AEO tools compared: engine coverage, citation tracking, and content execution
Most AEO tools look alike on a feature page and separate sharply on three axes: which engines your plan actually covers, what the tool records about each citation, and how far it takes the writing. Coverage is gated by tier at nearly every vendor here. Citation records differ enough that two tools can disagree about the same answer. And only some of these products ever produce a finished page.
We publish this page and sell one of the tools in every table on it. Figures were read on the vendor pages on 29 August 2026.
In short
The questions this page answers, and the short answers.
- Which AI engines do AEO tools actually cover on a paid plan?
- Fewer than the marketing pages suggest. Writesonic covers three surfaces on its brand self serve plans and ten at enterprise. Peec AI includes three of six. AthenaHQ covers five free and ten paid. Scrunch AI covers four at entry and nine at enterprise. GetXEO polls four.
- What does citation tracking record in an AEO tool?
- At minimum whether a brand appeared. Better tools record where in the answer it appeared, which sources the engine used, and whether a source was quoted or merely consulted. Peec AI separates used from cited. Profound reports competitive position. The depth of that record is what a report is worth.
- Which AEO tools produce finished pages rather than recommendations?
- Writesonic, AirOps, Profound, Conductor, AthenaHQ and GetXEO all produce drafts, and several publish into a content system. Ahrefs and Scrunch AI improve a draft that already exists. Peec AI produces no content at all.
- Why does sampling frequency matter when comparing AEO tools?
- Because the same prompt can return different answers on different runs, so a single check is a sample rather than a fact. Profound analyzes ninety responses per prompt each month on its main paid plan. Most rivals check daily. A weekly rhythm gives a coarser trend line.
- How should a buyer compare AEO tool prices?
- By what each plan meters rather than by the headline figure. Prompts, checks, credits, tasks, responses and drafts are six different units. A credit meter moves with configuration, so switching on fan out or a heavier model can multiply the same workload several times over.
The three axes this comparison uses
Why coverage, records and execution decide most AEO purchases.
Feature lists in this category are long and nearly identical, which is why they are useless for choosing. Three axes actually separate these products, and each one can be checked on a vendor page.
- Engine coverage. Which AI surfaces your plan watches, not which the vendor supports. Coverage is gated by tier almost everywhere, and the gap between the two figures is often three engines against ten
- Citation tracking. What gets recorded when a brand appears. Whether it was named or quoted, where in the answer it sat, and which sources the engine leaned on to build that answer
- Content execution. How far the tool takes the writing. A brief, a draft, or a page published into your own content system. This is the widest gap in the category
A fourth axis matters and is rarely published: how many times a prompt is checked. The same prompt can return different answers on different runs, so any single check is a sample. Sampling depth is what makes a trend line trustworthy.
Engine coverage, plan by plan
What each plan watches, rather than what the vendor supports.
Read this table against your intended plan, because the marketing figure and the plan row rarely agree.
| Tool | Engines on a paid self serve plan | At the top |
|---|---|---|
| Profound | ChatGPT alone at entry, three on the main plan | 9 |
| GetXEO | Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity | 4 |
| AirOps | ChatGPT at entry, four above it | 4 |
| Peec AI | Three chosen from six | 11 claimed |
| Writesonic | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | 10 |
| Conductor | Three on the AI search page, more on others | 6 in all |
| Semrush | Six named across the AI plans | 6 |
| Ahrefs | Six in the index, Claude with custom prompts | 7 |
| AthenaHQ | Five free, ten on either paid tier | 10 |
| Scrunch AI | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot | 9 |
Scrunch AI covers four AI platforms on its entry plan and nine at enterprise, and Semrush names six surfaces across its AI plans. Three more patterns are worth naming. Writesonic holds seven of its ten platforms for the enterprise tier, so a brand paying three hundred and ninety nine dollars a month watches three. Peec AI includes three models on every published plan and sells a fourth as an add on. And AthenaHQ covers five models free and ten on either paid tier.
Two vendors publish more than the tier grid suggests. AthenaHQ covers five models on its free tier and ten on both paid tiers, which no other vendor here matches on an included plan. Profound reaches nine answer engines at its enterprise tier and one on its entry plan.
Citation tracking: what each tool records
The difference between a mention, a citation and a source.
Every tool reports whether a brand appeared. What separates them is the record kept underneath that yes.
| Tool | What the record carries |
|---|---|
| Profound | Citations, sentiment, ranking, competitive position, and the sites influencing answers |
| GetXEO | One composite score with three sub scores, model citation rates and a delta |
| Peec AI | Visibility, position inside the answer, sentiment, and sources split into used and cited |
| Semrush | Visibility, sentiment across many locations, and which outlets models quote most |
| Ahrefs | Brand mentions, citations, impressions and share of voice, with prompt volumes attached |
| AthenaHQ | Citations by model, source intelligence, and citation rate per page |
The distinction that matters most is between a source an engine used and a source it named. Peec AI separates the two directly, marking whether content informed an answer or was explicitly cited. That difference decides whether a page is earning attribution or quietly feeding an answer that credits somebody else.
Position matters too. A brand named in the first line of an answer is not in the same situation as one mentioned at the end, and research on citation factors finds that pages carrying figures, quotes and citations get named noticeably more often. Any tool reporting a flat yes is throwing away the part of the record you would act on.
Content execution: brief, draft, or published page
How far each tool takes the writing, in three bands.
This is the widest gap in the category, and the one buyers most often discover after signing.
- Published into your system. Writesonic exports a finished article into WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow or Ghost in one click, AirOps routes drafts through review and back into a named content system, and Profound Agents publish approved content into an existing CMS
- Drafts, without a publishing path. Conductor meters drafts by the year at sixty, one hundred and eighty and six hundred, AthenaHQ produces optimized articles through a review flow, and GetXEO produces fifty blogs a month as one connected set on a sequenced calendar
- Advice about a draft you write. The Ahrefs AI Content Helper grades a draft and suggests changes, and Peec AI stops at a recommendation whose advice points at work beyond the site
Semrush sits across two of those bands, because its writing lives in a separate Content Toolkit at sixty dollars a month rather than in the AI visibility plans. A team pricing the AI toolkit alone is not pricing the writing.
Where the three axes disagree
The tool leading one axis rarely leads the others.
No product here wins all three, and the pattern in the mismatch is the useful part.
Coverage and execution pull apart. The widest engine coverage on an included plan belongs to AthenaHQ, which also runs outreach and edits crawler files. The deepest publishing path belongs to Writesonic and AirOps. Those are different products for different problems, and no ranking reconciles them.
Depth and breadth pull apart too. Profound analyzes nine thousand responses a month against a hundred prompts on its main paid plan, which is a narrow set checked hard. Ahrefs publishes an index across hundreds of millions of prompts, which is a wide set checked once. Both are defensible and they answer different questions.
And execution does not imply structure. Six tools here will write a page. One decides which pages should exist together first. That is our own position and we hold it as a design judgment rather than a measured finding, since nobody has run the comparison.
How to read a plan row before you buy
Four checks that take an afternoon and prevent surprises.
Every mistake we have watched a buyer make in this category traces to reading a marketing page instead of a plan row.
- Count the engines on your tier. Not the logo strip. The row in the comparison table for the plan you will sign
- Find the meter. Prompts, checks, credits, tasks or drafts. Then work out what your intended configuration consumes per month
- Check where the writing lives. Included, sold separately, or absent. Semrush sells it as a different product on a different invoice
- Ask what happens at the ceiling. Overage billed, work paused, or an upgrade required. All three exist in this set
One more thing worth doing before any trial. Check which AI crawlers your own site allows, agent by agent, because OpenAI says its systems pick up a robots change in about a day. A blocked crawler will flatten every number a tool reports, and no dashboard will tell you that is the cause.
Frequently asked questions
Longer tail questions that did not need a section of their own.
Does more engine coverage produce better AI visibility results?
Not by itself. Coverage decides what you can see, not what buyers use. A brand whose customers live in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews gains little from watching seven more surfaces, and pays for the privilege on most plans here.
What is the difference between a used source and a cited source?
A used source informed the answer without being named. A cited source appears in the answer with a link or a mention. Only the second one earns attribution, and a tool that reports both shows where a brand is quietly feeding somebody else's answer.
Should a brand buy separate tools for AI visibility tracking and for content?
It depends on whether the same team owns both. One vendor is simpler to run and harder to replace. Two vendors let each job be bought on merit, at the cost of moving findings between systems by hand every month.
How often do AI visibility platforms check a prompt?
Daily is the common default across AEO platforms, and Profound analyzes about ninety responses per prompt each month on its main paid plan. GetXEO publishes a weekly rhythm with scans available on demand. Frequency is published on most pricing pages.
Sources
The 19 records behind every external claim on this page.
All were published or last updated within the past twelve months. A competitor page appears only as a record of that vendor’s own published terms.
- Machine Relations, AI search citation factors research
- OpenAI, the crawler and user agent documentation
- Cloudflare, the AI crawler bot reference naming each operator, category and user agent
- Gond and others at Microsoft Research, enabling determinism in LLM inference, January 2026
- Writesonic, the published pricing page and plan comparison, read 29 August 2026
- Writesonic, the published AI article writer page, read 29 August 2026
- Profound, the published pricing page and plan comparison, read 29 August 2026
- Profound, the published Agents page, read 29 August 2026
- AirOps, the published platform page, read 29 August 2026
- Conductor, the published pricing and plan comparison, read 29 August 2026
- Semrush, the published Content Toolkit page, read 29 August 2026
- Semrush, the published AI visibility solution page and FAQ, read 29 August 2026
- GetXEO, the published XEO calendar feature page, read 29 August 2026
- Ahrefs, the published Brand Radar page, read 29 August 2026
- Ahrefs, the published AI Content Helper page, read 29 August 2026
- AthenaHQ, the published home page and FAQ, read 29 August 2026
- Peec AI, the published product page, read 29 August 2026
- Peec AI, the published pricing page and plan comparison, read in a browser 29 August 2026
- Scrunch AI, the published pricing page, read in a browser 29 August 2026
Read next
The rest of this cluster, in the order it makes sense to read.
- What are the best answer engine optimization (AEO) tools in 2026
- Reporting only or reporting plus execution: the real divide in AEO tools
- Best answer engine optimization (AEO) tools for B2B SaaS brands in 2026
- AEO tools to avoid and the warning signs to look for
- Profound vs Peec AI vs AirOps: how the leading AEO tools compare