Add as preferred source on GoogleIf your US team calls it AEO and your European team calls it GEO, you have probably worked out by now that you are shopping for the same thing twice. So let's clear that up first, then look at what you should actually buy.
GEO, AEO or AI Search?
Right now there is no single term yet that everyone agrees on. Some say GEO, mostly in Europe. Some say AEO, mostly in the US. Some say AI Search, so they don't have to vote for one of the acronyms. In the end, all mean the same, so don't get confused by them.
It matters for one practical reason only. When you search for a tool, you will find different lists depending on which word you type, and the same five or six products keep showing up under all of them. So search for all three, then ignore the label and look at what the tool does.
How big this actually is
Graphite ran a study on how much of search has moved to AI. Using Similarweb data checked against Google Search Console, they found AI now accounts for 56% of the volume of traditional search engines worldwide, and 34% in the US.
Most people think it is much smaller because almost everyone measuring it counts web traffic only, and 83% of AI use happens inside mobile apps. Miss the apps and you undercount by four to five times.
At a glance
| # | Tool | Best for | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peec AI | The best all-in-one pick. Detailed analysis, solid data and clear recommendations you can act on, so you get from insight to impact fastest | $95/mo |
| 2 | Rankscale | The widest engine coverage per euro | $99/mo |
| 3 | AthenaHQ | Seeing your numbers free first, then having the tool draft the follow-up | Free, then $295/mo |
| 4 | Scrunch AI | Bigger brands who want a ready-made prompt library | $300/mo |
| 5 | Keyword.com | The cheapest possible way to find out whether any of this matters for you | $3/mo + $24.50 add-on |
Checked against each vendor's own pricing and documentation, 15 September 2026.
The one question to ask on every demo
You are going to sit through five sales calls and see five visibility charts. They all look the same, and they all go up and to the right in the deck.
So ask for something else. Ask them to pull up a question where a competitor got named and you didn't, then show you the exact pages the model read before it wrote that answer.
Here is why that matters. There are only two reasons you are missing, and they need completely different responses.
Maybe the pages the model read are other people's sites, and none of them mention you. Then your problem is that nobody writes about you, and rewriting your homepage for the fifth time will not fix it. You need coverage, reviews and mentions on other people's pages.
Or maybe the model read your own pages and chose not to quote them. Then your problem is on your site, and outreach is the wrong place to spend the money. You need those pages to say what you do in a way a model can lift a clean sentence out of.
A visibility percentage cannot tell you which of the two you have. The source list can, in about thirty seconds.
1. Peec AI
From $95/mo
The most complete answer here to the demo question above.
- Six engines on the cheapest plan: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Most tools at this price give you three or four
- Every cited page, sorted into five groups: editorial, corporate, UGC, reference, and your own site. You look at the mix and you know immediately which of the two problems you have
- A gap report naming the pages where competitors are cited and you are not
- Server-log reading through eight setups including Cloudflare and Vercel, so you can see whether AI crawlers are fetching a page before you spend time rewriting it
- Your AI traffic joined to Google Analytics
- Fact-checking against facts you supply, which catches models repeating retired pricing or old positioning
Peec has raised around $29M, including a $21M Series A led by Singular, and names Zalando, Hugo Boss, Squarespace and Wix as customers. Useful if someone senior asks who else is using it.
2. Rankscale
From $99/mo
If you want to watch as many engines as possible for as little as possible, this is your tool.
- Ten engines on every plan, more than 17 supported
- The full credit formula published, so you can work out what next quarter costs before signing
- Scheduling from hourly to monthly
- A site audit running 94 technical checks
3. AthenaHQ
Free tier, then $295/mo
Two of the founders worked on Google Search and DeepMind, and you can tell from how it handles retrieval.
- A free tier at 300 credits, enough to see your own numbers and win the budget conversation internally
- Eleven engines on every tier, including Meta AI and Amazon Rufus
- An agent that drafts the actual recommendations, on your pages and off them. If your team is short on people rather than short on data, that is the gap it fills
- Source attribution showing which pages each engine referenced
4. Scrunch AI
From $300/mo
- 350 prompts of your own plus a library of about a thousand industry ones, which fills in the questions you could not have guessed
- Meta AI included, which is rare
- Crawler analytics and site audits alongside the tracking
- Competitor tracking across the same prompt set
5. Keyword.com
From $3/mo, plus $24.50/mo for the AI add-on
Here purely because of what it costs. If nobody has given you budget yet and you just want real data instead of guessing, nothing else gets you there for this little.
- $3/mo for the core rank tracker, and a free plan if you only want ten keywords
- $24.50 for fifty AI credits on top
- Four engines in the AI module: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
- A mature daily rank tracker underneath, not a standalone AI widget
Questions we get asked
What should we budget? Somewhere between $25 and $300 a month for one brand. Most teams end up around $250 once they have written a prompt set that actually covers their category.
How many prompts do we need? A hundred to a hundred and fifty. Start with the questions your sales team hears every week, then add the comparisons buyers make between you and two named competitors. Under thirty and you are just watching noise.
Does our SEO work still count? Partly, and it depends where. Google's AI answers lean heavily on pages that already rank, so everything you have done there keeps paying off. ChatGPT and the other chat tools lean far more on other people's pages, which is closer to PR than to SEO. That second half is usually the uncomfortable part of the conversation internally, because it is not your team's budget.
Will buying a tool improve our visibility? No, and be careful with anyone who implies otherwise. These tools measure. What actually moves the number is being on the pages the models read, and none of these products writes those pages for you.
