The 10 best AEO platforms in 2026, ranked by what you actually need them for

This is the job Onsomble was built for, and no other platform in the market does it. Every other tool starts from a website and builds the research around a brand you own. Onsomble starts from the question. A Topic has a scope, a jurisdiction, a time window and a list of entities to track, which can be organisations, people, groups, brands or products, with or without a focal one. You can study how AI assistants frame a contested policy, an industry issue or a public figure, see every stakeholder side by side, and read the claims and sources behind each portrayal, before anyone has decided who the client is. The same analytics engine that reads brand claims reads issue claims, so a PR team gets the stance, the driver and the cited passage for every statement AI makes about every stakeholder. For PR, public affairs and market research, that is the difference between a monitoring tool and a research instrument.

Profound sells a PR solution. You can write custom prompts about industry themes rather than products, and its sentiment product groups the claims it extracts into themes you can follow over time. Two things hold it to second. Its analytics setup requires at least one enabled brand or product asset per category, so the study is always anchored to something you own. And the trial runs recommended prompts only, so you cannot see how the PR tooling handles your issue before you sign an Enterprise contract.

Evertune comes at research from the consumer-insight side. Custom prompts cover thought leadership and emerging topics, and its Word Association and Consumer Preferences reports tell you what language and attributes AI attaches to brands in a category. Onboarding still starts with a brand name and URL, so treat it as category research around a brand rather than brand-free research.

Onsomble has the most advanced analytics engine available in this market, and this category is where that shows. The engine was built on decades of enterprise big data experience and combines generative and predictive models to analyse every individual claim an AI assistant makes, not the answer as a whole and not a sentiment score. For every claim you get the exact quote, the entity it is about, the stance taken, the driver behind it, the model and location it came from, and the citation attributed to that claim with the supporting passage from the cited page. Claims roll up into narratives (features, trust signals, decision criteria and concerns) so you can see the pattern across thousands of answers, and you can drill back down to the sentence when you need to defend a finding to a board or a client. The original answer is one click away, and claim evidence pins into a recommendation so the reasoning travels with the work. Other tools give you themes with source URLs attached. Onsomble gives you the sentence, the stance, the source and the passage, for every claim, every time.

Profound's Sentiment product extracts claims from answers, groups them into themes and attributes, shows the answer text, and ties sentiment to specific citations, with a click-through from a citation to the passage behind a claim. It is built to be read at theme level, with the individual claim as a drill-down rather than the starting point. It is Enterprise-only and the seven-day trial runs recommended prompts, so you cannot check any of this on your own questions before buying. Ask for a working session on your prompts before you sign.

Peec's Brand Perception view extracts the attributes AI associates with a brand and clusters recurring objections, each with the source pages behind them. Its Chats view shows the answer, the brand mentions, the search queries the assistant ran, and distinguishes sources it retrieved from sources it actually cited inline. That last distinction is more useful than it sounds when you are working out why a page shows up.

Onsomble has the deepest location analysis in the market, and it is not close. 7,313 selectable cities across 225 countries and territories, 6,544 of them outside the United States, every one of them included on every paid plan, and every one of them analysed with the same claim-level engine. Regional analysis puts visibility, share of voice, sentiment and competitors for every location on one map and one ranked list, so you compare cities against each other rather than running them one at a time. From any city you drill into the answers, the claims and the sources that make that city different. You do not just learn that Auckland and Wellington differ. You can read the sentence that makes them differ, and see which model said it and which page it came from. For a multi-location brand, a franchise network, a tourism board or an agency with clients in several markets, location-based inference is the whole job, and no other platform gives you this level of granularity. The one thing to plan for is capacity: one execution covers one question in one AI experience in one region, so a wide regional study uses allowance quickly.

Semrush's Brand Performance report has the longest location list here, more than 68,000 countries, states, regions and cities. The catch is that each report is tied to one location and language, every additional location is a separate report at $99 a month, and the reports do not compare locations against each other or let you drill into the answers for one city. A long list, one location at a time.

AthenaHQ supports city, state and province targeting across 185 markets, with CSV import of locations and bulk prompt assignment. Starter is single-region and single-language; multi-country operation is an Enterprise feature.

Onsomble's connector is the most complete in the market, and you get it from day one of the free trial. From inside ChatGPT, Claude, Codex or Gemini you can create clients, brand Sites and Topics; set questions, tracked entities, models and regions; review the configuration; start scans and watch them run; then read the original answers, the individual claims, the attributed sources, the city-by-city comparisons and the answer histories; and save evidence-linked recommendations, actions and notes. Your assistant has the same claim-level evidence the dashboard has, so it can write a client report or a board paper from the actual quotes and sources rather than from a summary metric. Nothing else in this list combines that depth with that access. The two connectors that come closest are gated: Peec's needs a paid plan and Profound's needs an Enterprise contract.

Peec's connector is broad: reports, chats, source content, perception, actions, project and prompt configuration, action statuses and content edits. Writes need organisation-owner permission and a few tools depend on early-access features. Peec's agency page says MCP is included on every paid plan.

Profound's connector reads its reports and raw data, adds and edits prompts, runs its Agents, and manages documents and project tasks. It does less of the research setup than Onsomble's and no more than Peec's. It is third, not higher, because it is Enterprise-only: there is no plan short of a contract that includes it, and the trial does not either.

Peec has built a proper agency product. Capacity is allocated across client and pitch projects rather than consumed, dashboards can be shared as password-protected public links or fixed PDFs, and brand plans include unlimited users. The Advanced tier adds Looker Studio.

Otterly includes unlimited members and reports on every plan, with a viewer role for clients. Standard and above add unlimited workspaces and Looker Studio. It is the least expensive way to give a dozen small clients a monitoring dashboard each.

Every Onsomble paid plan includes unlimited sites, clients and team members, and portfolios group clients for cross-client research. The plan you pick is about scan capacity, not seats. The report builder lets you configure a report, white-label it with the agency's branding, and share it as a link or a PDF. The gap is Looker Studio: Peec and Otterly connect to it and Onsomble does not yet, which matters if your agency's client reporting already runs through it.

Agents is a workflow builder for research, briefs, content creation and publication, connected to the visibility and citation data, with templates and a custom builder. It is first here because it is the only product in the list that runs the whole loop from monitoring to publication inside one platform. It is priced through Agent credits on an Enterprise contract, and extra Agent usage can pause or incur overages.

AthenaHQ turns prioritised gaps into governed content drafts, citation outreach and commerce actions, with ownership and review built in. CMS integrations cover WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Sanity, Contentful and others. Its connector can generate, revise and approve content from an assistant.

Conductor's Explorer turns topic research into briefs and hands them to Asana, Trello or Jira, and Creator handles drafting. For a large content team that already runs on those tools, that handoff matters more than a built-in editor.

Prompt Volumes is built from conversations Profound licenses from opt-in consumer panels, which it then runs through what it calls probabilistic modelling to extrapolate frequency and intent to the wider population. Profound does not publish the panel size, the weighting or any confidence interval. It is first here because it is the only one of the three that projects a volume for any prompt or keyword you type in, rather than for a topic, and it refreshes weekly. Treat the numbers as relative, not absolute, and do not expect them to agree with your monitored answer set.

Prompt Research starts from a topic, industry or category phrase and returns related prompts, intent, the brands mentioned and the domains cited, with full answers behind each, drawn from a database of 317 million prompts that Semrush sources from AI search clickstream data and Google's keyword data for AI Overviews. Volume is estimated at topic level only, by combining third-party data on AI interactions with Semrush's own models, so you get a number for a topic and a list of prompts under it, not a count per prompt. It is included in the US$99 toolkit.

Prompt Volumes reports estimated weekly prompts by topic, drawn from a consumer panel that Evertune says holds more than 150 million real conversations, weighted to reflect the composition of the internet. Evertune measures demand by topic rather than by exact prompt, on the argument that most AI prompts are phrased uniquely, and it pairs the volumes with Prompt Research, which lists the branded and non-branded questions buyers ask in a category. Like Profound, it does not publish the panel size or the weighting. Prompt research sits on the Pro plan, at $800 a month billed annually.

Scrunch is built around this. It shows you agent and crawler traffic, diagnoses site issues, connects page optimisation to the questions that matter, and on Enterprise its Agent Experience Platform serves agent-facing content alongside the human site. Nothing else here goes this deep on the technical side.

Conductor's website monitoring and Creator tools sit in the same platform as its AI visibility data, so a technical fix and the answer it affects can be tracked together.

The AI Visibility Toolkit includes an AI-readiness audit, and Enterprise AIO adds crawler log analysis, content audits and scoring.

Conductor is an enterprise SEO platform first. Keywords, page monitoring, content and AI visibility share one account, one set of workspaces and one reporting layer.

Brand Radar is bought on top of an Ahrefs plan, so the backlink index, keyword data and site audit are already in the same login. The connector works across all of them on Lite and above.

The AI Visibility Toolkit is a separate US$99 purchase from the SEO toolkit, but the two sit side by side in the same account and share the same reporting. Enterprise AIO bundles both.

Onsomble has the simplest pricing in the category by some distance. There is one product and three sizes. Every paid plan includes all supported AI models, every feature, the connector and the API, and unlimited sites, clients and team members. The only thing that changes between Grow at US$99, Pro at US$399 and Ultra at US$1,399 is monthly executions: 1,000, 5,000 and 20,000. Annual billing gives two months free, and 200-execution packs that never expire cover a busy month. No seat fees, no client fees, no per-model fees and no per-location fees. Every other platform here charges for at least one of those, or does not publish a price at all.

Three brand tiers at $95, $245 and $495 a month for 50, 150 and 350 prompts, each with three models of your choice and unlimited users. Projects and countries step up by tier (one, two and five projects; one, three and three countries), and extra models are paid. Clear, if a little boxed in.

Lite is US$29 for 15 prompts, Standard is US$189 for 100, Premium is US$489 for 400. The ladder is clear, but the add-ons stack: Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are each separately priced by tier, and tracking the same question in a second country uses a second prompt slot. Price the full engine list before you commit.