Most generative engine optimization tools sell you the same thing: a dashboard that tells you whether ChatGPT mentions your brand. What separates them is price, which engines they check, and whether they tell you anything useful once the number arrives. We ran six against our own site and our clients' before recommending any of them.
The Short Answer
The best generative engine optimization tools in 2026 are HubSpot's AEO Grader for a free first look, Otterly.ai at $29/month for small budgets, Semrush's AI Toolkit at $99/month if you already pay for Semrush, Peec AI at $95/month for dedicated daily monitoring, and Profound for enterprise teams tracking ten or more AI engines.
What AI Visibility Software Actually Measures
Every one of these platforms works the same way. You give it a list of prompts your customers might type. It runs those prompts against AI engines on a schedule, records whether your brand appears, and logs which sources the answer cited.
That produces three numbers worth watching: how often you show up, who shows up instead of you, and which of your pages get cited when you do appear.
What none of them can give you is search volume. Nobody outside OpenAI knows how many people asked ChatGPT about Portland marketing agencies last month. You're measuring your share of a pie whose size is a secret, so price your expectations accordingly.
The Best Generative Engine Optimization Tools, Compared
Here's how the six stack up at their entry price. The per-tool breakdowns below add the detail the table can't hold.
| Tool | Entry price | Engines at entry price | Prompts | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot AEO Grader | Free | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini | One-off scan | A first look |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | 15 | Solo operators, small budgets |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo add-on | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini | Varies by plan | Teams already on Semrush |
| Peec AI | $95/mo (~€89/mo) | Choose 3 of ~7 engines | 50 | Agencies and in-house teams |
| Profound | $99/mo (ChatGPT only) | One at Starter, three at Growth | 50 | Enterprise brands |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Bundled with Ahrefs | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot | Varies | SEO teams already in Ahrefs |
HubSpot AEO Grader: Free
HubSpot's AEO Grader is free. Type in your brand name, location, product or service, and industry, and you get a snapshot of how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini describe you. No account required, just a short form to unlock the full report. It scores you across five dimensions: sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position.
It's a one-time diagnostic, not a monitor. Run it, screenshot the result, and use it to decide whether the problem is worth paying to solve. For a lot of local service businesses the answer after one scan is "we don't appear at all," which is useful information for free. HubSpot also sells a paid AEO product at $50/month if you want ongoing tracking.
Otterly.ai: $29/Month
Otterly.ai is the cheapest real monitor on the market. Lite gets you 15 tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with a seven-day trial and no card required.
Read the add-on pricing before you commit. Gemini and Google AI Mode each cost extra on every tier, from $9/month on Lite up to $149/month on Premium. Claude costs more: $29/month on Lite, climbing to $439/month on Premium. A cheap plan gets expensive fast once you add the engines you actually care about. Standard runs $189/month for 100 prompts, Premium $489/month for 400.
Fifteen prompts sounds thin, and it is. But if you're a plumbing company in Beaverton, fifteen well-chosen prompts covers most of how people really ask.
Semrush AI Toolkit: $99/Month
Semrush now offers two ways in. You can bolt the AI Visibility add-on ($99/month) onto an existing Semrush SEO plan (starting at $139.95/month, or $117.33/month billed annually), call it roughly $220 to $240 minimum. Or you can skip the add-on entirely and take the bundled Starter SEO and AI Search plan at $199/month ($165.17 annualized), which includes both in one price.
If you already pay for Semrush, it's an easy yes either way. The AI visibility data sits beside your rankings and backlinks, and nobody has to learn a second interface.
Peec AI: $95/Month
Peec AI is where most of the brands and agencies we talk to have landed. The Starter plan includes 50 prompts across 3 chosen AI engines, tracked daily rather than weekly, with unlimited seats.
Daily tracking matters more than it sounds. AI answers are volatile in a way rankings aren't. The same prompt can return a different set of brands two days running, and weekly snapshots will hand you noise dressed up as a trend.
The trade-off is engine choice: you pick 3 from a wider pool, and expanding coverage, including Claude, which sits behind the Enterprise tier, comes as a paid add-on. For a business tracking one or two priority engines, that's a non-issue. For anyone who wants full-spectrum coverage from day one, it adds up.
Profound: $99 to $5,000/Month
Profound publishes its Starter and Growth tiers directly on its pricing page. Starter is $99/month (billed yearly) for ChatGPT tracking only, with 50 prompts tracked. Growth is $399/month for three answer engines and 100 tracked prompts. Enterprise is custom-quoted, covering up to nine answer engines, including Claude, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok, and Google AI Mode, along with API access, SSO/SOC2, and dedicated support.
What you get at the top end is genuinely different: enterprise plans are built on broader, real user-facing interaction data across a wider set of engines rather than a single API. If you're a national brand with a category to defend, that depth is worth paying for. If you're a regional service business, the $99 ChatGPT-only tier may still be narrower coverage than you'd get from Otterly at a similar price point.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: Bundled
Ahrefs Brand Radar is worth including because Ahrefs published the number everyone now quotes. In its own traffic data, AI search visitors made up 0.5% of sessions but 12.1% of signups, roughly 23 times the conversion rate of standard organic traffic.
Treat that as one company's data, not a law of nature. Ahrefs sells to exactly the people who ask AI tools for SEO software recommendations, which is close to a best case. The direction still holds though: fewer visitors, much warmer ones.
As a tool, Brand Radar is fine if Ahrefs is already your SEO platform and thin if it isn't.
The Part No Tool Does for You
Every platform here measures. None of them fix anything.
We've watched a client buy a $400/month subscription, stare at a visibility score of 4%, and change nothing for a full quarter. The tool worked perfectly. It told them they were invisible, every single day, in color.
Getting cited is content work: definitions clear enough for a model to lift, specific numbers instead of ranges, comparison and pricing pages that answer the question outright, and structured data that makes the answer machine-readable. The software tells you whether that work landed. It isn't the work. If you want the strategy underneath the tooling, start with our breakdown of how GEO differs from traditional SEO.
What Is a Generative Engine Optimization Tool?
Software that tracks whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini mention your brand when people ask questions in your category, and which of your pages they cite as sources.
How Much Does Generative Engine Optimization Software Cost in 2026?
Anywhere from free to $5,000 a month. Real monitoring starts around $29/month with Otterly.ai. Most small and mid-sized businesses land between $100 and $400/month. Enterprise platforms with full engine coverage run into the thousands.
Do I Need a GEO Tool If I Already Use Google Search Console?
Search Console folds Google AI Overview impressions into your regular data with no clean way to separate them, and it shows you nothing at all about ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. If those matter to your buyers, Search Console alone won't tell you what you need.
Are Free AI Generative Engine Optimization Tools Good Enough?
For finding out whether you have a problem, yes. HubSpot's AEO Grader will tell you in two minutes whether AI engines know you exist. For tracking whether your work is moving the number, no. You need something that runs on a schedule.
Which One Should You Buy?
Run the free grader first. If you already turn up in AI answers for your core services, a $29 monitor is enough to keep an eye on it. If you don't appear at all, spend the tool budget on content and structured data for two quarters, then buy the monitor to prove the work paid off.
We do this for service businesses across the Portland metro. If you want to know where you stand before spending anything, get in touch and we'll run the diagnostic with you.
Related reading: GEO vs SEO: Understanding the New Search Landscape · What Is Answer Engine Optimization and Why It Matters Now · See also Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization.
