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
If you need a number to take into a budget conversation, this is the one we use.
Graphite ran a study on how much of search has moved to AI. They took Similarweb data on the five biggest AI tools, checked it against Google Search Console, and found that AI now accounts for 56% of the volume of traditional search engines worldwide. In the US it is 34%.
The reason most people think it is much smaller is simple and easy to miss. Almost everyone measuring this has been counting web traffic only, and 83% of AI use worldwide happens inside mobile apps. Miss the apps and you undercount the whole thing by four to five times.
So if someone in your business is still calling this an emerging channel, they are probably looking at a number that ignores four fifths of it.
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, if vendor size is not a question you have to answer | $99/mo |
| 3 | AthenaHQ | Seeing your real numbers for free first, then having the tool draft the follow-up work | Free, then $295/mo |
| 4 | Scrunch AI | Bigger brands in crowded categories 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 |
Every figure here came off the vendor's own pricing page on 14 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, and 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. Three of the five tools below do this well, one does it partly, and one doesn't do it at all.
1. Peec AI
From $95/mo. Berlin, founded 2025.
You get 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, so this is the widest starting point in the comparison.
It also answers the demo question better than anything else here. For every answer it shows you which pages the model read, and it sorts them into five groups: editorial, corporate, UGC, reference, and your own site. You look at the mix and you know immediately whether you have a coverage problem or a content problem.
There is one more thing worth knowing about, even though it sounds technical. Peec can read your server logs, through eight different setups including Cloudflare and Vercel. That lets you see the AI crawlers actually arriving on your site, rather than hoping they do. If your pages are never being fetched, no amount of rewriting helps, and this is the only tool near this price that will tell you.
They have raised around $29M, including a $21M Series A led by Singular, and they name Zalando, Hugo Boss, Squarespace and Wix as customers. Useful if someone senior asks who else is using it.
Where it is not the pick. The company was founded in 2025, so there is not much history to point at yet. There is no free tier, so your cheapest look costs $95. The entry plan stops at 50 prompts, which most brands outgrow in a quarter. And if you need Claude or Grok on top of the six, those are billed per engine, so your real bill lands above the list price.
2. Rankscale
From $99/mo. Europe, bootstrapped.
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 in total, and you can set it to check anything from hourly to monthly.
The thing we like most is that they publish their whole credit formula. You can sit down and work out what next quarter costs before you sign anything, which almost nobody else in this category lets you do.
Where it is not the pick. It is two founders and no outside investment. That is fine for you and awkward the first time a client or your own security team asks who they are buying from, because there is no SOC 2 or SSO published to point at. The traffic reporting was still in beta when we checked. And the credits disappear faster than you expect once you multiply prompts by engines by days.
3. AthenaHQ
Free tier, then $295/mo. United States, Y Combinator backed.
Two of the founders worked on Google Search and DeepMind, and you can tell from how it handles the retrieval side. Eleven engines on every tier, including Meta AI and Amazon Rufus, which barely anyone else covers.
What makes it different is that it doesn't stop at telling you the problem. An agent takes the findings and 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. Most marketing teams we speak to do not need another dashboard. They need someone to write the pages.
Start on the free tier. Three hundred credits is enough to see your own numbers, which is usually what you need to win the budget conversation internally.
Where it is not the pick. One credit is one AI answer, and the 3,600 credits on the Starter plan will not cover a serious prompt set, so plan on paying more than $295. API access costs extra and they quote it on request. And at $2.2M raised it is the smallest company on this list.
4. Scrunch AI
From $300/mo. United States.
The entry plan gives you 350 prompts of your own plus a library of roughly a thousand industry ones. That second part is more useful than it sounds. If you are in a crowded category, you probably cannot guess every question your buyers ask, and the library fills in the ones you would never have written down.
You also get crawler analytics and site audits alongside the tracking, so it covers more of the job than the cheaper tools do.
Where it is not the pick. At $300 it is the most expensive way into this list, and you only get a seven-day trial rather than a free tier. Extra seats are $25 each, which adds up quickly across a team. And if your category is narrow, most of that industry prompt library is volume you will never look at.
5. Keyword.com
From $3/mo, plus $24.50/mo for the AI add-on. Established rank tracker.
This one is here purely because of what it costs. Three dollars for the core rank tracker, a free plan if you only want ten keywords, and $24.50 for fifty AI credits on top.
If nobody has given you budget yet and you just want to find out whether any of this matters in your category, this is the cheapest honest way to get real data instead of guessing.
Where it is not the pick. It tells you your position and stops there. It will not show you the pages behind the answer, so it cannot answer the demo question above. Credits get expensive once you run real volume. Think of it as the thing that wins you the budget, not the thing you keep afterwards.
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. Buy one to find out where you stand, then budget separately for the work itself.
