Best AEO Tools (2026): The Answer Engine Optimization Stack
The best AEO tools in 2026: Searchable is my all-around pick, plus the free checks, trackers, and writing tools to pair with it, with verified prices.
Searchable is the best all-around AEO tool in 2026. Searchable tracks prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity, with Claude, Gemini, and AI Mode as add-ons, audits your pages, drafts content, and connects to Claude over MCP. Pair it with Google Search Console, the most accurate AEO data you can get, and it is free. For the rest of the stack: Scrunch, Profound, and Otterly.AI are the other trackers worth knowing; Ahrefs Brand Radar and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit suit teams already paying for those suites; HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader gives a one-time baseline; AlsoAsked covers question research; Claude and ChatGPT write the answers; and Google’s Rich Results Test and Screaming Frog check the page.
I run answer engine optimization for B2B SaaS companies, and the verdicts below come from using these tools on live accounts. Prices and engine coverage were checked on each vendor’s site in November 2026, and case studies from those accounts are on my work page. This list is part of my generative engine optimization guides, and if you want the work done for you, here is how I run answer engine optimization services.
The best AEO tools at a glance
| Tool | AEO job | Price (checked November 2026) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Searchable | Prompt tracking, site audits, content, and a Claude MCP | From $125 a month, 14-day free trial | Best all-around |
| Google Search Console | See AI Overview and AI Mode impressions | Free | The most accurate AEO data |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | One-time brand check across AI engines | Free | A quick baseline |
| Profound | Enterprise prompt tracking across nine engines | Free 7-day trial, then custom | Large brands |
| Otterly.AI | Entry-level prompt tracking | From $29 a month | Small teams and single brands |
| Scrunch | Track prompts, citations, and AI crawler traffic | From $250 a month, billed yearly | Wide engine coverage, if the new UI works for you |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | AI mentions from Ahrefs’ prompt database | From $199 a month | Teams already on Ahrefs |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | AI mentions inside Semrush | $99 a month for 25 prompts | Teams already on Semrush |
| AlsoAsked | Question research | From $12 a month | Finding the questions to answer |
| Claude | Drafting and restructuring answers | Free and paid plans | Writing answer-first pages |
| ChatGPT | Titles, meta descriptions, quick rewrites | Free and paid plans | Short-form copy |
| Rich Results Test | Schema validation | Free | Checking structured data |
| Screaming Frog | Crawling pages at scale | Free up to 500 URLs | Site-wide checks |
What an AEO tool does
Answer engine optimization tools help with one of five jobs: measuring where your brand appears in AI answers, tracking a set of prompts over time, researching the questions buyers ask, writing pages that answer those questions cleanly, and checking that the page is technically readable. No single AEO platform covers all five well, which is why the list below is grouped by job.
The tracking job gets the most attention, and it matters for a specific reason. Across six B2B SaaS accounts I track, 88.7% of the sources AI answers cited were independent third-party sites, 8.7% were competitors, and 2.6% were the brand’s own site. A tool that only grades your pages sees 2.6% of the picture. You need one that shows which sources AI cites for your category.
The best all-around AEO tool
1. Searchable
Searchable is the AEO tool I use now, and the best all-around pick on this list. It goes deep: prompt tracking, citation tracking, site audits, article drafts, and agent analytics that show when AI crawlers visit your pages. It is also newer than the other trackers here, and new features ship all the time, so expect the product to look different from one quarter to the next. Its MCP server connects it to Claude, which is super useful: you can ask Claude how often your brand is mentioned in one engine versus another and get the answer from live Searchable data, without leaving the conversation.
Pro is $125 a month for 100 prompts and Scale is $400 a month for 500, with a 14-day free trial; annual billing brings Pro to $100 a month. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity are included, and Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Copilot, DeepSeek, and Grok are paid add-ons. My rule with any tracker applies here too: you are only as good as the prompts you track.
Best for: most B2B teams starting or running an AEO program.
Best free AEO tools to start with
2. Google Search Console
Search Console’s Generative AI performance report, launched in June 2026, shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device, and date. It reports impressions only, with no clicks or queries yet, and it covers Google alone. Even so, it is probably the most accurate AEO data you will get, because it is Google’s own record of when your pages appeared, where every tracker estimates from prompts it runs itself. It costs nothing. Expect most of those impressions on informational queries, because AI Overviews take the top of the funnel first while commercial searches still send the click. How to read it is in my guide to AI Overview impressions in Search Console.
Best for: every team, before any paid tool.
3. HubSpot AI Search Grader
HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader, which many people search for as the HubSpot AEO grader, runs a one-time check of your brand in OpenAI’s models, Perplexity, and Gemini. It scores five dimensions: sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position. It is a snapshot. It does not track prompts over time or show you which sources the engines cite; HubSpot’s paid HubSpot AEO product tracks the same three engines continuously for $50 a month.
Best for: a free first read on how AI describes your brand, before you pay for tracking.
4. Manual prompt testing
The free AEO checker every team already has is the engines themselves. Write 20 to 30 prompts your buyers ask, run them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, and mark each answer named, cited, or absent. It is accurate for what it shows, with two catches. The answers are biased toward your own account, because the engines personalize on your history, memory, and location, so what you see is not what a buyer sees. And running dozens of prompts across four engines by hand, every month, is incredibly time-consuming. When I need a pile of real, verifiable source links for a topic, Perplexity is the engine I use, because it links to real sources consistently.
Best for: building the prompt list every paid tool will need anyway.
Other AEO platforms for prompt tracking
5. Profound
Profound is good at what it does, and its tracking is built for enterprise AEO programs. My reservation is that it tries to be too much: alongside tracking it now sells AI agents and AI marketing credits, and the core job can get lost in everything else. The free trial tracks 50 prompts daily for seven days across ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews; the enterprise plan is custom-priced and covers up to nine engines, including Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and DeepSeek.
Best for: large brands that need wide engine coverage and a sales-led contract.
6. Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the cheapest serious tracker on this list. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot; Standard is $189 a month for 100 prompts, with Claude, AI Mode, and Gemini available as add-ons.
Best for: small teams and single brands that want tracking on a small budget.
7. Scrunch
Scrunch tracks custom prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Meta, records citations, and monitors AI crawler traffic to your site. I ran it on B2B SaaS accounts, and the coverage is wide. The problem is the recent interface redesign, which made the product much worse to use day to day, so sit through a demo of the current UI before you sign a yearly contract. Starter is $250 a month billed yearly ($300 month to month) for 350 prompts; Growth is $417 a month billed yearly for 700.
Best for: teams that need every major engine in the base price and can live with the new interface.
AEO software inside Ahrefs and Semrush
Both suites now sell AI visibility tracking, and for most teams starting AEO the barrier to entry is too high. Brand Radar’s AI index starts at $199 a month, more than Searchable’s Pro plan, and Semrush’s $99 toolkit tracks 25 prompts, a quarter of Searchable Pro’s 100. They earn their place when you already pay for the suite and want AI data next to your keyword data.
8. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar shows AI mentions from a database of 551 million prompts across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude. The AI Visibility Index is $199 a month, and custom prompt tracking runs from $50 a month to $699 a month for every model. I use Ahrefs daily, and my one gripe carries over to AEO: its rank tracking counts an AI Overview citation as position one, even when the citation is buried deep in the answer and the brand is never named.
Best for: teams already paying for Ahrefs who want AI visibility next to their keyword data.
9. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month and includes brand performance reports, prompt research, and tracking for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Gemini, with 50 more prompts for $60 a month. There is no free trial.
Best for: teams already paying for Semrush. For the broader comparison of the two suites, see Semrush vs Ahrefs.
Which AI engines each AEO tracker covers
Engine coverage is where AEO trackers differ most, and add-on engines change the real price. A tracker that sells Claude as an add-on costs more than its headline price if your buyers are technical evaluators who research in Claude.
| Tracker | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Searchable | Yes | Add-on | Add-on | Yes | Yes | Add-on | Add-on |
| Profound (Enterprise) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Otterly.AI | Yes | Add-on | Add-on | Yes | Yes | Add-on | Yes |
| Scrunch | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
Coverage as listed on each vendor’s site in November 2026. Profound’s free trial covers ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews only; Scrunch also tracks Meta AI, and Profound also tracks DeepSeek. Semrush reports AI Overviews in its classic rank tracking, outside the toolkit’s prompt tracking.
Best tools for researching the questions
10. AlsoAsked
AlsoAsked maps the People Also Ask questions around a topic, which is the closest public proxy for the follow-up questions AI engines expand a prompt into. Basic is $12 a month for 100 credits, and non-registered users get free searches to try it.
Best for: building FAQ sections and prompt lists from real question data.
11. Ahrefs connected to Claude
The biggest change in my own keyword research this year is piping Ahrefs data into Claude through Ahrefs’ official MCP server. Claude can pull the keyword and SERP data, group it by intent, and draft the question list in one pass. My full process is in keyword research for SEO. Semrush has an official MCP server too, so this works with either suite.
Best for: teams that want question research and planning done in one place.
Best tools for writing and structuring answers
12. Claude
Claude is my pick for drafting and restructuring pages for AEO. It follows a specific outline closely and handles answer-first rewrites well: the answer in the first sentence, sections that stand on their own, and specific facts. That structure is what lifted AI-answer presence on an HR-tech account from about 30% to 48% across eight retrofitted pages in 30 days. The full head-to-head is in ChatGPT vs Claude.
Best for: drafting and retrofitting long-form pages.
13. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is my pick for title tags and meta descriptions and short rewrites, where it is faster and more consistent than Claude. Check any links it gives you before you use them.
Best for: short-form copy and quick edits.
Best tools for schema and technical checks
14. Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator
Google’s Rich Results Test checks whether your structured data qualifies for Google’s rich results, and the Schema Markup Validator checks schema.org syntax for any engine. Both are free. Google says structured data is not required for its AI features, and it is still worth getting right as part of SEO. My schema markup guide covers what to add.
Best for: validating schema before and after a release.
15. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog crawls your site and extracts titles, headings, canonicals, and structured data at scale, and its official MCP server lets you query a crawl from Claude. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. Unless your site is large, Search Console catches most of the big errors on its own.
Best for: site-wide checks on larger sites.
Pick your AEO stack by budget
- Free: Search Console, HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, a manual prompt set in a spreadsheet, and the Rich Results Test.
- Around $125 a month: add Searchable Pro for tracking, audits, and the Claude MCP, plus AlsoAsked for question research. On a tighter budget, Otterly.AI starts at $29.
- Already on a suite: Ahrefs Brand Radar or Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit keeps AI data next to your keyword data; connect the suite to Claude over MCP.
Whichever stack you choose, the prompt list decides whether the numbers mean anything. On an HR-tech account, the tracked set grew from 139 to 200 prompts, adding CFO-ready ROI questions, alternatives, and integrations, before it covered the questions buyers ask right before they talk to sales. More on building that list is in my guide to AI visibility, and the wider AI tool stack for SEO work is in AI SEO tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AEO tool?
An AEO tool is software that helps a brand appear in AI-generated answers. Most AEO tools track how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI features name or cite a brand for a set of prompts; others help research questions, write answer-first content, or validate schema.
What is the best AEO tool?
The best AEO tool for most B2B teams is Searchable, paired with Google Search Console’s free Generative AI report. On a small budget, Otterly.AI starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts.
What does AEO stand for?
AEO stands for answer engine optimization: optimizing content and brand presence so AI answer engines name and cite you. It describes the same work as GEO, generative engine optimization, which is explained in what is GEO.
What is HubSpot’s AEO grader?
HubSpot’s AEO grader is its free AI Search Grader, a one-time check of how OpenAI’s models, Perplexity, and Gemini describe your brand. It scores sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position, and it does not track changes over time. HubSpot AEO, the paid version, monitors the same three engines continuously for $50 a month.
How do you measure AEO?
Measure AEO with a fixed prompt set: the share of prompts where your brand is named, the share where your page is cited, AI Overview impressions in Search Console, and AI-referred sessions and pipeline in your analytics. Re-run the same prompts on a schedule so the trend is comparable.
Is AEO worth it?
AEO is worth it for B2B companies whose buyers research with AI before they talk to sales, because the brands named in those answers get the first call. On the HR-tech account above, eight retrofitted pages gained 18 points of AI-answer presence in 30 days, so the on-page side shows results quickly.
Do I still need structured data with AEO tools?
You still need structured data as part of SEO, and AEO tools do not replace it. Google says schema is not required for its AI features, while clean structured data helps every engine understand what a page is about. Validate it with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.
Is there a free AEO audit tool?
The best free AEO audit tool combination is Google Search Console’s Generative AI report, HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, and a manual prompt test across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Paid trackers add history, competitor comparison, and citation sources.