Best AEO and AI Search Tracking Platforms

I’ve been using Profound and Gumshoe this year as my AEO tracking platforms, and I’ve recently demo’d Peec, Evertune, and Searchable.

My take is that a lot of the platforms are converging on common conventions, which I believe is good, and they will also all need to work on where to carve out their name. My sense is that “Profound” is the default word out of everyone’s mouth, based on first-mover advantage and brand name, but also that many will evaluate the others on this list.

I will be documenting my experiences here and share more as I go.

Brif Summary on My Perspective of Platforms

Here’s how I understand the platforms:

1. Profound is the big dog – sets the market, has the highest valuation. Probably the strongest fit for enterprises that want to go with the $2B valuation winner.
2. Peec is the closest to Profound – based in Berlin, seems to have most core features at a better price. Have heard of many marketing agencies that prefer them for their pricing for lots of clients.
3. Searchable – strong on price, features, and speed. Raised venture funding for their warchest. Probably the strongest fit for SEO-centric teams and agencies.
4. Evertune – more enterprise, and related to the ad tech world. They are leading on ChatGPT ads. Probably the best pick for large retail brands and big international names.
5. Gumshoe – really good with personas and has a strong technical SEO + adtech audience following. They are the dark horse that could come out of nowhere to take more market share.
6. Ahrefs Brand Radar – has a very unique global data set that is probably the best place to get a large amount of data. Strongest for those in the Ahrefs ecosystem. A great complement to custom prompt tracking tools. Leitado by Ahrefs looks like a promising, unique BI platform.
7. Airops – I don’t know much about the internals but my understanding is this is great for complex multi-step workflows and they go way beyond prompt tracking. Very compelling product for enterprise.
8. SEMrush – I’m not on the SEMrush platform so I don’t have first hand experience or demo experience here. Likely strongest for those who have everything in SEMrush and are in the Adobe ecosystem.
9. HubSpot XFunnnel – Great for those all-in on the HubSpot platform, likely underpowered compared to alternatives above.
10. Your Own – I think many firms should build a rudimentary one in Google Sheets and with the GPT for Sheets by Talarian plugin. This allows you to build from the ground up what you need.

My recommendation is to use this as your starting ten shortlist and demo and talk to everyone. It does seem like there is a strong enough lock-in effect on these platforms, where it’s hard to export to another system and recreate prompt tracking history. I do think it makes sense to test multiple in parallel, and then choose one primary and one backup platform.

Hot Takes – Off the Cuff Recommendations

Do your own due diligence, but if I was to pick roughly 3-4 for each use case, I’d filter down to these:

Best AEO Platforms for Enterprises

1. Profound – you won’t be fired for going with McKinsey, IBM, or Profound. If you want to follow the herd, it’s this one.
2. Peec.ai – probably the closest 2nd and probably preferred for European countries for some data policy reasons.
3. Evertune – has The Trade Desk founding heritage, likely a strong match for advertising and ad-tech first companies, like large retailers and international consumer giants.

Best AEO Platforms for Startups

1. Searchable – looks to have the greatest focused feature set and good cost-per-prompt price.
2. Your Own – technical founders should be able to build their own direct to the model API, using scrapers and scraper APIs, and linking it to a data warehouse and data visualization platform. Could also vibe code a 60% solution or go straight to LLM chats.
3. Ahrefs – there’s some interesting data capabilities that Ahrefs has a top 5 global crawler – with data most other platforms don’t have. Complementary to one of the above.

Best AEO Platforms for CMOs and Marketing Leaders

1. Profound – likely safest and your CEO has heard of it.
2. Evertune – the ad-tech integration and ChatGPT ads focus will save you some tool management headaches
3. Gumshoe – I think strong persona-based classical marketers will like the unique approach Gumshoe takes.

Best AEO Platforms for Entreprenuers and SMB CEOs

If you have founded or own your own professional service firm, small business, or similar sized entity where you run the budget and strategy, look to these.

1. Profound – if you’re the country club type of entrepreneur you’ll brad to your friends because you have the most expensive and leading (by funding) AEO platform. Also they do push into doing agentic marketing tasks now and are pushing the limits in this space.
2. Gumshoe – If you fancy yourself an under-the-radar guy or gal, Gumshoe will be one that most will be unfamiliar with. You’ve discovered some interesting gold. You may keep this one to yourself.
3. Peec.ai – If you’re a value investor, you like the strong reliable one that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and you want stability, Peec is likely good for you. You’d rather have a Toyota Land Cruiser than a Range Rover.