing team and no engineering support, Etyma or Peec, and the decision comes down to whether you need five engines or three will do.

    For an agency or consultancy reporting across clients, Etyma, because one account with white-label reporting is the difference between a service line and a spreadsheet exercise.

    For an enterprise with server logs and developers, Profound for the demand side and Scrunch for execution. Plenty of companies run both, which tells you how unfinished the category still is.

    For anyone still deciding whether this matters, spend $29 at Otterly for one quarter and look at the data before committing a budget.

    Then be patient with whatever you choose. Citation is more fragmented than the headlines suggest: Profound's analysis of 730,000 ChatGPT conversations found the top ten domains account for only 12% of all citations. There is no single page to win, no list to buy your way onto. It is broad, unglamorous work across a lot of surfaces, and the tool's only real job is telling you which of them to start with.

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