Top 10 AEO/GEO Platforms in 2026

The Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization category that did not exist as a named vendor lane two years ago now has dozens of platforms competing for the same buyer. Most listicles in this space are written by one of the vendors and order the list to promote themselves at #1. This guide does the opposite job: a feature-breadth ranking with verified pricing where it is public and an explicit "sales-led" label where it is not, plus a runnable evaluation workflow so you can pressure-test every platform against your own data before a sales call.

The shape of the market in 2026: six of the ten leading platforms now publish pricing on their own site, four are still sales-led, and one ships a first-party Model Context Protocol server. Coverage of the five most-cited AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overview) is now table stakes at the entry tier — the differentiation has moved to depth of on-page scoring, integration surface for developer workflows, and how cleanly the platform translates findings into action.

Foglift is on this list because we built one of the platforms in it. We have ranked ourselves at #4 by feature breadth — fairly mid-list, ahead of the monitoring-only tools and behind the enterprise-focused platforms. The ranking criteria and the underlying data are below; if you disagree with the slot, the comparison table and runnable evaluation script will let you re-rank against your own priorities.

How we ranked these platforms

Five criteria, weighted equally:

1. AI engine coverage at entry tier. Number of generative engines tracked at the cheapest paid plan. Five engines is the modern baseline.
2. On-page scoring depth. Whether the platform produces an extractability score (structured data, headings, FAQ structure, entity identity) or only tracks mentions.
3. Public pricing. Whether a buyer can see the entry price without booking a sales call. Sales-led platforms are penalized one slot per criterion in cases where features are otherwise tied, because pricing opacity is a real friction cost for mid-market and developer-led teams.
4. Developer integration surface. Public API, CLI, MCP server, CI/CD documentation. The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey reports that 76% of developers are using or planning to use AI tools in their workflow, so editor-integration is no longer a nice-to-have for engineering buyers.
5. Recommendations engine. Whether the platform translates findings into prioritized actions, or only reports them. BrightEdge/xseek 2025 analysis found that sites with FAQ schema and strong structured data see up to 40% more AI Overview appearances — the platforms that surface these gaps with action guidance score higher than the ones that only flag them.

1. Profound

Profound is the most established of the AI-search-native platforms, positioning itself as "the full-stack marketing platform for the marketer of the future." Pricing is sales-led — the homepage routes every primary CTA to "Get a Demo" or "Get Started" and no entry tier is publicly listed as of April 2026. Coverage spans the major generative engines including Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and the platform leans toward enterprise brand-monitoring depth: agent-mention tracking, conversation analytics, and share-of-voice reporting at scale.

Key specs

• Pricing: not publicly listed (sales-led)
• AI engine coverage: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini (per public marketing copy)
• On-page scoring: monitoring-focused, on-page audit not the lead use case
• Developer integration: API access available on request; no public MCP server
• Best for: enterprise brand teams that need broad share-of-voice analytics across AI engines and have budget for a sales-led tier

2. AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ is one of the few purpose-built GEO platforms that publishes pricing on a Self-Serve tier. As of April 2026 the Self-Serve tier is $295/month, includes 3,600 credits, and advertises monitoring across eight major LLMs — the highest engine count among the platforms in this guide at the entry tier. Above Self-Serve sits a custom-priced Enterprise tier with the "Athena Citation Engine," white-glove setup, and a dedicated GEO specialist. The credit-based usage model is uncommon in this category and worth modeling against your monthly query volume before committing.

Key specs

• Pricing: $295/month Self-Serve; Enterprise custom (verified at athenahq.ai/pricing, April 2026)
• AI engine coverage: 8 LLMs (per published marketing copy)
• On-page scoring: content-optimization features at Self-Serve
• Developer integration: no public MCP server documented
• Best for: marketing teams that prioritize maximum engine coverage at the entry tier and are comfortable with a credit-based usage model

3. Peec AI

Peec AI is a Europe-based AI search visibility platform with four advertised tiers — Starter, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise — though as of April 2026 no monthly dollar amounts are published; tier features and contact forms route through a single "Talk to Sales" flow. Coverage scales by tier across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and additional engines. The product positioning emphasizes marketing-team accessibility (SEO and content managers as the explicit primary persona on the pricing page) rather than developer integration. For a comparison page that goes deeper, see our Foglift vs Peec AI feature comparison.

Key specs

• Pricing: tier names public (Starter, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise); monthly amounts not published
• AI engine coverage: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, others (scales by tier)
• On-page scoring: tracking-focused
• Developer integration: no public MCP server documented
• Best for: European marketing teams needing AI search tracking and comfortable with a sales-led pricing flow

4. Foglift

Foglift is the platform we build. It combines an eight-dimension AEO score (Structured Data Richness, Heading Clarity, FAQ Quality, Entity Identity, Content Depth, Citation Formatting, Topical Authority, AI Crawler Access) with five-engine AI Visibility tracking and an Actions Engine that converts findings into prioritized work. The Launch plan starts at $49/month — the lowest entry-tier price among full-stack AEO/GEO platforms with public pricing. Foglift is the only platform on this list that ships a first-party Model Context Protocol server: Cursor, Claude Code, and Windsurf can call scan_website, run_ai_visibility, and get_scan_history directly from an editor. The scanning engine is also published as an open-source CLI (foglift-scan on npm, MIT-licensed) — the only GEO/AEO-native CLI in the npm registry.

Key specs

• Pricing: Free; Launch $49/month (4,000 tokens, 3 brands); Growth $129/month (11,500 tokens, 10 brands); Enterprise $299/month (27,000 tokens, unlimited brands)
• AI engine coverage: 5 engines at every paid tier (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overview)
• On-page scoring: 8-dimension AEO score, full SEO/performance/security/accessibility audit
• Developer integration: REST API, MCP server, open-source CLI on npm, public docs
• Best for: developer-led teams, mid-market SaaS, and agencies that want AEO scoring + AI visibility tracking + actionable recommendations at a transparent self-serve price

5. Otterly.ai

Otterly.ai is the lowest-priced platform on this list at $29/month for the Lite plan (15 search prompts), but it is monitoring-focused and does not ship the on-page audit signals that scanning platforms produce. The Standard plan at $189/month (100 prompts) and Premium at $489/month (400 prompts) layer in unlimited workspaces, recommendations, and a Looker Studio connector. Coverage at every tier includes ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and MS Copilot. Otterly publishes a 15% annual-billing discount on every tier, which makes the effective annual price for Lite $25/month.

Key specs

• Pricing: Lite $29/month, Standard $189/month, Premium $489/month, Enterprise custom (verified at otterly.ai/pricing, April 2026)
• AI engine coverage: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, MS Copilot
• On-page scoring: not the lead use case; positioned as monitoring-first
• Developer integration: Looker Studio connector at Premium; no public MCP server documented
• Best for: solo operators or content teams that want low-cost AI mention tracking and don't need the full on-page audit surface

6. Semrush AI Toolkit

Semrush AI Toolkit is the AI-search extension to the Semrush SEO platform rather than a standalone product. Pricing is bundled into existing Semrush subscription tiers; the AI Toolkit itself does not have a separate public price point as of April 2026. The strength of this option is the consolidation: an existing Semrush customer adds AI search tracking inside the same dashboard they already use for keyword research and backlink analysis. The weakness is that AI search visibility is one feature among many, and the per-feature depth is less than purpose-built platforms like Profound or AthenaHQ.

Key specs

• Pricing: bundled into Semrush plans; no standalone price published
• AI engine coverage: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini (per published marketing copy)
• On-page scoring: leverages existing Semrush site audit infrastructure
• Developer integration: Semrush API; no public MCP server documented
• Best for: existing Semrush customers who want to add AI search tracking without procuring a second vendor

7. Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs Brand Radar is the AI search arm of the Ahrefs SEO platform. Pricing is unusual for this category — €358/month for the AI Visibility Index on select platforms, €654/month for all platforms, with custom-prompt add-ons starting at €47/month for 2,500 checks. Engine coverage is the broadest published across the platforms in this guide: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok, plus YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit during the current beta. The platform leverages Ahrefs' 243M-prompt organic dataset, which is a structurally different data foundation from purpose-built GEO startups.

Key specs

• Pricing: AI Visibility Index Select Platforms €358/month, All Platforms €654/month, plus add-ons (verified at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, April 2026)
• AI engine coverage: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Grok
• On-page scoring: leverages Ahrefs' existing site-audit infrastructure
• Developer integration: Ahrefs API; no public MCP server documented
• Best for: enterprise SEO teams already on Ahrefs that need the broadest engine coverage and have budget for the EU-priced tiers

8. Adobe LLM Optimizer

Adobe LLM Optimizer is the enterprise-CMS-integrated entry. It is positioned for organizations already running Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Marketo Engage, where the integration with existing Adobe content workflows is the differentiator rather than the standalone scoring capability. Pricing is sales-led with no public starting tier as of April 2026, consistent with the Adobe Experience Cloud licensing model. The product belongs on a vendor shortlist for any Adobe-Experience-Cloud customer and probably nowhere else.

Key specs

• Pricing: not publicly listed (sales-led, Adobe Experience Cloud licensing)
• AI engine coverage: per Adobe marketing materials — major engines, specifics not published
• On-page scoring: integrated with AEM content workflows
• Developer integration: Adobe Experience Cloud APIs
• Best for: enterprise teams already invested in Adobe Experience Cloud who want AEO scoring inside the CMS they already operate

9. Scrunch

Scrunch publishes pricing at $250/month for the Core (Brands) plan, which includes 125 unique prompts, 5 site audits per month, 1 workspace, and 5 user licenses. An Agency Core tier sits at $500/month with multi-brand support; both have custom-priced Enterprise upgrades with API access, SSO (SAML/OIDC), and dedicated support. Annual Enterprise agreements paid upfront receive what Scrunch describes as "a discount equivalent to two months free." Extra user seats are $25/month each or $75/month for a 5-seat pack. The platform positions itself on prompt-level monitoring depth — the 125-prompt Core allowance is generous relative to Otterly's 15-prompt Lite but at a higher price point.

Key specs

• Pricing: Core (Brands) $250/month, Agency Core $500/month, Enterprise custom (verified at scrunch.com/pricing, April 2026)
• AI engine coverage: per published marketing copy — major generative engines
• On-page scoring: 5 site audits/month at Core
• Developer integration: API access at Enterprise
• Best for: brands and agencies needing prompt-level monitoring depth and willing to pay above the entry tier of self-serve competitors

10. Rankability

Rankability rounds out the list as a credit-based alternative monitoring platform. Core is $199/month ($166/month annual, 3 seats, 5 clients, 25,000 credits); Team is $399/month ($332/month annual, 5 seats, 15 clients, 75,000 credits); Agency is $799/month ($666/month annual, 15 seats, 50 clients, 200,000 credits). All tiers include white-label reporting and API access — that combination is uncommon at this price point and is the structural reason Rankability earns a slot. For a comparison page that goes deeper, see our Foglift vs Rankability comparison.

Key specs

• Pricing: Core $199/month, Team $399/month, Agency $799/month (verified at rankability.com/pricing, April 2026)
• AI engine coverage: per published marketing copy
• On-page scoring: full toolset access at every tier
• Developer integration: API access at every tier
• Best for: agencies needing white-label reporting and API access at every tier, with multi-client allowances

Comparison table

Four columns: tool, who it's best for, whether a free or trial tier exists, and the entry-tier monthly price (or "sales-led" when no public price exists). All pricing was verified by direct WebFetch against each vendor's own pricing page in April 2026.

How to evaluate any of these platforms in 60 seconds

Vendor demos are designed to make every platform look great. The cleaner test is to run the same evaluation against your own URL and compare the output. The script below uses the open-source foglift-scan CLI (MIT-licensed, on npm) to produce an AEO score and structured-data audit for any URL — your site, a competitor's, or a vendor's own pricing page. Run it before every sales call and the conversation starts on different ground.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# evaluate-aeo-platforms.sh
# Run this before every AEO/GEO platform sales call.
# Usage: ./evaluate-aeo-platforms.sh https://your-site.com
set -euo pipefail
URL="${1:?usage: evaluate-aeo-platforms.sh https://your-site.com}"
OUT="$(mktemp -d)"

# 1. Baseline AEO score on YOUR site (no API key needed for the free scan)
npx -y foglift-scan "$URL" --json > "$OUT/aeo.json"

# 2. Pull the eight-dimension breakdown so you know which dimensions are weak
node -e '
  const r = require("'"$OUT"'/aeo.json");
  const d = r.aeo?.dimensions || {};
  Object.entries(d).sort((a,b)=>a[1]-b[1]).forEach(([k,v]) => console.log(k.padEnd(28), v));
'

# 3. Now run the same scan against three competitors so you have a benchmark
for u in https://competitor-a.com https://competitor-b.com https://competitor-c.com; do
  npx -y foglift-scan "$u" --json > "$OUT/$(echo "$u" | tr / _).json" || true
done

echo "Audit artifacts in: $OUT"
echo "Take this to your AEO platform demo and ask the vendor to show how their tool"
echo "would lift the lowest two dimensions. Watch how concrete the answer gets."

The point of the script is not to replace any of the platforms in this guide — it is a baseline scoring layer that ships in every real AEO/GEO toolset and that lets you walk into a sales call with the same data the vendor sees. Foglift's hosted product layers five-engine AI Visibility tracking, an Actions Engine, and team workflows on top of this scoring core. Other platforms layer their own monitoring depth and integrations on top of comparable scoring cores. The CLI just removes the asymmetry of walking into a demo without your own data.

What this list deliberately excludes

• AEO/GEO agencies and consultancies. Single Grain, NoGood, RevenueZen, iPullRank, and similar firms appear on competitor "top AEO companies" lists, but they are services businesses, not platforms. A buyer comparing software should not be asked to compare against an agency retainer.
• General-purpose marketing analytics with AI add-ons. BrightEdge, Conductor, MarketMuse, and similar platforms have shipped AI-search modules but their primary product surface remains enterprise SEO. The guide focuses on platforms whose AI search capability is the lead use case, with two exceptions for the incumbent SEO platforms (Semrush, Ahrefs) where the AI module is large enough to be evaluated independently.
• Open-source tools. The open-source GEO/AEO building blocks — Lighthouse, axe-core, MDN HTTP Observatory, schema-dts, Lychee, pa11y, and foglift-scan — are covered in Best Open-Source GEO/AEO Tools 2026. They are essential primitives but not full platforms.
• Adjacent tools that don't do AI search optimization. Brand-mention monitoring tools that pre-date the AI-search era (Brand24, Mention, Meltwater) appear in some "AI brand monitoring" listicles but they were not built for generative engines and do not score on-page extractability.

FAQ

What is the difference between an AEO platform and a GEO platform?

AEO and GEO describe overlapping practices that have converged in the vendor landscape. AEO emphasizes on-page extractability — structured data, FAQ formatting, heading clarity. GEO, formalized in Aggarwal et al.'s KDD 2024 paper that introduced GEO-Bench, focuses on source-level optimization that lifts visibility in generative engines by up to 40%. In 2026 most platforms cover both surfaces. The phrase "AEO/GEO platform" in this guide refers to any tool that scans on-page signals and tracks brand mentions across at least two generative AI engines.

Which AEO/GEO platforms publish their pricing in 2026?

Six of ten in this guide: AthenaHQ ($295), Otterly.ai ($29 / $189 / $489), Ahrefs Brand Radar (€358 / €654), Foglift ($49 / $129 / $299), Scrunch ($250 / $500), and Rankability ($199 / $399 / $799). Four are sales-led: Profound, Peec AI, Adobe LLM Optimizer, and Semrush AI Toolkit (bundled into existing Semrush subscriptions).

What is the cheapest AEO/GEO platform with full feature breadth?

Foglift Launch at $49/month is the lowest-priced full-stack AEO/GEO platform that combines on-page scanning, multi-engine AI Visibility tracking, and an actionable recommendations layer. Otterly.ai Lite is lower at $29/month but is monitoring-only — it does not produce an AEO score, structured-data audit, or accessibility audit.

Do any AEO/GEO platforms offer a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server?

Foglift is the only platform on this list that ships a first-party MCP server as of April 2026. Cursor, Claude Code, and Windsurf can call scan_website, run_ai_visibility, and get_scan_history directly from an editor. The Model Context Protocol specification was released by Anthropic in November 2024.

Which AEO/GEO platform has the broadest AI engine coverage?

AthenaHQ Self-Serve advertises eight LLMs at the entry tier, the highest count. Foglift, Otterly, Peec, Profound, and Scrunch all cover the five most-cited engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overview). Ahrefs Brand Radar covers seven on the €358/month tier and the same seven plus YouTube/TikTok/Reddit on the €654/month tier. The marginal value of the seventh engine is debatable; BrightEdge/xseek 2025 found that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews account for the majority of AI-referred traffic.

How should a developer-led team evaluate AEO/GEO platforms?

Three axes vendor marketing tends to flatten: public CLI or API for CI/CD integration; transparency or open-sourcing of the on-page scoring engine; integration with the editor surface developers actually live in (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf via MCP). The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey reports that 76% of developers are using or planning to use AI tools in their workflow, so editor integration is no longer a nice-to-have for engineering buyers.

Why is Adobe LLM Optimizer on this list when it is enterprise-only?

For completeness. Any AEO/GEO buyer evaluating enterprise CMS-integrated options will see Adobe LLM Optimizer on a vendor shortlist if they are already an Adobe Experience Cloud customer. It is included for that buyer; it is not the recommended option for SMB or mid-market teams.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, Deshpande — "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (KDD 2024, arXiv:2311.09735). Introduces GEO-Bench (10,000 queries) and shows source-level optimization lifts generative-engine citation visibility by up to 40%.
2. SE Ranking / Search Engine Journal — "Top Factors Influencing ChatGPT Citations" (2025, 129,000-domain analysis). ChatGPT cites only 15% of retrieved pages; top 10 domains take 46% of all citations in a topic.
3. Stack Overflow — 2025 Developer Survey (n > 49,000 respondents). 76% of developers are using or planning to use AI tools in their workflow.
4. Gartner — "Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents" (February 2024).
5. BrightEdge / xseek — Structured data and AI Overview analysis (2025). Sites with FAQ schema and strong structured data see up to 40% more AI Overview appearances.
6. Anthropic — Model Context Protocol specification (modelcontextprotocol.io, November 2024). Defines the open interface that lets agentic tools call external servers.
7. Vendor pricing pages (verified April 2026) — AthenaHQ, Otterly.ai, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Scrunch, Rankability, Foglift, Profound, Peec AI, Adobe LLM Optimizer, Semrush. Pricing subject to change; verify against the vendor's own page before purchase.

Fundamentals: Learn about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — the two frameworks for optimizing your content for AI search engines.