17 AEO Tools Compared: Monitoring vs Execution

Most aeo tools are monitoring products. They report which AI answers omit your brand and which sources the engines read instead, then hand the work back to you. A smaller group also changes something off your own site. Scored on one published rubric, the field splits on that line long before it splits on price.

Every price, engine list, and plan limit below was read from the vendor's own live pages in August 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Engine counts move by tier: the number on a homepage is usually the enterprise number, and four of these vendors put Claude, Gemini, or Grok behind a custom quote.
• Source reporting separated nobody: all seventeen publish it, which is why the useful question has moved to what happens after the source list arrives.
• The meter is the hidden cost: prompts, credits, checks, and analysed responses are four different units, so two headline prices rarely describe the same purchase.
• Contrarian: a prominent product in this category finished last on the rubric, because the rubric reads the cheapest paid tier and its cheapest tier tracks one engine.
• Execution stays rare: three of seventeen publish off-site execution at the cheapest paid tier. Drafting an outreach email is not placement, whatever the plan table calls it.

How We Compared and Scored

Desk-checkable only: every number below was read from a vendor's own live pages in August 2026. No vendor was contacted, none paid for inclusion, and nothing here rests on a test only we can see.

The constraint is the method. A score you cannot re-check is a score you have to take on trust, and a buyer comparing tools against how models choose what to cite has enough of those already.

The Criteria

The Weighting

Engines and execution carry fifty points between them, because those two fields decide what the product can do for you. Price transparency carries fifteen, enough to punish a blank pricing page without letting a cheap tool buy its way up the table.

One criterion failed outright. All seventeen vendors publish source or citation reporting, so twenty points sat flat across the entire field and separated nobody. Naming a dead criterion beats quietly reweighting it, and the next re-score replaces it with source granularity.

The Tiebreakers

• First, engines included, not sold separately. A tool that bundles four beats a tool that unbundles four at the same score.
• Second, the lower published entry price.
• Third, programmatic access at the entry tier instead of as an upsell.

Only one tie needed breaking. Semrush and HubSpot both scored 75, and Semrush takes the higher row on four included engines against HubSpot's three.

What We Could Not Test

Accuracy is missing on purpose. Whether a tool's ChatGPT reading matches what a buyer sees at the same hour, how densely it samples, and whether its recommendations move anything: none of that appears on a pricing page, and inventing a score for it would produce a number nobody could reproduce.

The larger gap is the tier. This rubric scores each criterion against the cheapest paid tier, so it answers what the entry tier buys rather than how good the best version of a product is. Score the same field at the enterprise quote and the order changes, because several of these vendors keep their range behind a sales call.

The vendors also disagree on method in public. Writesonic states it crawls the engines "like a real user. Not through APIs", while Evertune describes tracking "through the model's API and its consumer app" as its differentiator. Both cannot be right, and neither publishes the evidence.

Disclosure: Klarivo Is Included

No vendor paid for inclusion. Klarivo is our platform. We scored ourselves on the same rubric, and we finished fifth.

Rivals beat us on published fact, in two places. Scrunch AI and AthenaHQ publish an entry price where we publish none. Peec AI publishes a deeper source specification than ours: it separates URLs an engine accessed from URLs it cited, across five source classes, where we report at domain level. Both concessions are honoured inside those entries.

One structural asymmetry, stated openly. Every entry heading links to that vendor's own page. Ours does not, because our product link belongs at the end of an article and not in the middle of a scorecard.

Summary Comparison Table

Seventeen answer engine optimization tools, ranked by published total. The order is the score, with no editorial override anywhere in the table.

Read the first two columns together before anything else. Rankscale names ten engines at twenty dollars and Profound names one at ninety-nine, and those two rows explain more about this category than the totals do.

Monitoring-Only Tools vs Execution Platforms

The most expensive mistake in this category is buying an aeo tool to answer a question you had already answered. You knew the engines were ignoring you. Twelve months of dashboards will confirm it in higher resolution and change nothing.

Thirteen of the seventeen never put anything on a domain you do not own. Rankscale draws the boundary in plain words: "Rankscale analyzes output but does not generate text or media itself." Four of those thirteen stop at measurement and advice entirely. The other nine draft content or on-site fixes and hand them back to you, which is where monitoring stops short of moving an answer.

The middle row is where many buyers are likely to land and where disappointment often starts. A draft in your CMS is not a citation, and the gap between the two is why writing so engines can consume it is necessary work rather than sufficient work.

The 17 Tools Reviewed

Nine fields per entry, identical on every tool including our own. This is the full scored field and not a shortlist, so several of the most popular answer engine optimization tools sit below products you have never heard of.

1. https://scrunch.com

It tops the table by pairing a published price with a citation-acquisition partnership that very few products in this set publish at all.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO, Copilot. Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok are Enterprise-only. Entry price: $250/mo (Core). Agency Core is $500/mo. Annual pricing not published. Sources reported: Yes, domain level, on both tiers. Execution: Places. Citation data connects to partners Noble and Stacker "to secure mentions at scale". The Agent Experience Platform layer is Enterprise-only. Data access at entry tier: CSV and Excel export. Query API is Enterprise-only. Free entry point: 7-day trial of Core, no sales call. Score: 20 + 20 + 25 + 15 + 8 = 88/100 Buy it if: you want placement and monitoring on one invoice with a number you can budget. Skip it if: you need Claude or Gemini, which move you to an unpriced Enterprise contract.

2. https://seranking.com/ai-visibility-tracker.html

The heritage cuts both ways here. You are buying a full SEO suite and the AI toolkit rides along inside it.

Engines at entry tier: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. All five on both paid tiers. Entry price: $129/mo Core, $103.20/mo annual. Growth $279/mo. The sister product SE Visible starts at $99/mo. Sources reported: Yes, domains and URLs, unlimited on both tiers. Execution: Drafts. AI Writer is included at 25 articles a month on Core. Data access at entry tier: 25,000 API credits and MCP access, included. Free entry point: 14-day trial with published terms, no card, plus five free visibility checks a day. Score: 25 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 15 = 87/100. Buy it if: you still run classic SEO and want one bill instead of two. Skip it if: you want AI visibility alone, since you are paying for a suite either way.

3. https://www.evertune.ai/pricing

Where it thins out is the buying process. The price is published and the checkout is not.

Engines at entry tier: Eleven, including Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, DeepSeek, Perplexity and Copilot, split between provider APIs and consumer apps. Entry price: $800/mo (Pro), 100,000 prompts. Enterprise custom. The Pro button is "Request a demo". Sources reported: Yes, at domain and URL level, sorted into Owned, Strength and Opportunity URLs per model. Execution: Places. Sources push to impact.com and PartnerStack, with programmatic buying through The Trade Desk and Index Exchange. Data access at entry tier: Not published. No data API and no analytics export appear on any tier, though generated drafts export as Markdown or HTML. Free entry point: None published. Score: 25 + 20 + 25 + 15 + 0 = 85/100 Buy it if: you have media budget and want source targeting wired to it. Skip it if: your reporting lives in a warehouse, because no analytics export is published.

4. https://athenahq.ai/pricing

The one that priced its unit instead of its plan, which makes it the easiest here to model.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, plus more on request. Entry price: $295/mo (Starter), 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response. That works out at roughly 8.2 cents per response. Sources reported: Yes. Citation intelligence, plus source insights on the free tier. Execution: Drafts. On-page and off-page actions, a base content optimisation agent, and managed robots.txt and llms.txt. The off-page action researches a contact and drafts the email, then hands the send back to you. Data access at entry tier: CSV export listed on Starter, though the docs say export needs a plan that includes it. API is a paid add-on with the price on request. Free entry point: Essential, free, with $25 of credit and 300 credits. Score: 25 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 8 = 80/100 Buy it if: you want to forecast spend from response volume instead of a seat count. Skip it if: you need the API, which arrives as an unpriced add-on.

5. Klarivo

Klarivo Monitor tracks the engines, and Klarivo's Reddit programme publishes into the communities those engines read. That pairing is why it scores where it does, and the missing price is why it does not score higher.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok. Five, all included, tracked independently on a schedule the client sets. Entry price: Not published. Pricing is scoped to the programme. Sources reported: Yes, at domain level. The surface is Top 10 Citation Sources and it lists the third-party domains behind answers in your category. Execution: Places. A contributor network posts across dozens of subreddits on a weekly cadence. Data access at entry tier: Reporting is exportable and filterable from the dashboard. No API is published. Free entry point: None public. Score: 25 + 20 + 25 + 0 + 8 = 78/100 Buy it if: you have read a source list, seen which communities carry your category, and have nobody to write into them. Skip it if: you want a number before a conversation, or your team already publishes off-site every week.

6. https://higoodie.com/pricing/

The action layer arrives on every tier, which is rare. The engines do not.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity. Pro adds Gemini, Copilot, Rufus and Sparky; Claude, AI Mode, Meta, DeepSeek and Grok are Enterprise. Entry price: $399/mo (Explorer), 100 prompts and 3,000 AI responses. Pro and Enterprise are demo-gated. Sources reported: Yes, domain level, with comparison against the sources citing competitors. Execution: Drafts. Named agents cover content, technical signals and outreach targeting, described as tracking outreach status rather than securing placement. Data access at entry tier: MCP server access on Explorer. Full API and export are Enterprise. Free entry point: 7-day trial on Explorer. Score: 15 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 15 = 77/100 Buy it if: you want agents doing the work at a mid-market price with no sales call. Skip it if: three engines will not survive your first board question.

7. https://www.semrush.com/pricing/ai/

Priced per domain, which is the detail that reshapes the quote once a second brand appears.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity. Claude appears in the Enterprise AIO product only. Entry price: $99/mo per domain, billed annually (Base), tracking 25 custom prompts. Extra seats are $99 each and extra domains are $99 each. Sources reported: Yes. Mentions and citations reported by platform, with the sources behind your visibility broken out. Execution: Drafts. Recommendations and content optimisation; the automation language sits on Enterprise. Data access at entry tier: CSV export, capped at 1,000 rows and ten exports a day. API starts at the Advanced bundle. Free entry point: A $0 plan exists, though the knowledge base states twice that the AI Visibility Toolkit has no free trial. Score: 20 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 8 = 75/100 Buy it if: one domain, one analyst, and Semrush already in the stack. Skip it if: you run several brands, because the per-domain multiplier compounds fast.

8. https://www.hubspot.com/products/aeo

Cheapest real entry point in the field, and the widest gap between that entry point and the capability people buy it for.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. The same three at every tier, with no Claude, Copilot, Grok or AI Overviews. Entry price: $50/mo for 25 prompts, or $45 annually. Publishing arrives with HubSpot for Marketers at $900/mo. Sources reported: Yes. Citation analysis names domains, pages, source types and content types. Execution: None at the entry tier. The $50 tier recommends actions but does not publish off-site. Publishing capabilities are available through higher-tier HubSpot marketing products. Data access at entry tier: Not published. No API or export appears on the AEO pages. Free entry point: AI Search Grader, free with no account, plus 25 free tracked prompts. Score: 15 + 20 + 25 + 15 + 0 = 75/100 Buy it if: you are already on Marketing Hub, where the $50 add-on is close to free. Skip it if: you are not, since the execution you saw demonstrated costs eighteen times the sticker.

9. https://www.conductor.com/platform/features/ai-search-performance/

It markets execution harder than anything else here and defines a citation more precisely than anyone. The pricing page carries no numbers at all.

Engines at entry tier: Seven models claimed. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Google AIO and AI Mode appear across pages, which is six, and the seventh is never named. The definitive roster is not printed in one place. Entry price: Not published. Three tiers are named with quotas and no figures, while a feature page calls the same pricing transparent. Sources reported: Yes, and best defined. The mention-citation gap is the published diagnostic. Execution: Drafts. What "execution" resolves to on the plan table is Writing Assistant drafts, 60 to 600 a year. Data access at entry tier: Data API and MCP server available from Essentials. Free entry point: Three-week trial, no card. Score: 25 + 20 + 12 + 0 + 15 = 72/100 Buy it if: you want ChatGPT Auto and Search modes separated, which Conductor says you cannot find anywhere else. Skip it if: procurement needs a figure before the second call.

10. https://writesonic.com/ai-visibility-tracker

A low published door with the steepest engine cliff behind it, and an action layer that stops at the outbox.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. The other seven, including Claude, Perplexity and Grok, are Enterprise-only. Entry price: $79/mo (Starter) billed annually, 50 prompts. Basic $199, Growth $399. The month-to-month rate is not readable on the page. Sources reported: Yes, page and domain level, with source-type breakdowns. Execution: Drafts. The off-page action drafts an outreach email, sends it, then watches for the citation to appear. Starter and Basic get none of them; Growth gets five a month. Data access at entry tier: PDF and CSV export published as a capability, tier not stated. No API row on the plan table. Free entry point: A 7-day trial, published on the signup page. Whether a card is needed is not stated. Score: 15 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 8 = 70/100 Buy it if: you will reach Growth or Enterprise, where the outreach and on-page actions open. Skip it if: you stop at Starter, which is three engines and a report.

11. https://www.brightedge.com/ai-catalyst

The oldest name on this list, and the least willing to say what anything costs.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, named together on the Win In AI Search page, with AI Catalyst "included in all BrightEdge SEO Platform subscriptions". Entry price: Not published. The pricing page is a contact form and a phone number, and no product price appears anywhere on the site. Sources reported: Yes, domain level, under AI Hyper Cube's Citation Tracking, headed "Uncover Every Source AI Trusts in Your Brand Category". Execution: Drafts. Content Advisor produces briefs and drafts, and no off-site claim appears. Data access at entry tier: An MCP server, read-only, open to any customer with login credentials. Export formats are not published. Free entry point: None published. Score: 20 + 20 + 12 + 0 + 15 = 67/100 Buy it if: you are an enterprise already running the platform and want AI folded in. Skip it if: you are comparing on paper, because there is nothing here to compare.

12. https://otterly.ai/pricing/

The clearest pricing page in the field, and the one that shows you exactly what unbundling costs.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are priced add-ons. Entry price: $29/mo (Lite), 15 prompts. Standard $189, Premium $489, Enterprise from $1,000. Adding Claude, Gemini and AI Mode to Lite costs $47 more, so seven engines on 15 prompts runs $76/mo. Sources reported: Yes. Link Citations Analysis and Domain Ranking on every tier. Execution: None. Three recommendations a week on Lite, unlimited above it, and an audit. Data access at entry tier: Reports and export on Lite. API and MCP start at Standard. Free entry point: A 14-day free trial, no card, plus a published set of free GEO tools. Score: 20 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 8 = 63/100 Buy it if: you want to buy engines à la carte and see the bill before you commit. Skip it if: you need somebody to act on the citations analysis it produces.

13. https://knowatoa.com/pricing

Named agents draft on a schedule, which is more than most tools at three times the price attempt.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode. Claude, Gemini, Meta AI and Perplexity require the $199 tier, a 3.4x jump. Entry price: $59/mo (Starter). Growth $199. The question limit at either tier is not published anywhere, despite the FAQ referring to one. Sources reported: Yes, on all tiers, including which of your pages get cited. Execution: Drafts. Agents research and write on a schedule with optional auto-approval, and you ship. Data access at entry tier: Not published for Starter. The pricing page puts API, MCP and Looker in the Growth reporting stack, while a feature page claims API on all plans. Free entry point: Free trial, no card. Length not published. Score: 15 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 0 = 62/100 Buy it if: you want drafts arriving without a strategist attached. Skip it if: you cannot budget against an unpublished question limit.

14. https://rankscale.ai/pricing

The most engines for the least money, and the plainest statement of what a monitoring tool is.

Engines at entry tier: Ten named across every plan card, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Mistral, with no tier gate. Queries cost different credit amounts, and Claude runs eight times a ChatGPT query. Entry price: $20/mo (Essentials). Pro $99 for 1,200 credits. Essentials appears only in the comparison table and its quotas do not render. Sources reported: Yes, across three named features including sources-box and query fan-out analysis. Execution: None, stated outright: "Not a Generative AI: Rankscale analyzes output but does not generate text or media itself." Data access at entry tier: Not published. The REST API covers metrics and share links on Growth and Enterprise. Free entry point: 7-day Pro trial. Score: 25 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 60/100 Buy it if: you want the widest engine spread on the smallest budget and will act yourself. Skip it if: you need to know what $20 buys before you enter a card.

15. https://peec.ai/pricing

Best source specification in the field, attached to a product that will never act on it.

Engines at entry tier: Choose 3 of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. A fourth costs $35/mo on Starter, so all six runs $200/mo. Entry price: $95/mo (Starter), 50 prompts, or $80 annually. Pro $245, Advanced $495, Enterprise custom at up to 11 models. Sources reported: Yes, and it is the reference implementation. Sources accessed are separated from citations used, classified into five types, with gap analysis by score. Execution: None, by design. Its own documentation states the product "does not write or publish content itself". Data access at entry tier: CSV export of project chats, documented with no tier gate. API and SSO are Enterprise. Free entry point: A "Start free trial" link on the pricing page. No length or card terms are published. Score: 15 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 8 = 58/100 Buy it if: the source list is the deliverable and you have a team waiting for it. Skip it if: you were hoping the tool would close the gaps it finds.

16. https://ahrefs.com/brand-radar

The rubric punishes it hardest, and the reason belongs in the open.

Engines at entry tier: One. Platforms are selected and priced individually, and no prose on the page says what the entry figure covers. The page's own pricing config prices each index at $199. The index names seven platforms in total. Entry price: $199/mo per platform index. The page shows $398/mo for a two-platform selection and $699/mo for all platforms. The unit price is in the page config rather than in the copy. Sources reported: Yes, under AI Sources, with citation data exposed through the API. Execution: None. Content Kit grades content from $99/mo and publishes nothing. Data access at entry tier: API and MCP server on every paid tier, with row caps by plan. Free entry point: A permanent free account and a free visibility preview. No trial. Score: 5 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 15 = 55/100 Buy it if: you want the largest published prompt index and the most open API here. Skip it if: you need the roster stated in plain copy. That five is an artefact of an unbundled model, and a rubric reading the $699 option would rank it far higher.

17. https://www.tryprofound.com/pricing

The most cited name in this category finishes last, on a rubric that reads the cheapest door.

Engines at entry tier: ChatGPT only. Growth adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise reaches up to nine. Entry price: $99/mo (Starter), $399/mo (Growth). Both render as an animated digit reel that never settles, and the figures are readable only from the accessibility labels in the page source. The page's own meta description still reads "Currently available through customized enterprise pricing". Sources reported: Yes, citations tracked daily across the prompt set. Execution: Drafts. Profound Agents generate and optimise content on a credit meter. Data access at entry tier: Neither. Starter lists exports as none and API as no. Free entry point: Growth is offered on a "Try for free" button. Score: 5 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 0 = 52/100 Buy it if: you are buying Enterprise, where nine engines, the API, SSO and SOC 2 arrive together. Skip it if: you are shopping self-serve, because Starter is a one-engine product.

Best for Enterprise / Mid-Market / Solo

Segment first, then score. Buying aeo software above your segment is how teams end up paying enterprise rates for a dashboard nobody opens, and buying below it is how they end up with three engines and a board question they cannot answer.

Enterprise, quoted rather than listed. Conductor, BrightEdge and Evertune sit here, and two of the three will not quote you on a page at all. Klarivo scopes to the programme rather than to a plan tier, so it is not a row on this band's price list. Expect the engine roster and the action layer to be contract terms rather than plan features, which is where coverage becomes the pricing variable.

Mid-market, published and self-serve. AthenaHQ, Goodie AI, SE Ranking, Writesonic, Semrush and Peec AI compete here on six different shapes: a credit meter, an agent layer, a bundled suite, a tier cliff, a per-domain multiplier and a pure analytics product. Model your own prompt count and engine list before comparing any two of those numbers.

Solo and small team, under $100 a month. Rankscale at $20, Otterly.AI at $29, HubSpot at $50 and Knowatoa at $59 are the real entry points, and every one of them expects you to do the work the report implies.

When a Competitor Is the Better Pick

Three cases, and each is a rival beating us on published fact rather than a courtesy we extended to look even-handed.

Buy Peec AI if the source list is the deliverable. It separates URLs an engine accessed from URLs it cited, sorts them into five classes, and ranks gaps where competitors are cited and you are not. Klarivo reports at domain level, which is a coarser instrument, and for a team that already has writers, the finer one is worth more.

Buy Ahrefs Brand Radar if the data has to leave the dashboard. API access lands on every paid tier there. Klarivo publishes export and no API, so a warehouse-first team will hit that wall in week two. Buy Scrunch AI or AthenaHQ if procurement needs a number before a call, because both publish one and we do not.

How to Choose

Seventeen options collapse to two faster than any feature matrix suggests, because most of the differences on those matrices do not survive contact with a budget.

Three Questions That Narrow the Field Fast

1. Which engines are included at the tier you will buy? Not the homepage number. Writesonic drops from ten to three, Knowatoa from seven to three, and Scrunch from nine to four the moment you look at the entry row.
2. Do you already have somebody to act on a source list? If yes, buy the cheapest tool whose source reporting is granular enough and stop. If no, thirteen of these seventeen will sell you a better-resolution version of a problem you already understand.
3. What is the meter? Prompts, credits, checks and analysed responses are four units. AthenaHQ charges roughly 8.2 cents per AI response, Ahrefs charges one check per prompt per platform per location, and Peec charges per prompt with engines priced on top. Convert everything to your own volume before you compare, the way you would with any pricing model fitted to a prompt set.

One more filter. If two tools survive all three questions, take the one whose pricing page you could hand to your CFO without annotating it.

Where Klarivo Landed in This Field

Fifth, at 78 out of 100, held back by the one criterion we could have won with a page edit. We do not publish a rate card and the rubric charges fifteen points for that. The reason is structural: pricing is scoped to the programme, so the sizing conversation happens before anyone buys rather than after they hit a quota.

What the rubric does reward is the pairing. Five engines tracked independently, a citation-source view that names the third-party domains carrying your category, and a contributor network that publishes into those communities weekly. Thirteen of the seventeen tools here stop short of publishing anywhere you do not own. Klarivo sells to funded B2B brands with real budget, and smaller teams are better served running the work themselves than buying a managed programme they cannot yet use.

Want your current reading before you talk to anyone? Book a Klarivo discovery call. Fifteen minutes, a slot you choose, and instant confirmation, with no form to fill in first. The tracking product lives at Klarivo Monitor.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does this comparison get re-scored?

Every quarter. Two vendors here changed ownership in the months before the check, so a comparison older than a quarter is a historical document. The criteria are versioned apart from the scores, so you can tell whether a tool moved or the rubric did.

What disqualified a tool from being included at all?

Three rules. The vendor had to publish a live product page describing AI answer tracking; that page had to name at least one answer engine, and the capability had to exist in the product and not in an announcement. A tool that measures classic SERP features and files it under AI visibility did not qualify.

Can you combine a monitoring tool with an execution partner?

Yes, and it is the most common arrangement that works. Buy the cheapest tool whose source reporting is granular enough for your category, then spend the difference on somebody who acts on it. The failure mode is buying two products that both stop at the report and calling it a stack.

Do any of these tools cover the same engines identically?

No two sets in this table match. ChatGPT appears in all seventeen, Meta AI in three, and Rufus and Sparky in one. Two vendors both claiming nine engines are rarely claiming the same nine, so compare rosters rather than counts.

What should you do if your shortlist tool gets acquired?

Read the roadmap, not the logo. Sitecore announced its acquisition of Scrunch AI on 3 June 2026, and Scrunch followed on 8 July with a post saying the Agent Experience Platform is "no longer just a part of our product, but the product itself", which is a repositioning as much as an ownership change. Acquisitions tend to reset the pricing page within two quarters, so check your renewal date before you renew on familiarity.