The AEO tool category did not exist three years ago. Today there are four platforms most professional services buyers end up comparing when they decide to measure their AI search visibility: AEO Grader (us), Knowatoa, Profound, and Otterly.ai. Each one solves a different shape of the problem. None of them solve all of it.
This is the comparison we wish existed when we were building AEO Grader. We will tell you when our tool is the right answer and when one of the other three is. The category is young enough that honest positioning is more useful than pretending we are best at everything.
All pricing and feature data below was verified directly against each vendor's site or third-party reviews cited inline. Pricing for AI-native SaaS moves fast; check the live pages before purchasing.
The four tools at a glance
| Tool | Starting Price | AI Engines | Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AEO Grader | Free, then $999 - $7,500 | 4 (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) | Full scan, email gate, no card | Local practices wanting a prioritized audit + fix list |
| Knowatoa | $59/mo Starter, $199/mo Growth | Up to 7 | Free audit, no card | B2B SaaS teams needing continuous tracking |
| Profound | Enterprise custom ($2K - $5K+/mo per third parties) | 9 | Limited free report | Enterprise brand teams tracking share-of-voice at scale |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo Lite, $189/mo Standard, $489/mo Premium | 6 | 14-day trial | Solo operators + agencies on a small budget |
AEO Grader (us)
We built AEO Grader for one specific buyer: a professional services practice that wants to know where it stands in AI search and wants a defined fix list instead of a recurring SaaS dashboard. A scan is free, takes about 60 seconds, and is gated behind an email. Paid tiers start at $999 (Founding, first ten buyers, locked at that price for life) and move up to $1,499 Standard, $2,499 with monitoring, and a $7,500 Authority tier. Paid tiers add deeper analysis, a PDF strategy memo, and a 30-day outcome guarantee.
Where we are strong: vertical focus. The 60 prompts we query are tuned to how patients, clients, and prospects actually ask AI about dentists, attorneys, advisors, med spas, and therapists. Generic AI-visibility tools ask brand-mention questions. We ask buyer questions in the buyer's phrasing.
Where we are weak: no continuous monitoring out of the box (the Monitoring tier adds a weekly re-scan, but if your job is to track share-of-voice across nine engines daily, Profound or Knowatoa fit that pattern more directly). We query four engines, not seven or nine. The four cover the majority of consumer AI search volume but if your buyer is on Grok or DeepSeek, we will not see it.
Knowatoa
Knowatoa sits in the middle of the market on price and the top on engine coverage. Starter plan is $59/month and limited to ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. The $199/month Growth plan unlocks all seven platforms, an API, Looker Studio and NinjaCat integrations, and a dedicated account rep.
Where strong: cross-platform tracking. Seven AI engines polled on a recurring schedule fits an in-house marketing team that reports weekly. AI-powered content agents auto-draft articles based on audit gaps if you trust auto-generated content in your category.
Where weak: positioning. The platform is built for B2B SaaS and in-house marketing teams. A dental practice or PI firm will find it feels like a generic visibility tracker rather than a vertical-specific audit. The $59 Starter is also feature-stripped; the real product starts at $199/month.
Profound
Profound is the enterprise option. Public pricing page routes to a Get a Demo flow. Third-party reviews (Trakkr, Workduo) report enterprise plans in the $2,000 to $5,000+/month range. Treat those as directional; actual contract pricing is set in the sales call.
Where strong: coverage and enterprise infrastructure. Nine AI engines, Prompt Volumes data on what millions of people ask AI, agent analytics tracking AI crawler behavior on your site, SSO/SAML, SOC2, dedicated Slack support. The platform built for a brand team at a public company.
Where weak: accessibility. No public pricing, no free trial, no self-serve. For a solo practice, the sales-call requirement is disqualifying. The platform assumes a marketing ops function to consume the dashboards.
Otterly.ai
Otterly.ai is the budget option. Lite is $29/month with 15 tracked prompts, Standard is $189/month with 100 prompts, Premium is $489/month with 400 prompts. 14-day free trial without a credit card.
Where strong: long-term prompt monitoring at a price a solo operator can absorb. Six AI engines tracked, public API for programmatic access, brand-report dashboards that update over time.
Where weak: depth per prompt. The Lite tier 15-prompt cap is restrictive for any practice with more than one service line. The platform is built for monitoring known prompts over time, not for the diagnostic question of “what does AI think about my business when I have never asked before.”
When to use which
- Local practice wanting a one-time prioritized audit: AEO Grader. Free tier covers most of what you need.
- In-house B2B SaaS marketing team reporting weekly: Knowatoa Growth ($199/month).
- Enterprise brand team tracking share-of-voice at scale: Profound.
- Solo operator monitoring a fixed prompt set on a tight budget: Otterly Lite or Standard.
- Not sure what AI says about you yet: Start with the free tier of AEO Grader or Knowatoa. The diagnostic tells you which monitoring pattern you actually need.
What all four tools share
Every tool in this category, including ours, gives you visibility into the gap. None of them close it for you. AEO Grader returns a prioritized fix list. Knowatoa drafts content. Profound gives dashboards. Otterly tracks prompts. The work of implementing schema, fixing directories, claiming Avvo and Healthgrades profiles, publishing answer-format pages, and building review depth still happens at your site, on your domain, with your team or an agency you hire. For the implementation reference, see which schemas AI actually reads.
What is missing across the category
- No tool monitors Google AI Overviews live at the SERP level. Tools sample. None give a live view of how Overviews answer your category in your geography right now.
- No tool integrates directly with Google Business Profile edits. Every tool tells you to fix GBP. None push updates to the listing for you.
- Attribution from AI citation to closed revenue is unsolved. No tool, ours included, gives a clean closed-loop attribution model.
- Schema implementation is still manual. Every tool tells you what schema is missing. None write and deploy the JSON-LD for you.
The take
If you are a professional services practice and your job is to know where you stand in AI search and what to fix first, the free scan from AEO Grader is the fastest path. Sixty seconds, no card, four engines, sixty prompts, prioritized fix list. If after the scan you decide you want recurring monitoring instead of audit-and-fix, Otterly Lite or Knowatoa Growth are the credible next steps and we will say that on the call.
Related reading: what AEO is and why it matters, how to optimize for ChatGPT Search, and the BrightLocal 2026 data deep-dive.