Comparison

The best AEO tools for a bootstrapped founder

On a founder’s budget the shortlist is short. Rankscale at $20/mo covers the most engines for the least money. Otterly.AI at $29/mo is the cheapest honest way to watch whether AI answers name you. Fulcru at $50/mo is ours, and it is the pick only if you want the page that closes the gap written and re-measured, not just the number. Profound and Semrush start at $99/mo and are built for teams with budget. Before you pay any of them, do the free pass below; it takes an afternoon and tells you whether you need software at all.

Do this first, for nothing

1. 1

   Check nothing is blocking the crawlers

   GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended each need to be allowed in robots.txt. Plenty of sites block them by accident through a Cloudflare bot rule nobody remembers turning on. This costs nothing and it is the one failure that makes every other effort pointless.

2. 2

   Run 20 buyer questions by hand

   Questions a buyer asks before they have heard of you, with no brand name in them. Paste each into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini in a fresh session. Write down who gets named. An afternoon of work gives you the number a tool would sell you.

3. 3

   Read the citations under the answers

   Perplexity shows them inline; ChatGPT and Gemini show them when they search. The domains that keep coming back are where your category gets argued about. That list tells you where to spend your time, and it is usually a forum, not a blog.

That is the whole method. A tool does not know anything you cannot find this way. What it buys is the repetition: 20 questions across 3 engines every week, logged and compared, is where people quietly stop.

The shortlist, cheapest entry first

Who each one is actually for

Rankscale $20/mo

An agency that wants the widest engine coverage in the category at the lowest entry price, and is comfortable with credit-metered usage. Essentials, billed annually. Credit-metered; free Pro trial.

Otterly.AI $29/mo

A solo operator or small team that wants the cheapest honest way to monitor AI answers and is happy to handle everything after the measurement themselves. Lite, billed monthly ($25/mo annual). Free trial for new users.

Fulcru $50/mo

A bootstrapped founder who does not just want to learn they are invisible - they want the page that closes the gap written, published, and the before/after delta measured, through an agent loop rather than by hand. Starter, plus a free visibility report that needs no card.

Profound $99/mo

An enterprise brand or larger agency that wants the deepest answer-engine analytics on the market and has a team ready to act on them - the category's high end, priced for it. Starter, billed annually. Growth is $399/mo.

Semrush AI Toolkit $99/mo

A team already living inside Semrush for classic SEO, that wants AI-visibility tracking bolted onto the workflow and reports it already uses. Per domain, billed annually. 25 tracked prompts included.

Peec AI ~€89/mo†

A European SEO team or agency that wants clean multi-brand monitoring with a native MCP and does its own content work. Self-serve Starter, annual saves 15%. 7-day trial, no card.

The trap in the entry tiers

Read what the cheap plan covers, not what the brand covers. Profound starts at $99/mo and tracks ChatGPT only; Perplexity and AI Overviews wait for the $399/mo plan. Otterly’s $29 Lite has no API and no MCP, so an agent cannot drive it. Peec AI’s base plan covers three engines and sells the rest as add-ons. Semrush prices per domain. On our plans every engine is on every plan, which is a choice we made because gating engines by tier makes the number meaningless.

Where the number actually moves

No tool here will get you named. They measure. We ran our own product on our own brand across 34 buyer prompts and were named in zero of them, and the citation log said why: the engines were reading Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, not vendor blogs. If you are bootstrapped, that is good news. The channel that decides this costs time, not budget. We wrote up the full result, numbers and all, in the day we scored zero on our own product.

† Peec AI does not publish its exact prices on its pricing page; the ~€89/mo figure is from third-party reviews and should be confirmed in-app. Every other price here is from the vendor's own current pricing page and reflects the lowest paid entry point, not the plan most teams end up on.