Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn are cited more often than any AEO vendor's own website when AI engines answer questions about this category. GetIntel's own citation tracking, read 29 August 2026, shows third-party sources hold 91% of the citation share in this space; every AEO tool's own site combined holds the rest.
Disclosure: GetIntel is an AEO tool and appears in the comparison below, so weigh the ranking accordingly. The citation-share data comes from GetIntel's own source tracking across its tracked buyer prompts, read 29 August 2026. Competitor pricing and feature facts are drawn from each vendor's own site, checked on the dates stated in the linked articles below.
AEO tools and generative engine optimization (GEO) tools get searched for separately but describe mostly the same buying decision: software that tracks whether AI engines cite or recommend a brand. The tools compared below serve both searches. For the real distinction between the two terms, not just the shared buyer intent, see AEO vs GEO.
Which Sources Actually Get Cited When AI Engines Discuss AEO Tools?
Not vendor websites, mostly. Reddit and YouTube alone account for 40% of the citation share GetIntel tracks in the AEO tools category.
| Source | Citation share | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 22% | Third-party (UGC) | |
| YouTube | 18% | Third-party (UGC) |
| Semrush | 12% | Competitor |
| 11% | Third-party (UGC) | |
| Otterly.AI | 10% | Competitor |
| LLM Pulse | 10% | Competitor |
| GetIntel | 6% | Own |
GetIntel's own citation tracking, 5,130 filtered citations across its tracked buyer prompts, read 29 August 2026. Domain-type breakdown for the full pool: 91% third-party, 8% competitor, 1% own.
That 91% third-party figure is the real finding here. Most "best AEO tool" answers an AI engine gives aren't built from vendor marketing pages, they're built from Reddit threads, comparison videos, and LinkedIn posts written by people outside any of these companies. A tool's own product page is a small fraction of what actually gets cited.
What Do the Named AEO Tools Actually Offer, and What Do They Cost?
Real, checked prices vary from free tiers to $2,000/month, and the gaps are usually in engine coverage or reporting features, not raw functionality.
- GetIntel: $29, $49, $99/month, four engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) from the $29 tier, Claude added on Growth. White-label client reporting from the Agency tier of its per-client rate card ($39 per client brand, from ten brands).
- Profound: $99/month for ChatGPT-only tracking, $399/month for three engines, both billed yearly with two months free. See Profound pricing 2026 for the full breakdown.
- AirOps: Free tier only publicly priced. Solo and Pro are unpriced on AirOps' own page; two independent reviews report $200/month and $2,000/month respectively. See AirOps pricing 2026.
- Scrunch AI: $250/month for its Core tier, now publicly self-serve as of late August 2026 after previously being sales-led only. See Scrunch AI pricing 2026.
- Otterly.AI: appears prominently in GetIntel's own citation data (10% share, second-highest competitor) but wasn't independently price-checked for this article; see GetIntel vs Otterly for a direct comparison.
None of the pricing above is guessed. Each figure links to a dedicated article where it was checked directly against the vendor's own page or, where a vendor doesn't publish pricing, against independent reviews with their dates stated.
Does a Higher Citation Share Mean a Better AEO Tool?
Not necessarily, and that distinction matters for how to read GetIntel's citation-share data above.
Citation share measures how often a domain gets cited when AI engines answer category questions, not whether the underlying product is good. Reddit's 22% share reflects how much organic discussion happens there, not a Reddit-endorsed ranking. The same applies to the competitor tools listed above: a higher citation share can reflect more content published, more time in the category, or more third-party coverage, independent of whether the product itself out-performs a smaller competitor's.
What the table is actually useful for is different: it shows where an AI engine is likely to encounter a claim about any of these tools, which is the same signal a buyer using AI search to research this category would encounter.
What Should You Actually Evaluate Before Choosing an AEO Tool?
Three things GetIntel's citation-share data doesn't answer.
- Engine coverage per dollar. Some tools gate additional engines behind a much higher tier (Profound's jump from ChatGPT-only at $99 to three engines at $399); others include four or five engines from their entry tier.
- Whether it drafts a fix or only reports a gap. A citation-tracking dashboard and a tool that hands back a ready-to-ship entity page or counter-article are different products solving different amounts of the actual work.
- Whether pricing is even published. AirOps prices only its free tier publicly; Scrunch didn't publish self-serve pricing until late August 2026. A tool that won't state its own price is a different kind of buying decision than one that does.
What Doesn't This AEO Tools Comparison Settle?
Two real limits on GetIntel's citation-share data, worth stating plainly.
The 91% third-party figure is pooled across GetIntel's own tracked buyer prompts in its own category, not a universal AEO-market statistic; a narrower or differently-phrased prompt set could return a different split. And citation share says nothing about product quality or fit for any specific buyer's use case, which is why the evaluation criteria above matter more than the ranking itself for an actual purchase decision.
How Did We Check This AEO Tools Pricing and Citation Data?
The citation-share table comes from GetIntel's own source tracking, read 29 August 2026, the same tracking used in which sources AI engines actually cite. Every competitor pricing figure links to a dedicated article where it was checked directly, with the check date stated in that article.
For the broader question of what AEO actually means as a practice, see what is answer engine optimization and AEO vs GEO. For a real check of which of these tools practice what they preach on markdown and llms.txt, see markdown vs HTML for AI citations.