Best AEO Tools in 2026: Engine Coverage Compared

The best AEO tools in 2026 separate on one published fact. How many of the six answer providers a plan covers, and whether the full roster sits behind a sales call. Four of the seven platforms here advertise a complete engine list and release it only on an enterprise contract. Coverage is what your money buys, and most pricing pages price it quietly.

Coverage, plan, and price claims below were read off each vendor's own live pages in August 2026.

Disclosure: this page is published by a vendor in the category it scores. The section naming the two categories that vendor did not win sits at the end, before the FAQs.

Key Takeaways

• Coverage is tier-gated: on five of the seven platforms the engine roster changes as the price rises. Four of those five hold the full list for enterprise contracts.
• Price buys prompts: Peec AI charges $80 and $420 a month for the same three-model cap. Otterly.AI ships the same four engines on its $29 plan as on its $489 one.
• One free plan outscores two paid ones: AthenaHQ's free tier names four of the six providers. That beats Profound's $399 plan and every Writesonic plan sold online.
• Contrarian: the engine count on a pricing page is a marketing number. The count worth reading sits on the tier you can buy without talking to sales.
• Nobody covers everything: DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral each sit on fewer than five of the seven rosters here. A complete-coverage claim is a claim about six providers at most.

How We Compared Them

One variable decides every verdict here: engine coverage. Every figure was read off the vendor's own live pricing, plan, or comparison page in August 2026. Where a vendor publishes no list, the entry says "not published" rather than guessing.

Coverage sets scope and price in this category, which is why it carries the verdicts instead of a feature grid. Buyers who already know how engine coverage sets scope can skip to the table.

The Six Engines and Why These Six

Six model providers, one slot each. The rule for inclusion: a provider earns a slot when at least five of the seven platforms here name it on a live page. That gives OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, Microsoft, Anthropic, and xAI.

Google holds one slot covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. Vendors sell those three separately, so a tool naming only one of them scores Partial. Three providers missed the bar: DeepSeek appears on four rosters, Meta AI on two, and Mistral on two.

What We Checked on Every Vendor Page

• Named engines per plan: whether the roster is published tier by tier or only in aggregate.
• The cheapest plan that names engines: how many of the six it covers, and at what price.
• Movement with price: whether coverage changes when the invoice does.
• The enterprise gate: which providers require a sales call before they appear.

What This Method Cannot Tell You

No answers were run for this page. The verdicts come from what each vendor publishes about its own coverage. Any reader can re-check the lot in about twenty minutes.

Published coverage is a claim about capability, not a measurement of accuracy. Two tools naming the same six providers can return different readings. Nothing here settles that. It says nothing about citation attribution either.

Quick Verdict Table

The seven top aeo tools below are ordered by one number. How much of the six-provider set each covers on a plan you can buy online, without a call. The publisher's own platform is scored against the same six and reported at the end.

Two rows carry the whole argument. A free plan sits second. A $99 plan sits last.

Best Overall

Judged among the best ai visibility tools on coverage alone, one platform publishes the full six-provider roster below $100 a month. Nothing else here does.

https://rankscale.ai (Best for Full Coverage Under $100)

It sells credits rather than engine tiers. That is why its roster does not shrink on the cheaper plan. The same list appears on the Pro, Growth, and Enterprise cards.

Coverage: the Pro card names OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini, DeepSeek AI, Mistral AI, Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok, and Microsoft Copilot. Six of six providers, plus three that missed the bar.

Pricing: Essentials from $20/mo. Pro $99/mo with 1,200 credits and up to 4,800 tracked answers. Growth $385/mo with 5,500 credits. Enterprise $780/mo with 12,000 credits.

The catch: credits are the real ceiling, and the engines do not cost the same. The page's own calculator charges 0.25 credits for ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, and Perplexity, 1 for DeepSeek, and 2 for Claude. The buyer's maths: 4,800 answers is the ceiling at the cheapest rate only. Spread across nine engines that is roughly 533 each per month, or about 17 a day, and Claude cuts it.

Verdict: shortlist Rankscale if you want every provider on one bill and can plan around a credit budget. Think twice if you need a guaranteed answer volume per engine, because the ceiling moves every time you add one.

Best for Enterprise

Ask who offers the best ai visibility platform once procurement is involved and the answer stops being about engines. It becomes SOC 2, single sign-on, regions, languages, and an API. The engine roster is the last thing on that list.

https://www.tryprofound.com (Best for Audited Enterprise Rollouts)

It is the deepest product here on response volume, and the steepest on how coverage gets released. The Enterprise tier is where the roster finally opens.

Coverage: Enterprise lists up to nine answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Six of six providers.

Pricing: Starter $99/mo billed yearly with ChatGPT tracking only, 50 prompts, 1,500 responses a month, and one seat. Growth $399/mo with three answer engines, 100 prompts, 9,000 responses a month, and three seats. Enterprise custom, with SSO/SAML and SOC 2 compliance.

The catch: $99 buys one provider. $399 buys three, named on the page as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The other three arrive with a contract.

Verdict: shortlist Profound if procurement needs SOC 2 and SSO and the budget assumes a sales cycle. Skip it if you expected six providers self-serve, because $399 a month does not reach them.

https://scrunch.com (Best for an Enterprise Roster With a Published Entry Tier)

Where it separates from Profound is honesty at the bottom of the ladder. Its entry plan names its four engines on the pricing page. Profound's describes them.

Coverage: Core lists four LLMs: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO, and Copilot. Enterprise lists nine, adding Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, and Grok. Four of six on Core, six of six on Enterprise.

Pricing: Core $250/mo with 125 unique prompts, limited to one country, three personas, two languages, five competitors, and three AI Search Trends topics. Enterprise custom, with API access, SSO through SAML and OIDC, expanded model coverage, and a dedicated account team.

The catch: Core is scoped as a proof-of-value tier and its own page says so. One country and two languages will not survive a second market. That, rather than the engine count, is the real upgrade trigger.

Verdict: shortlist Scrunch if you are building an internal case before a bigger commitment and want a published entry price to put in front of finance. Think twice if you already run multi-region, because Core rules that out on day one.

Best Budget Option

The short answer to what are the best ai visibility products under $100 a month is short. One sells four engines flat. One sells three from a menu of six. Both are worth a look, and which pricing model fits a prompt set moves the total further than the headline figure does.

https://otterly.ai (Best for Four Engines at Twenty-Nine Dollars)

Its included roster is identical on the cheapest plan and the most expensive one. No other platform here can say that except Rankscale. Neither gates an engine behind a tier.

Coverage: four AI search engines on every published plan: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and MS Copilot. Four of six providers. Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini are sold as paid add-ons on every tier, from $9 a month to $439. xAI is absent at every price, add-ons included.

Pricing: Lite $29/mo for 15 search prompts, or $25/mo billed annually, with unlimited team members. Standard $189/mo for 100 prompts, or $160/mo annually. Premium $489/mo for 400 prompts. Enterprise from $1,000/mo.

The catch: you are buying prompts. Lite works out at $1.93 a prompt and Premium at $1.22. The engine roster does not move at either price.

Verdict: shortlist Otterly if your buyers live in ChatGPT and Google and you want the cheapest entry that does not hide anything. Skip it if Grok carries weight in your category, because no plan and no add-on reaches it.

https://peec.ai (Best for Teams That Can Live With Three Models)

Its pricing page is the clearest here on prompts and the strictest on how many engines you may switch on at once. That combination is unusual enough to name.

Coverage: the plan comparison names six surfaces on every self-serve tier: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini. Four of six providers on the menu, and the plan card caps you at three models. Enterprise adds Claude Sonnet 4, GPT 5 Search, Deepseek, Qwen, and Mistral for the eleven the page advertises. Five of six there, because xAI Grok sits on no Peec tier.

Pricing: Starter $80/mo with 50 prompts and one project. Pro $205/mo with 150 prompts and two projects. Advanced $420/mo with 350 prompts, five projects, unlimited users, and daily tracking. Extra models are an add-on at $30/mo on Starter, $70 on Pro, and $140 on Advanced.

The catch: the three-model cap is identical across all three tiers. The buyer's maths: Advanced costs 5.25 times Starter, delivers seven times the prompts, and includes no extra engines. The add-on that fixes that costs 4.7 times more on Advanced than on Starter.

Verdict: shortlist Peec if you have already decided which three models matter and want unlimited seats on a daily refresh. Think twice if Claude or Grok anchor your category, because Claude arrives only on Enterprise and Grok never does.

Best for Execution, Not Just Data

Monitoring against execution is the other axis this category argues over. It gets one section here rather than a rerun. On coverage, the execution platforms behave exactly like the monitors do, and they stop in the same place off-page. No platform in this set publishes a mechanism that puts an asset on a domain it does not own. What the docs describe is drafting, sending or handing off, and detecting the citation once a human at the other end agrees to publish it. So the work of writing so a model can consume it stays yours, and no chart does it for you.

https://writesonic.com (Best for Fixing What the Tracking Finds)

Of the seven platforms here, it is the one pairing tracking with an Action Center and agentic workflows in a single subscription. Read what that buys you off-page. Its docs describe drafting outreach, sending it or copying it to your mail client, and detecting the citation when it lands, with the community half left to you: "Aim for 2-3 high-quality contributions weekly". The gap between the promise and what the self-serve plans deliver is the widest in the set.

Coverage: Enterprise lists all ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews. Six of six providers. Every plan sold online tracks three: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

Pricing: Starter $79/mo billed annually, with 50 prompts and 50 answers tracked daily. Basic $199/mo lifts that to 100 prompts at 300 daily answers, Growth $399/mo to 200 prompts at 600 daily answers. Enterprise is custom, and carries the full Action Center, agentic workflows, and a strategy team.

The catch: the pricing page's summary description promises tracking "across 10 AI platforms". The plan cards put all ten behind Enterprise and give every self-serve tier the same three. The $99 in that summary is the monthly rate, and $79 is the same plan billed annually.

Verdict: shortlist Writesonic if you want the drafting, the articles, and the on-page fixes on the same invoice as the tracking, and if ChatGPT plus Google is genuinely where your category sits. Think twice if you read execution as someone else placing the mention, because the docs hand that step back to you.

Best Free Tier

One free plan here names its engines instead of counting down a trial. Every other free entry in this set is a trial of a paid tier.

https://www.athenahq.ai (Best for a Free Plan That Names Its Engines)

It gives away more coverage than Profound charges $399 a month for. That is the finding, and it is printed on its own pricing page.

Coverage: Essential is free and names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. Four of six providers at no cost. Starter adds Google AI Mode, Copilot, and Grok, which the page sums as "visibility across 9 models".

Pricing: Essential free, with $25 of credit and 300 credits included, plus unlimited members. Starter $295/mo with 3,600 credits, where one credit equals one AI response. API access and extra credits are paid add-ons on Starter rather than inclusions. Enterprise custom.

The catch: 300 credits is 300 AI responses a month. The buyer's maths: split across five engines that is 60 answers per engine, or two a day. That is a sample rather than a trend line.

Verdict: shortlist AthenaHQ if you want real multi-engine coverage before spending anything. It is the fastest honest baseline here. Think twice about staying on Essential, because 300 responses will not survive a board question.

How We Scored Engine Coverage

Each tool is scored on the cheapest plan that names its engines. That is the number a buyer can act on. Partial means the vendor names at least one Google surface but not all three, and it still counts toward the total. Read the Peec AI row carefully: its Starter card names four providers, then lets you switch on only three models at once.

Coverage Depth vs Coverage Breadth

Breadth is how many providers a plan names. Depth is how many answers you get per engine per month. The two rarely move together.

Profound's Growth plan runs 9,000 responses a month across three engines, or 3,000 each. Rankscale's Pro plan runs up to 4,800 answers at its cheapest credit rate across as many as nine, or roughly 533 each. Breadth can cost depth when usage is constrained by credits or response allowances, and pricing pages rarely show you that trade clearly.

Settle that trade before you shortlist anything. It starts with building a prompt set worth tracking rather than with a vendor roster.

Where Vendor Claims Did Not Match

Three mismatches turned up between the marketing line and the plan card. All three are checkable in a browser today.

• Writesonic: the pricing page's summary description reads "Track AI visibility across 10 AI platforms". Every plan you can buy online tracks three of them. All ten sit behind Enterprise.
• Profound: "Answer Engines tracked" reads as a platform capability throughout, and the Enterprise column heads its nine-engine list "Capability for". The Starter card reads "ChatGPT tracking only".
• Otterly.AI: the closing line of the pricing page reads "For ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Copilot. All in one place." Four of those six are in the plans. Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons.

None of this is dishonest. It is what happens when engine access is the pricing lever and the marketing copy is written before the plan cards are.

Where Klarivo Won and Where It Did Not

Klarivo lost two categories outright. Best Free Tier goes to AthenaHQ, because Klarivo has no public free plan at all, and AthenaHQ gives away four of the six providers with its engines printed on the page. On the six-provider scoring above, Klarivo Monitor covers five and Rankscale covers six. Microsoft Copilot is not tracked, and the Google slot scores Partial on Gemini alone.

Where it holds up is the axis this audit rewards. All five engines are included rather than sold as tier upgrades. The refresh runs on a schedule the client controls rather than one fixed by the plan. That puts Klarivo with Rankscale and Otterly.AI in the small group whose coverage does not change when the invoice does, and outside the five platforms that release engines by tier.

The part a coverage count cannot express is what happens after the reading. Klarivo Monitor reports the domains the engines drew on for each answer, so a missing mention arrives with the source list that filled the gap. Coverage tells you where you are absent. The source list tells you what the engine read instead of you.

Want a read on your own position before you shortlist anything? 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

If you can only optimise for two engines, which two should they be?

ChatGPT and Google. Every platform in this comparison names both, making them the broadest starting point in this dataset.

. The order after that depends on your category:

• Perplexity, if buyers research with citations open.
• Microsoft Copilot, if your market runs on Microsoft 365.
• Claude, if you sell to engineering or research teams.
• Grok, if your audience is consumer and social.

How fast does a coverage verdict like this go stale?

Faster than a feature comparison. Coverage here is set by which engines sit on which tier, so a single plan reshuffle can move a tool two places without any product changing. Treat every published roster as a claim with a date attached, this page included. Re-read the plan cards before you sign anything.

Do enterprise plans genuinely add engines, or only seats?

Both, and the engine half is the bigger jump. Profound goes from three answer engines to nine at Enterprise. Scrunch AI goes from four to nine. Writesonic goes from three to ten. Seat counts rise too, and they are not what the upgrade is really selling.

What can a free tier realistically teach you?

Whether you appear at all. AthenaHQ's free plan gives 300 AI responses a month, which across five engines is about two answers per engine per day. Enough to see a pattern of absence. Not enough to prove a trend, so treat it as a baseline rather than a measurement.

How would you re-run this coverage audit yourself?

Open each vendor's pricing page and ignore the hero copy. Write down the engines named on each individual plan card, note which plans hide the list, then divide the monthly response allowance by the number of engines you would switch on. That figure is your real sample size per engine. It is usually smaller than expected.