If you’re a digital marketing agency in 2026, there is no “hotter” digital marketing service offering than answer engine optimization. Nearly every business is now wanting to to become a recommended brand on ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and other major answer engines. For digital agencies (especially those who excel at it), the revenue opportunity is massive.
As someone who grew a digital agency to $20M in ARR and sold that business, I can say first-hand that answer engine optimization services generated millions in revenue in the last 3 years for the agency I sold. And the demand right now is hotter than it has ever been before. I speak with many other digital agency founders regularly, ones presently running agencies and those who have also sold their company. They all saying pretty much the same thing, which is essentially this: “All our clients really want to have good visibility on answer engines like ChatGPT”.
If you are looking to grow revenue for your agency, this is a fantastic time to do that through AEO service offerings. But in order to go a great job of AEO optimization work for your clients, you need to have the right software behind you that helps you to accomplish that. There are plenty of options out there, so this post is to help you whittle down those options to the top AEO tools for agencies.
Here’s a clear-eyed look at the best options, what they actually do well, and who they’re best suited for.
1. Hoverboard AI
Hoverboard AI is my company and yes it’s ranked #1 here. But for valid reasons. First, I tried many of the tools on the market prior to creating Hoverboard AI and I just was not happy with what I was using in my previous agency. So, I decided to build a better one. One that was focused and built specifically for agencies or teams handling multiple projects. That’s how Hoverboard AI was born and now there are many agencies using Hoverboard AI. Some of them are generating millions in ARR from their AI optimization offerings and Hoverboard AI is their tool of choice.
Here’s why Hoverboard AI is the best AEO tool out there:
- Founded by a digital marketer with 20+ years specializing in Google SEO, 5+ years studying answer engines and a highly successful AEO track record. That background has helped to shape Hoverboard AI to be both answer engine and SEO friendly. That is a key differentiator.
- Tracks how AI platforms respond to prompts relevant to your brand: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity
- Strongest of the AI tracking tools for drilling down into sources and citations that matter most to each specific answer engine.
- Lets you do that citation analysis at the individual prompt level, not just in aggregate
- Enhanced content generation that uses keywords and entities (good for AEO and SEO)
- Provides fan-out data
- Offers white-label reporting
- Offers an audit tool will help your sales team sell more AEO services
- Makes specific action oriented recommendations for each campaign/project
- API
One of the more powerful features is the prompt research. Rather than monitoring only a fixed set of prompts you configure yourself, it helps users discover the questions AI engines are already fielding in their niche, organized by intent type and powered by data. That matters for brands that don’t yet have a clear map of what queries drive AI visibility and need concrete recommendations before scaling up monitoring. It bridges traditional keyword research and AI visibility tracking in a way most competitors don’t bother with.
Maybe the most powerful feature however is the specific “actions” it gives you. The is important, whether you are a beginner to answer engine optimization or a highly experienced AEO specialist. For anyone that works on a large number of campaigns at one time (as many agency AEO specialists do), this is an awesome and highly beneficial feature.
Best for: Agencies, marketing teams or anyone who is focused on both answer engine visibility and Google organic search rankings.
2. Profound
Profound is without question the biggest company in the answer engine tracking and analytics space, and it’s probably the most advanced platforms on this list. I think it makes the most sense for very large agencies and enterprise teams because there is a lot going on inside the product.
Its Answer Engine Insights product tracks things like visibility, share of voice, sentiment, citations, competitors, and changes over time. It also covers a pretty large number of answer engines. The more you spend, the more platforms are included. Their list includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek.
One thing that people love about Profound is their prompt volumes feature, although most people do not understand that those are not actual numbers. They are extrapolated and estimated. Like Hoverboard AI, Profound gets most of their prompt response data from the actual front-end app that consumers use, as opposed to API calls. That’s important because API responses aren’t necessarily the same thing a real user sees when they open ChatGPT or another answer engine.
Profound’s Agency Mode gives you separate workspaces for clients, same as Hoverboard. But the more interesting feature is pitch workspaces. You can create a temporary workspace for a prospect, generate prompts for their industry, analyze how visible they are in AI and use that information as part of the sales process. If they become a client, that workspace can then be converted into their actual account.
If you’re building AEO software specifically for agencies, the software shouldn’t just help the agency do the work after the sale. It should help them sell the service in the first place, so this is a nice feature they have.
Profound can do much more than just monitoring brand visibility. Its Agents can take visibility and citation data and use it to find content opportunities, create briefs, optimize existing pages and generate new content. Those workflows can also connect back to a CMS. Agent Analytics looks at another part of the equation by showing how AI crawlers are interacting with the website.
All of that functionality comes with a downside, though. Profound can be complicated to use, as there is a very large amount of analytics data they provide. Reviews say it’s “too much data” and that it’s hard to know what to do with all that data. Some say it feels more like an enterprise marketing intelligence platform than an AEO tracking tool, and some of the more advanced agency functionality is reserved for Enterprise plans that have tacked on products (and costs). If you’re running a very large agency with enterprise clients, that may be exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re a smaller agency, you may end up paying for a lot of functionality you don’t really need.
Best for: Larger agencies and enterprise teams that want deep visibility data, multi-client management, crawler analytics, and automated AEO content workflows.
3. Peec AI
Peec takes a more focused approach. At its core, it’s an AI visibility and citation tracking platform.
You give it your brand, competitors, and the questions you care about, and it tracks where you show up across AI-generated answers. More importantly, it can show you where competitors are showing up and you aren’t.
Traditional SEO software tells you that you’re ranking #7 and your competitor is ranking #3. With AEO, the question is different. Does ChatGPT mention your company at all? Does it recommend three competitors and leave you out? Is a particular competitor being cited over and over for a certain topic? Peec is designed around answering those kinds of questions.
It’s also considerably more approachable for smaller teams than something like Profound. You don’t get the same breadth of functionality, and the platform is still developing in some areas, but if your main goal is tracking AI visibility and figuring out where competitors have an advantage, Peec does that job well.
It’s a good tool, but is it better than Hoverboard AI? We would say no.
Best for: Brands and smaller teams that care primarily about AI visibility, citations, and competitive gaps.
4. AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ tracks visibility across Google’s AI experiences and conversational answer engines, but what makes AthenaHQ more interesting is the amount of attention it puts on understanding why certain content gets cited.
It’s one thing to know that your brand appeared in an answer. It’s another to see which pages are earning citations, which pages aren’t, and what might be different about the content that is getting picked up.
That gives teams something they can actually work on instead of just watching an AI visibility score move up and down.
AthenaHQ also has the kind of reporting you would expect from a platform targeting larger organizations. If you need to take AEO data and present it to executives, clients, or other stakeholders, there is plenty here.
The obvious downside is price. This isn’t really positioned as an inexpensive AEO tracker for a small business or solo consultant.
Best for: Enterprise brands and larger agencies that want deeper reporting and more analytics insights.
5. Otterly AI
Otterly is probably the easiest tool on this list to understand. If you just care about brand visibility, Otterly might be the right choice for you.
You add the prompts you want to monitor, and Otterly checks how your brand appears in AI-generated responses across platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI experiences.
It tracks things like mentions, citations, sentiment, and competitor visibility.
Otterly is pretty basic and simple to use. There are AEO platforms where you can spend a considerable amount of time just figuring out what all the dashboards are trying to tell you. Otterly is much more straightforward.
That makes it a good entry point for a company that basically wants to answer:
“Are we showing up?”
“Who is showing up instead of us?”
“Is our visibility getting better or worse?”
You can monitor the same prompts repeatedly and watch those answers change over time, which is important because AI responses obviously aren’t static.
For agencies, there are enough reporting and monitoring features to manage multiple brands, although it’s not as agency-centric as some of the other platforms on this list.
Pricing also makes Otterly interesting for smaller companies. There are inexpensive plans available, so you don’t need an enterprise AEO budget just to start measuring what is happening.
Best for: Small brands, solo marketers, and teams that primarily want straightforward AI visibility tracking without a lot of complexity.
6. Semrush
Semrush has become a better AEO platform over the last year. Its AI Visibility Toolkit now tracks brand mentions, citations, competitors, share of voice, sentiment, and prompt performance across major AI platforms. It also has Prompt Research. Semrush has a massive database of AI prompts and uses clickstream data to help identify the kinds of questions people are actually asking. That’s useful because one of the hardest parts of AEO is figuring out which prompts are worth tracking in the first place. To be clear though, these aren’t actual numbers, but estimated.
There’s also a convenience factor for agencies already using Semrush. You can analyze traditional Google visibility and AI visibility within the same ecosystem rather than treating AEO as a completely separate campaign.
The downside for agencies is pricing. The standard AI Visibility Toolkit is geared more toward managing one or a few brands, and costs can climb quickly as you add domains, prompts, and users. Larger agencies may need Semrush’s enterprise offering instead. High prices are the biggest complaint, so in most cases Semrush isn’t a great fit for most agencies.
That being said, Semrush is becoming a legitimate competitor to dedicated AEO platforms, particularly because of its enormous data infrastructure and connection to traditional SEO.
Best for: SEO agencies and marketing teams that want SEO and AI visibility data in the same platform
How to Choose Between These Alternatives
The decision comes down to four things: team size, budget, where you sit in the AI search maturity curve and if Google organic rankings are also a focus for you. A solo consultant running lean has completely different needs than an enterprise SEO team managing a large number of brand queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews simultaneously. If you’re early in figuring out how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, a lighter tool with solid citation tracking and a forgiving price point will get you further than an over-engineered platform you’ll use at 20% capacity.
If you’re an agency managing multiple brands, need clean reporting that clients can understand, and you want to make sure your AEO campaigns do not negatively impact your SEO efforts, Hoverboard AI is the strongest choice of the group. It allows you to create multiple projects inside of your organization account, with ability to provide separate reporting (and PDF exports with white label branding) for any project. With deep citation data, competitive gap analysis and it’s best-in-class content generation tool, it’s hard to compete with. Add to the fact that the recommendations it makes for you are also SEO friendly.
For solo marketers or small brands, Otterly may be the best choice as it has low cost plans that start at $29. Naturally, it doesn’t come with all the features offered by some of these other options, but for down and dirty and just wanting to know visibility metrics, it may be best for you. One thing to say is that many of these providers are adding features fast, so we’ll have to see which ones are keeping up with all the changes in the world of AEO/GEO in the near future.