AEO, or answer engine optimization, is getting a brand mentioned and cited when people ask AI assistants for recommendations. People are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews to recommend a product or a local business, and the brands named in those answers get the attention. AEO tools measure that visibility. They run prompts across the major engines, record which brands get mentioned and how often, track the sources each AI pulls from, and show how visibility changes over time.
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch AI, and Cairrot all do that core job, but each one was built for a different kind of team. Profound was built for enterprise marketing teams, and its prompt volume data comes from real user prompts. Peec AI focuses on monitoring, with a clean dashboard, unlimited seats, and multi-country tracking that works well for European and multilingual brands. Scrunch AI goes deeper on the technical side, with crawler analytics and an Agent Experience Platform that serves AI crawlers a machine-readable version of a site. Cairrot was built for agencies, local businesses, and multi-location brands, with location-level reporting, five LLMs under $100, and API access on every plan.
This is the current picture, tier by tier, with what each tier actually buys.
AEO tools comparison
Side-by-side look at positioning, strengths, gaps, and starting price.
| Tool | Best for | Where it wins | Where it falls short | Standout differentiator | Starts at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Cairrot
Featured
|
Agencies, local and multi-location brands, SMBs | Five LLMs under $100, local AEO, API on every plan, lowest per-client cost | No prompt volume dataset, no SOC 2 yet, smaller company | Only local-to-global AEO toolkit in this group | $39/mo |
Profound |
Enterprise brands with budget and a dedicated AEO team | Real prompt volume data, content Agents, crawler analytics, compliance | ChatGPT only at $99, three engines max on self-serve, $399 per agency client | Prompt Volumes built on real user prompts | $99/mo |
Peec AI |
In-house European and multilingual teams | Clean dashboard, unlimited seats, strong multi-country tracking | Three-model cap on every self-serve plan, monitoring only | Unlimited users on every tier | €85/mo |
Scrunch AI |
Enterprises and Sitecore customers | Crawler analytics, Agent Experience Platform, SOC 2 Type II | $300 floor per brand, key features on Enterprise, new Sitecore ownership | Serves AI crawlers a machine-readable site | $300/mo |
What to look for in an AEO tool
- Engine coverage on the tier you can afford. ChatGPT alone is a partial picture. Check which engines unlock at which price, and whether Claude and Gemini require a sales call.
- How prompts are metered. Find out the prompt allowance and whether it counts per engine, per project, or per brand.
- Local and location-level reporting. If your clients compete on “near me” searches, you need visibility by city or location, not just by country.
- Attribution to real outcomes. Mentions are a start. The better tools connect AI referral traffic to sessions, leads, and conversions in GA4.
- The sources AI actually cites. Reddit, YouTube, Google Maps, and review sites shape AI answers. Make sure the tool tracks those sources visibility.
- API and data portability. Having API access makes it much more convenient to take action and grab data.
- Agency economics. For agencies, look at two numbers: cost per client and cost per prospect audit.
Which AEO tool is best, and for whom?
There is no single best AEO platform, because these tools are not priced against each other. They are priced for different buyers.
- Profound is the strongest fit for enterprise brands with budget and a dedicated analyst.
- Peec AI is the best pure monitoring dashboard for in-house European teams.
- Scrunch AI fits enterprises that need crawler-level delivery control and hallucination detection, especially existing Sitecore customers.
- Cairrot is the best fit for agencies, multi-location brands, and SMBs that need multi-engine coverage, local breakdowns, and API access without a four-figure monthly commitment.
AEO tool pricing compared (2026)
| Platform | Entry price | Engines at entry | Real multi-engine price | API access | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cairrot | $39/moStarter | ChatGPT, Perplexity | $99/mo Pro5 LLMs | Unlimited, every plan | Yes, free trialNo card required |
| Profound | $99/moStarter | ChatGPT only | $399/mo Growth3 engines | Enterprise only | Growth trialCard required |
| Peec AI | ~€85/moStarter | Any 3 of 6 | €85 + €25–€115Per extra engine | Enterprise only | 7 daysNo card required |
| Scrunch AI | $300/moStarter | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot | $300/mo9 engines on Enterprise | Enterprise only | 7 daysNo card required |
Scroll horizontally to compare all features.
Price per engine
- Profound Growth: $399 for 3 engines = $133 per engine
- Scrunch Starter: $300 for 4 engines = $75 per engine
- Peec Starter: ~€85 for 3 engines = ~€28 per engine
- Cairrot Pro: $99 for 5 LLMs = $19.80 per engine
Profound pricing and review
Top alternatives to Profound
- Peec AI: The best overall of the big three. It has a cleaner product, a faster-moving team, and three engines from $95 a month instead of $399.
- Cairrot: Five LLMs, city-level reporting, GA4 attribution, and API access on every plan for $99 a month. It’s built for agencies that can’t absorb $399 per client.
- DemandSphere: One of the few pure analytics tools in the space that’s reasonably priced, run by a founder obsessed with product.
Profound is the best-funded platform in the category. It has raised $155 million, including a $96M Series C at a billion-dollar valuation, and it counts Fortune 500 companies, large e-commerce brands, and regulated industries like finance and healthcare among its core customers.
The product is solid, but price is a bit spendy. Profound charges enterprise rates for monitoring that other tools now match for a fraction of the cost. With that much capital behind it, we expected more innovation and a deeper feature set than what ships today.
Best for:
- Enterprise brands building a funded AEO program with a dedicated team
- Regulated industries that need SOC 2 and SSO before anything else
- Content teams that want AI-generated briefs and drafts inside the same platform
- Large e-commerce and retail brands tracking how products appear in AI shopping answers
What you’ll like
Profound is built for teams that treat AI search like a full-time job. Setup is quick, and you start with an industry prompt set you can tweak however you want. From there you can click from your visibility score straight into the exact citations behind it, compare how you’re doing across engines, and use Query Fanouts to see the searches an engine runs before it answers. The Platform Matrix points out the engines where you’re falling behind, and Agents turn all that data into briefs and drafts without you ever leaving the platform. Reviewers pretty much agree that depth is the reason to buy it. G2 users say it replaced guesswork with AI visibility they can actually track and report up to leadership, and they like the clean dashboards, the weekly summaries, and how fast new features ship.
- Prompt Volumes, a dataset of real user prompts that no one else in this comparison offers
- Agents that turn citation data into briefs, drafts, and optimizations
- Agent Analytics with CDN and GA4 integrations, available on the self-serve brand plans with unlimited domains
- Real enterprise compliance, dedicated support, and the largest review base in the category
Profound key features
Profound tracks how a brand appears in AI answers and adds prompt research, crawler tracking, and content tools on top. Most of the platform is designed for enterprise teams, so engine coverage and several features depend on the plan. The Starter plan covers ChatGPT, with more engines and features added on Growth and Enterprise.
Where it falls short
- It’s overpriced for what you get. Starter is one engine (ChatGPT), one seat, one region, and one language. Perplexity and AI Overviews start at $399. Claude and Gemini require Enterprise, which means a sales call before you see that data.
- Innovation hasn’t matched the funding. With $155M raised, buyers should expect the category’s most advanced feature set. Instead, product updates have been slow, and the core experience is monitoring that cheaper tools now match.
- There’s no API access on either self-serve plan.
- The spend is the thing to watch. Profound is burning capital aggressively. Before signing a long enterprise contract, it’s worth asking how that spend turns into product over the next few years.
Profound’s prospecting plan is the most interesting thing on its pricing page
This is the part most comparisons skip. Profound’s Agency Growth tier is $99 a month, and the base does not buy you a client account. It buys 10 pitch workspaces per month for running audits on prospects. Extra pitch workspaces are $10 each. Turning a pitch workspace into a real client workspace is a $399/month add-on, or $199/month for a bundle of 5 trial workspaces.
That is a genuinely smart product decision and worth understanding, because it tells you what Profound thinks agencies actually buy: a sales tool first, a reporting tool second.
The math is also brutal at scale. Ten full client workspaces is $99 + (10 × $399) = $4,089 a month before you have optimized anything.
Here is their pricing as of September 2026
Starter
$99$79/month
For small companies who want to monitor and understand their brand’s visibility online
- ChatGPT tracking only
- 50 prompts tracked
- 100 Agents credits/month
- Email support
Growth
Popular$399$319/month
For growing companies who want to monitor visibility and create AEO optimized content
- 3 Answer Engines tracked
- 100 prompts tracked
- 400 Agents credits/month
- Email support
Enterprise
Custom
For large companies and agencies building and orchestrating AEO marketing campaigns
- Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked
- Multiple companies tracked
- Tailored prompt tracking plan
- Dedicated Slack support
- SSO/SAML + SOC2 compliance
Annual billing runs $1,188/year for Starter and $4,788/year for Growth.
Summary
- Best for: Fortune 500 enterprises, especially in e-commerce, finance, and healthcare, with dedicated AEO budgets and teams.
- Key differentiator: Prompt Volumes data, an Agents content engine, SOC 2 Type II compliance, and crawler analytics through CDN integration.
- Value proposition: A premium, high-touch platform for organizations where AI visibility is a leadership priority and depth matters more than cost.
- Takeaway: Profound is the most complete enterprise AEO platform in this comparison. Agencies and SMBs with many smaller accounts will usually get better value from a tool priced per client at a lower level.
For the full breakdown, see our complete Profound review and pricing comparison.
Peec AI pricing and review
Top alternatives to Peec AI
- Cairrot: The move for agencies and local businesses that outgrow Peec’s three-engine cap. It covers five LLMs on the $99 Pro plan, with city-level reporting and API access on every plan.
- DemandSphere: One of the few pure AEO/SEO analytics tools that’s reasonably priced, backed by a founder obsessed with product and customers.
- SOCi: Worth a look for franchise and multi-location brands that want AI visibility tied into their local listings and reviews.
- Rankability: A fit for SEO agencies that want AI visibility tracking tied directly to content and SEO execution.
Peec AI is the overall best of the big three. It’s a Berlin-based AI search analytics platform for marketing teams. It shows how often a brand appears in AI answers, how it’s described, where it ranks against competitors, and which sources AI engines rely on when they write those answers. Of Profound, Peec, and Scrunch, Peec gives the most usable product for the money, and it’s the one improving fastest.
Best for:
- In-house marketing teams, especially in Europe
- Brands that need multi-country and multilingual tracking without paying per region
- Teams that want a clean monitoring dashboard and handle optimization elsewhere
What you’ll like
Peec AI is built for teams that want clear AI visibility without a steep learning curve. It launched in February 2025, raised a $21 million Series A that November, now serves more than 3,000 brands and agencies, and opened a New York office this year.
Europe is still where Peec is strongest, with multilingual coverage and multi-country tracking at no extra charge. It’s getting better in the US now that it has a local footprint, after opening a New York office this year. Peec also has the most product-focused team of the big three. We see them regularly and know several of their leaders, including CEO Marius Meiners and co-founder Daniel Drabo, whom we spent time with at SEO Week. The pace of shipping reflects that:
- the Actions engine turns cited sources into a prioritized list of opportunities
- AI Shopping Analytics launched in June 2026
- the native MCP server pipes Peec data straight into Claude, Cursor, and other AI tools, and it’s a favorite with agencies building their own reporting
Users consistently say the dashboard feels clean instead of crowded, with an easy path from the overview into deeper analysis. You can open the actual AI chats behind your numbers and see which domains and URLs got cited. The one onboarding complaint that comes up is that the suggested prompt set can overlap and needs some cleanup.
- Unlimited user seats on every paid tier, which is rare and great for larger teams
- Fast setup, with suggested prompts generated from your site
- Strong multilingual coverage and multi-country tracking with no surcharge for extra regions
- Sentiment and source analysis that reviewers consistently rate highly
Peec AI features
Peec AI runs tracked prompts daily and reports how a brand appears in the answers. It shows visibility, position, sentiment, and cited sources, with competitor comparisons for each. Every self-serve plan includes three AI models, and additional engines are paid add-ons.
Where it falls short
The three-engine cap applies to every self-serve plan. Climbing tiers buys prompts and projects, not engines. Full six-engine coverage on Starter means three paid add-ons stacked on top of the base price. Claude, DeepSeek, and Mistral are Enterprise-only, and add-ons draw from the same core six, so you cannot buy your way to Claude from a standard plan.
Peec is also monitoring-first by design. It does not audit your site, hand you a fix list, or attribute AI mentions to traffic and leads. And API access plus white-label reporting are both Enterprise-gated.
Peec AI pricing, September 2026
Starter
$95/mo
For SEO and content managers getting started with AI Search visibility.
This includes:
- 50 prompts
- Choose 3 models
- Unlimited users
- Daily tracking frequency
- 1 project
Pro
$245/mo
For SEO teams that need sophisticated AI Search tracking and insights.
This includes:
- 150 prompts
- Choose 3 models
- Unlimited users
- Daily tracking frequency
- 2 projects
Advanced
$495/mo
For marketing teams managing multiple projects with deeper reporting.
This includes:
- 350 prompts
- Choose 3 models
- Unlimited users
- Daily tracking frequency
- 5 projects
- Multi country
- Looker Studio integration
Enterprise
Custom
For global brands who need custom coverage, integrations, and dedicated support.
Everything in advanced, plus:
- Fully customizable prompt tracking
- Choose from all models
- Daily or weekly tracking frequency
- Unlimited projects
- Custom prompt setup
- API access
- Single Sign-on (SSO)
- Up to 13 LLM models tracked
Summary
- Best for: In-house marketing teams, especially European and multilingual brands, that want visibility tracking without per-seat costs.
- Key differentiator: Unlimited seats, multilingual tracking, and suggested prompts generated from a brand’s website.
- Value proposition: An accessible monitoring platform that makes AI visibility easy to track across countries and languages.
- Takeaway: Peec fits in-house teams that need international monitoring. Agencies, local businesses, and SMBs that need more engines, location-level reporting, and API access will usually get more from Cairrot, which covers five LLMs with API access on every plan for $99 a month.
Scrunch AI pricing and review
Top alternatives to Scrunch AI
- Peec AI: The best overall of the big three. It’s a deeper product than Scrunch, with a faster team, for $95 a month instead of $300.
- Profound: If you have enterprise budget either way, Profound is the more complete enterprise platform, with Agents, content workflows, and stronger competitive intelligence.
- Cairrot: Five LLMs, city-level reporting, Reddit and YouTube tracking, GA4 attribution, and API access on every plan for $99 a month. It has more depth at a third of the price.
Scrunch AI is a Sitecore-owned AI visibility platform for enterprise marketing teams. It shows how a brand appears in AI answers, how it compares to competitors, and how AI crawlers access the website behind those answers. Scrunch runs one of the best outbound machines in the category. It approached us first, before we ever paid to test it. Even its pricing page says that if you approach your limits, its team will reach out. Behind the outbound, the product is shallow: thinner than Profound, thinner than Peec AI, and thinner than unfunded alternatives like Cairrot.
Best for:
- Enterprises that want control over what AI crawlers see
- Existing Sitecore customers
- Brand and comms teams focused on how AI describes them
Extra seats are $25 each per month. Seven-day trial, no card, though hands-on reviewers report the paid plan auto-bills when the trial ends.
What you’ll like
Scrunch AI is built for teams that care as much about what AI crawlers see as what AI answers say. G2 users say the dashboard is intuitive, with reports that are clearly organized and easy to navigate. The tradeoffs users mention most are a learning curve on how prompt credits get used and a wait of about four weeks for baseline data before insights are ready to show a prospect.
- Clean UI and broad multi-engine coverage
- GA4 integration that ties AI visibility to real traffic
- A 7-day free trial on Starter, with no card required
Scrunch AI key features
Scrunch AI tracks how a brand appears in AI answers and how AI crawlers access the website behind those answers. The entry plan covers visibility tracking, site audits, and crawler data across four engines. Broader engine coverage, the Agent Experience Platform, and API access are on the Enterprise plan.
Where it falls short
- The product is shallow. Scrunch tracks seven engines, but its Insights read only ChatGPT. The Citations view doesn’t make it clear which sources matter most. Page Audits are capped at 5 a month on Starter. There’s no content generation at all.
- The best features are gated. Hallucination detection, the full AXP, and the Enterprise Data API are Enterprise-only, which is the flagship feature set most buyers never touch.
- Prompts burn per engine, so the allowance shrinks fast when you track more than one or two engines.
- There’s no location-level reporting, Google Maps data, or Reddit and YouTube tracking in the published plans.
Scrunch AI pricing, September 2026
For teams to evaluate Scrunch, establish AI visibility benchmarks, and prove impact before scaling.
- 125 unique prompts
- 5 site audits / month
- 1 brand workspace
- 5 user licenses
For teams to evaluate Scrunch, establish AI visibility benchmarks, and prove impact before scaling.
- 250 unique prompts
- 5 site audits / brand / month
- 3 brand workspaces
- 3 pitch workspaces
- Unlimited user licenses
For organizations requiring expanded model coverage, advanced features, API access, and dedicated support.
- Custom # of unique prompts
- AXP (Agent Experience Platform)
- Complete site audit(s)
- Custom # of brand workspaces
- Custom # of user licenses
- API access & integrations
- Expanded model coverage
- SSO (SAML, OIDC)
- Dedicated account team
For large-scale agencies requiring custom features, security, and dedicated support.
- Custom # of unique prompts
- AXP (Agent Experience Platform)
- Full site audit(s)
- Custom # of brand workspaces
- Custom # of pitch workspaces
- Custom # of user licenses
- SSO (SAML, OIDC)
- Dedicated account team
Summary
- Best for: Mid-to-large enterprises and Sitecore customers that want crawler data alongside AI visibility tracking.
- Key differentiator: Crawler analytics tied to AI referral traffic, plus the Agent Experience Platform.
- Value proposition: A technical, enterprise-focused platform for brands that want to control how AI crawlers read their site.
- Takeaway: Scrunch fits enterprise teams with the budget for its Enterprise tier. Agencies, local businesses, and SMBs will usually get more from Cairrot, which covers five LLMs with location-level reporting and API access for $99 a month.
Cairrot pricing and features
Waiting for credits back for photo
Top alternatives to Cairrot
- Peec AI: The best overall of the big three. It’s the pick for in-house European and multilingual teams that want unlimited seats.
- Profound: The pick for Fortune 500 brands that need SOC 2, HIPAA, and prompt volume data, and have the budget for it.
Cairrot is an AI visibility platform built for agencies, local businesses, and multi-location brands. It shows how a brand appears in AI answers by city, region, and country, which sources and communities AI engines cite, and how AI visibility turns into traffic, leads, and conversions.
It’s also the only tool in this comparison that wasn’t built with venture money. That shows up in two places: the price, and a roadmap shaped by what agencies actually ask for instead of what enterprise procurement demands.
Stakeholder Report
Month-over-month traffic, AI visibility, and LLM citations in one shareable view.
New users by channel
Best for:
- Marketing agencies managing multiple client brands from one dashboard
- Local and multi-location businesses competing on “near me” searches
- SMBs and in-house teams that want multi-engine tracking and API access without an enterprise contract
What you’ll like
Cairrot is built for teams that need to report AI visibility to clients or leadership without an enterprise budget. Agencies can manage multiple websites from one account and set up each client manually or with AI assistance. From one dashboard, teams move between brands and locations to see share of voice, mentions and citations, and sentiment in one view, including the exact phrases each AI model uses to describe every brand in the market. Location reporting shows how visibility changes city by city, with Google Maps sentiment alongside LLM data, so local businesses can see which markets they own and which ones a competitor holds. Reddit tracking and YouTube tracking add citation share, mentions, and sentiment from the two platforms AI engines lean on heavily, down to the exact threads and videos being cited.
Cairrot also connects visibility to what happens on the website. The AI Crawl Monitor shows which AI bots visit a site and which pages they read through the free WordPress plugin, Cloudflare, or CloudFront, and llms.txt management is part of the same workflow. AEO Insights turn that data into prioritized fixes, and the GA4 integration measures sessions, key events, and conversions from each AI provider and landing page. For teams that build their own reporting, the API and MCP are included on every plan, so agencies can power white-label dashboards, send data to Databox or webhooks, automate PDF reports, or query their analytics in plain language from Claude or ChatGPT.
Cairrot also connects visibility to what happens on the website:
- The AI crawler monitor shows which AI bots visit a site and which pages they read. It works through the free WordPress plugin, Cloudflare, or CloudFront, and the open-source Cloudflare tracker is part of the same workflow.
- AEO Insights turn that data into prioritized fixes.
- The GA4 integration measures sessions, key events, and conversions from each AI provider and landing page.
Cairrot key features
Cairrot tracks how a brand appears across AI engines and connects that visibility to real business results. Reporting breaks down by location, engine, topic, and buyer type, and GA4 and Search Console integrations tie AI referral traffic to conversions. Crawler monitoring, llms.txt management, and Reddit and YouTube tracking are included, and the API and MCP work on every plan.
Where it falls short?
- No prompt volume dataset. Profound’s Prompt Volumes has no equivalent here.
- No SOC 2 yet. Regulated enterprises that need it before signing should look at Profound.
- Smaller company. Cairrot has a smaller team than the venture-funded platforms. The flip side is direct access to the founder and a roadmap driven by customer requests.
- Monitor 2 LLMs (ChatGPT and Perplexity)
- 15 Prompts Tracked
- Up to 3 Team Members
- Email Support
- API Integration
- Monitor 5 LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek)
- 40 Prompts Tracked
- Up to 10 Team Members
- Email Support
- API Integration
- Free Onboarding + Consultation Call
- Monitor 5 LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek)
- 100 Prompts Tracked
- Unlimited Team Members
- API Integration
- Slack Support
- Professional Onboarding & Consultation
Summary
- Best for: Marketing agencies of all sizes, local and multi-location businesses, and SMBs that need multi-engine AEO tracking.
- Key differentiator: Five LLMs under $100, location-level reporting, and unlimited API access on every plan.
- Value proposition: Multi-engine tracking, local reporting, conversion attribution, and API access at a price that works across an agency’s full client list.
- Takeaway: Cairrot is the strongest fit in this comparison for agencies, local businesses, and SMBs. It covers more engines at a lower price than Profound, Peec AI, or Scrunch AI, and it connects AI visibility to the locations and conversions clients actually report on.
Which one should you actually buy? should we add this section?
If you are an agency
Do the per-client math before the feature comparison.
At Profound, a full client workspace is $399 on top of the $99 base, so ten clients is roughly $4,089 a month. The $99 base is a prospecting tool, not a delivery tool, and it is worth being clear-eyed about that when you read the pricing page. At Peec, engines stay capped at three regardless of tier and white-label reporting is Enterprise-only. Scrunch starts at a $300 floor per brand workspace.
Whatever you choose, the platform needs a multi-client interface, white-label reporting, and API access on the tier you can afford. Three of the four here gate the API behind Enterprise.
If you sell to local or multi-location businesses
This narrows fast. You need city-level visibility breakdowns, Google Business Profile data, and Google Maps sentiment in the same view as your LLM data. Cairrot is the only platform in this comparison that does all three on a self-serve plan.
If you are an in-house SMB or mid-market team
One brand, one market, a handful of engines. Do not buy a $399 plan to track one brand until you know which prompts actually matter to you, and you will only learn that after a few months of data. Start at the bottom of the market, learn your prompt set, then scale coverage.
If you are enterprise
Profound and Scrunch have the compliance posture, and Scrunch has the deepest technical layer with the Agent Experience Platform. Both route real capability through custom-priced contracts, so the published numbers will not apply to you. Budget four figures monthly and negotiate on engines, prompt volume, data retention, region and language coverage, and whether the API is truly unlimited or metered.
