The best answer engine optimization tools in 2026. Priced honestly, including ours.

An answer engine optimization tool runs your buyers' questions through AI engines on a schedule and records which sources each engine cited, so you can see whether you are being recommended or whether a competitor holds the slot. Seven are worth knowing in 2026: Otterly.AI at $29 a month and our own WhyIQ AI Radar at the same price, Peec AI at $95, Profound at $99 billed yearly, SE Ranking as an $89-a-month add-on to its suite, Semrush bundled from about $165 billed annually, and AthenaHQ at $295 with a free tier beneath it. The headline price is the least useful number on that list. What decides your real cost is which engines the entry tier actually covers, and every vendor draws that line somewhere different.

We build one of these tools, so read this the way you would read any vendor's comparison: with the receipts checked. Every competitor figure came off their own live pricing page on 21 August 2026, we name what each one does better than ours, and there is a section on who should not buy Radar. The criteria come first, because a ranked list without criteria is just an opinion with a table.

Five criteria separate these tools. Price is the fifth, not the first.

Engine coverage at your actual tier. Every vendor markets a long engine list; several reserve half of it for a tier you were not planning to buy. Profound's Starter tier covers ChatGPT only; Perplexity and Google AI Overviews arrive on its $399 Growth tier, with Claude and Gemini on Enterprise. Otterly covers four engines at $29 and sells Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode as add-ons that can each cost more than the base plan. Read the engine list on the tier, never the homepage.

Prompt volume and how it is metered. Prompts are the unit. Some vendors count them directly, some meter credits where a credit equals one prompt on one model for one day, which means a single prompt tracked across three models for a month can consume ninety credits. Neither model is dishonest; they are just hard to compare until you convert to prompts-per-month at your engine count.

Cadence and samples per reading. Daily sounds better than weekly and often is not, because AI engines are probabilistic: the same prompt can produce different cited sources minutes apart. A daily single-shot check samples that noise every day. The more useful question is how many times each prompt runs per reading, which is the difference between a data point and a confidence band.

Published pricing and self-serve access. Demo-gated pricing is a legitimate enterprise motion, but it costs you a week and a sales call before you know whether the tool fits your budget. And agency workflow, if you run client work: multi-client projects, per-client reporting, and white-label output are the features that decide whether the tool survives contact with a retainer.

Entry tier only. All figures from each vendor's own pricing page on 21 August 2026.

Each of these is the right answer for somebody. Here is who.

Profound is the enterprise choice. Starter is $99/mo billed yearly for 50 prompts, one seat, and ChatGPT tracking only; Growth is $399/mo billed yearly for 100 prompts, three seats, and three engines. The thing genuinely worth paying for is Agent Analytics, which tracks AI-agent traffic hitting your own site, available on all tiers with unlimited domains, plus the enterprise stack around it: SSO, SOC 2, API access. The trade-offs are real too: the entry price is an annual commitment, one seat is tight for a team, and Claude and Gemini sit behind custom Enterprise pricing. If AI-agent traffic analytics is the problem you are solving, nothing else here competes.

Peec AI is the broad-coverage daily tracker, with the most developed agency tiering in the category. Brand plans run $95, $245, and $495 a month; agency tiers run $245 to $795 with credit pools sized for three to seven clients. Six engines are named on its pricing page including Copilot, which is more than we cover. The friction is the credit arithmetic: a credit is one prompt on one model for one day, so a prompt tracked across three models for a month is about ninety credits, and the mental conversion is not obvious at purchase. Their static pricing page also renders figures client-side, so re-check them live.

Otterly.AI has the lowest published entry point at $29/mo, and daily tracking with unlimited team members at that price is genuinely good value. The asterisk is engine scope: Lite covers four engines and fifteen prompts, and Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are add-ons priced from $9 up to $439 a month depending on tier and engine. A five-engine setup at Otterly does not cost $29. If you only care about ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Copilot, it is the cheapest way to get there.

AthenaHQ is the only one with a genuinely useful free tier: 300 credits covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude, with unlimited team members. Starter jumps to $295/mo and widens to nine models. That is a steep step, and the credit metering means each AI response consumes budget, but if you want to see five engines for free before spending anything, start here.

Semrush and SE Ranking are the incumbent answer, and for a lot of teams they are the correct one. Semrush now bundles AI visibility tracking into its main plans (Starter $165.17/mo billed annually, 50 prompts tracked daily), so if you already pay for Semrush you may already own this capability. SE Ranking sells its AI Search add-on from $89/mo on top of a suite plan ($71.20/mo billed annually), with the SE Visible dashboard, 200 prompts at entry, five engines, and multi-region support; a pricier standalone SE Visible tier exists for teams that do not want the suite. Both are worth checking before you add a seventh subscription: the honest answer to "which AEO tool should I buy" is sometimes "none, you already have one."

WhyIQ AI Radar, ours, is $29/mo for 30 prompts across all five engines with no add-ons, and $149/mo for agencies (one client included, $49 per additional client) where every prompt runs three times per weekly check and the dashboard reports a band, cited in two of three passes, rather than a single sample. That multi-pass measurement is the thing we built the product around, and as of this verification date no other tool on this list advertises one. Where we are the wrong choice: we run weekly, not daily, so if you need same-day signal we are not it; we cover five engines and Peec covers six; and we have nothing resembling Profound's agent-traffic analytics. Full details are on our pricing page, and there is a sample client report if you want to see the output before the price.

Four buyer shapes cover almost everyone asking this question.

You already pay for Semrush or SE Ranking. Check what your plan already includes before buying anything. Semrush bundles prompt tracking into its main tiers now, and SE Ranking's add-on starts at $89/mo on top of a subscription you already have. Adding a specialist tool on top only makes sense if you need engine breadth, prompt volume, or measurement rigor your suite does not offer.

You are a founder or small team testing the water. Start free with AthenaHQ's tier or a free check, then pick between Otterly at $29 for four engines and daily readings, or Radar at $29 for five engines and weekly readings. The real question is whether Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode matter in your category. If they do, compare the fully-loaded Otterly cost against a flat five-engine plan.

You are an agency running client work. Peec's agency tiers and our Agency tier are the two purpose-built options; Peec gives you more engines and daily cadence, we give you multi-pass confidence bands and white-label client reports at a lower per-client cost. Look at the deliverable each one produces, because the thing your client sees every month is the actual product.

You are enterprise with a procurement process. Profound, and it is not close. The agent-traffic analytics, the security posture, and the nine-engine Enterprise coverage are built for exactly that buyer. Budget for the sales cycle.

And who should not buy ours. Skip Radar if you need same-day signal, because we run weekly by design and no amount of wanting it faster changes that. Skip it if Copilot coverage matters to you, because Peec has an engine we do not. Skip it if the problem you are actually solving is AI-agent traffic on your own site, because that is Profound's product and we do not have one. And skip it if you already pay for Semrush or SE Ranking and only need a basic read, because paying twice for overlapping capability is a worse decision than any tool choice on this page.

The honest answer to "which AEO tool should I buy" is sometimes "none, you already have one." Check your existing suite first.

Every tool here measures. None of them earns you a citation.

This is the part the category undersells, and it applies to our product as much as anyone's. A tracker tells you that Perplexity cites a Reddit thread instead of your product page. It does not go and participate in that thread. The work that actually moves the number is off-page: third-party brand mentions correlate with AI citation at r=0.664, roughly three times the correlation of backlinks (Ahrefs, 2026), and in one 57-million-citation analysis brands earned only about 10 percent of citations from their own domains. The rest went to sources other people wrote.

So the tool is the instrument, not the intervention. Buy one to find out where you stand and to check whether your work moved anything, then spend most of your budget on the work itself: crawlable pages, answers in the opening third, the moves in the citability playbook, and real presence where your buyers are already reading. Expect a four to eight week lag between doing that work and seeing the number move, which is another reason a weekly reading with several samples beats a daily one with a single sample.

One last piece of due diligence. Prices in this category moved twice inside three months while we were writing this, so treat every figure here, including ours, as a snapshot dated 21 August 2026. If a comparison page does not tell you when it last checked, it is not telling you much.