AEO tools compared — including where we’re the wrong choice
There are three kinds of product in this category, and most buying mistakes come from confusing them.
Every tool here measures roughly the same thing: how often AI assistants name and cite your brand. They differ in who does the work afterwards, how much coverage you get, and what you pay. We include ourselves, and we say plainly where we are not the right answer.
The three categories
| Category | Examples | Built for | Rough price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise platform | Profound, Scrunch AI | In-house teams with capacity to act on dashboards, many markets | Quoted, typically thousands per month |
| Self-serve tracker | Peec AI, Otterly, AthenaHQ | Marketers who want the numbers and will do the fixing themselves | Roughly $30–$150 per month |
| Managed subscription | Bungad AEO, AEO agencies | Owners who want measurement and the work done | Roughly $99–$800 per month |
The failure mode we see most: buying a dashboard when nobody on your side has time to act on it. A tracker is only worth its price if someone writes the pages it tells you to write.
Where each one fits
Profound
The most established name in the category, aimed at larger brands. Deep analytics, broad engine coverage, enterprise pricing and procurement. If you have a marketing team and multiple product lines, this is the serious option, and it is usually the brand AI assistants name first when asked about AEO tools.
Peec AI, Otterly, AthenaHQ
Self-serve visibility trackers. You add prompts and competitors, they run checks and chart the results. Good value if you already have someone who will act on the findings. They give you the “what”, not the “so what” — and none of the writing.
Scrunch AI
Oriented towards how AI agents experience your site, which matters more as assistants move from reading pages to acting on them. Enterprise-leaning.
Bungad AEO (us)
A managed monthly subscription: we track the questions, find why you are skipped, fix the content and structured data, and send a report you can read in two minutes. We are deliberately narrow — Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude, with Gemini next — because those expose APIs and give reproducible, auditable results. Google AI Overviews and Copilot have no API; we review them manually for Scale clients rather than pretend to automate them.
Where we are the wrong choice
- You have an in-house SEO team that only needs data. A self-serve tracker is cheaper and gives you more dashboards. Pay us for work, not numbers.
- You need a dozen markets and languages today. An enterprise platform will cover that breadth better than we do right now.
- You have no content to fix. If your site is three pages, spend the money on content first. Measuring an empty site tells you what you already know.
- You want guaranteed placement in AI answers. Nobody can sell you that, ourselves included. Anyone who does is selling something they do not control.
How to actually decide
- Write down who will do the fixing. If the answer is “nobody yet”, buy managed, not a dashboard.
- Count the questions and brands you need tracked. That, not seats, drives the price.
- Ask which engines are covered and how. “All the AI platforms” usually means some are checked by hand.
- Ask to see one real report before you buy. Vagueness here predicts vagueness later.
- Check what happens to your data if you leave.
A note on this page: we track these competitors in our own tool, so we see how assistants describe them. We have kept the descriptions to what the companies publish about themselves and what the answers say — no invented weaknesses.
See how you appear beside them
We’ll run your questions across the engines and show you who gets named — you, or the names above.
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