INSIGHTS
Keller Maloney
Unusual - Founder
Mar 3, 2026
There are over 30 companies building AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tools. Collectively, they've raised over $200M in venture capital. Every week, a new one pops up on Product Hunt promising to "optimize your brand for AI search."
We built Unusual to help brands understand and shape how AI models perceive them. We have seen people mistakenly lump us into this category, so we decided to just give you the most comprehensive list of all the AEO/GEO tools available, tell you what they actually do, and explain why we think the category has confused a narrow technical practice for a strategic discipline.
What is AEO/GEO?
At its core, AEO and GEO describe the practice of optimizing your content for the internal search engines that AI models use under the hood when they need information from the web
It's basically a subset of technical SEO adapted for a new set of crawlers.
The problem is the category didn't stay scoped to this. "Optimize your content for AI retrieval" got inflated into "manage your brand in AI," and those are fundamentally different problems.
Read more about What AEO/GEO is here.
Our Honest Take: These Tools Are a Commodity
Every AEO/GEO tool is a “prompt tracker.” Here's how they work:
Runs prompts against LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) on a schedule
Checks whether your brand is mentioned in the responses
Tracks those mentions over time and calls it "AI visibility" or "share of voice"
Compares you against competitors on the same prompts
The core mechanic is the same across every tool on this list. The differentiation is in packaging, UI, and how many prompts they run per month. Some bundle in content recommendations. Some have nicer dashboards. Some charge $29/month and some charge $3,000+/month for essentially the same underlying data.
Our recommendation: If you want prompt tracking—and there are legitimate reasons to want it—pick the cheapest tool that gets the job done. Or build your own with Claude Code in an afternoon. It's a few API calls and a spreadsheet. The prompt-tracking layer is not where the value is.
The Master List
We've compiled every AEO/GEO tool we could find, organized by tier. Funding data is included where available to give you a sense of how much capital is chasing this category.
Tool | Funding | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
Peec AI | $29M ($21M Series A) | €89–€199/mo |
Evertune | $19M (Felicis) | $3,000+/mo |
Scrunch AI | $15M Series A (Decibel) | $100–$500/mo |
BrandLight | $5.75M seed | Custom |
Goodie AI | Undisclosed | ~$495/mo |
AthenaHQ | $2.2M seed (Y Combinator) | $95–$295/mo |
Profound | $58.5M (Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins) | Custom enterprise |
Azoma | $4M pre-Series A (eBay Ventures) | Custom per-use |
Relixir | $2M (Y Combinator) | $97–$500/mo |
Gumshoe | $2M pre-seed (Pioneer Square Labs) | Credit-based |
Conductor | Established | Custom |
Semrush AI Toolkit | Established (Adobe acquiring for $1.9B) | $99/mo add-on |
Ahrefs Brand Radar | Established | Add-on to subscription |
Bluefish | $24M (NEA, Salesforce Ventures) | Custom enterprise |
Surfer SEO | Established | $79–$219/mo (AI Tracker: $95–$495/mo) |
Gauge | $500K seed (YC S24; acquired by XBE) | $99/mo |
Undisclosed (Gartner Cool Vendor 2025) | $29–$489/mo | |
Geostar | Undisclosed | $299/mo |
Rank Prompt | Undisclosed | $49–$149/mo |
Vaylis | Bootstrapped | €49–€699/mo |
Writesonic | Established | $12–$249/mo |
Quattr | Undisclosed | Custom |
Bear AI | Undisclosed | $150–$500/mo |
Nightwatch | Established | $32+/mo |
€360K pre-seed | €59+/mo | |
Hall | $2M pre-seed (Blackbird) | Freemium |
Passionfruit Labs | Undisclosed | $19+/mo |
GPTrends | Undisclosed | Budget tier |
Free (by Gauge team) | Free | |
Undisclosed | TBD | |
Am I on AI? | Undisclosed | Unknown |
HubSpot AI Search Grader | N/A (HubSpot feature) | Free |
The "Build Your Own" Option
Every tool above is running LLM API calls on a schedule and storing the results. If you have a developer (or even just Claude Code), you can build the core prompt-tracking functionality yourself in a day:
Define 20–50 prompts your buyers might ask
Run them against the ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity APIs
Parse responses for brand mentions, competitor mentions, and sentiment
Store results in a database, run weekly, diff the changes
That's the entire product for 80% of these tools. The remaining 20% is UI, integrations, and reporting — nice to have if you need to share dashboards across a team, but it doesn't change the underlying insight.
If you just need to know "does ChatGPT recommend us when someone asks about [category]?" You don't need a $500/month tool.
So What Should You Actually Do?
Use AEO/GEO tools for what they're actually good at: making sure your content is discoverable by the retrieval systems that AI models use under the hood. That's legitimate technical work. Pick a tool from the list above (ideally a cheap/basic one) and get your baseline.
But don't confuse that with managing how AI perceives your brand. Prompt tracking tells you if AI is mentioning you. It doesn't tell you what or why the model is saying what it's saying, what's driving its opinion, or how to change it.
The companies winning in AI perception are the ones who understand the gap between how they want to be positioned and how AI actually perceives them and then close that gap with better positioning, stronger proof, and more credible differentiation. That's not an SEO problem with a new acronym. It's a product marketing/strategy problem that requires a fundamentally different tool.
Have an AEO/GEO tool that should be on this list? Reach out at keller@unusual.ai and we'll add it.
