A new tool promising to tell you whether ChatGPT recommends your brand appears almost every week. Under the hood most of them do the same thing — send prompts to assistants and count mentions — but they differ sharply in analysis depth, how they treat cited sources, and what they turn the data into.
What an AEO tool actually does
Every serious platform shares the same conceptual engine:
- A prompt set representing your category (comparisons, alternatives, use cases, purchase intent).
- Scheduled runs of those prompts across one or more assistants.
- Mention extraction: your brand, your competitors and the sources cited.
- Aggregated metrics: appearance frequency, position inside the answer, sentiment and trend over time.
If a tool will not explain how it generates and repeats prompts, you cannot trust its historical series. That is filter number one.
The categories on the market
Prompt-tracking platforms. Peec AI and Otterly.AI focus on monitoring prompt sets over time and showing mention share against competitors. A good fit once you already know which questions matter.
Enterprise data platforms. Profound and peers target large teams: high query volumes, integrations and conversation analytics at scale. More power, and a bigger price and onboarding curve.
AEO modules inside SEO suites. Semrush and Ahrefs have bolted AI visibility reporting onto their ecosystems. Convenient if you already pay for the suite, shallower if conversational answers are your priority.
Free grader tools. Graders such as HubSpot's give a one-off snapshot and work well as awareness plays, but they are no substitute for a time series.
Hybrid technical + AI platforms. This is where AskBrandly sits: it audits your domain (structured data, llms.txt, AI crawlers, answer-shaped content) *and* queries the assistants, joining cause and effect in one report.
Seven questions to ask before you buy
- Which assistants does it really query? Some tools simulate answers through a model API; others mirror the consumer product with live browsing. Those are different datasets.
- Can I edit and version the prompts? Change the set and the historical series breaks. You need control and an audit trail.
- Does it log cited sources? Knowing which pages feed the answer is half of the actionable work.
- Does it measure sentiment, not just mentions? Being named as "the expensive, limited option" is not a win.
- Does it compare competitors in the same run? Without comparison there is no context: your 20% could be leadership or last place.
- Does it ship actions or only charts? The value is knowing what to write or fix on Monday.
- How much history does it keep, and how does it export? Board or client reporting needs PDF plus raw data.
Metrics worth demanding
- Mention rate: share of answers where you appear.
- Share of Model: your weight against all brands named.
- Average position in the answer: appearing first is not the same as appearing in passing.
- Sentiment: positive, neutral or negative, with the exact sentence.
- Cited sources: the domains the assistant leans on to justify a recommendation.
- Technical readiness: whether your site is legible to AI crawlers at all.
Common selection mistakes
- Buying on assistant count instead of prompt-set quality.
- Measuring your brand in isolation, with no competitors.
- Confusing a technical audit with a real assistant check.
- Switching tools every quarter and losing all trend comparison.
How to decide in one afternoon
Run a free trial on two or three platforms using the same eight prompts. Then compare: do the results agree, do they explain *why* you appear or disappear, and could you send that report upstairs untouched?
To start without signing up, run an AI visibility audit of your domain and benchmark it against any other tool. For depth, read how to measure Share of Model and how AI chooses the sources it cites.