Where Does Your Brand Rank in AI Search?

A number recently stopped me in my tracks.

42%.

There's a study saying that 42% of buyers now ask AI before they buy anything. Not a search engine — they ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity.

And this 42%? They're the most ready to buy.

Think about it. We used to fight to get our content onto the first page of search results, then wait for the customer to click through. Now? The customer never clicks through. They just ask the AI: "I want a CRM — which one's good?" And the AI answers, right there.

Are you in that answer?

A New Term: AEO

This has spawned a whole new line of work.

What's AEO? Answer Engine Optimization (the practice of optimizing for AI answer engines).

In plain terms, it studies one question: when a user asks an AI something, does your brand show up in the answer — in which sentence, and do they praise you or drag you?

It's not the same as SEO. SEO is optimized for algorithms, to push a web page up the rankings. AEO is optimized for AI, so that in the split second the AI starts talking, it names you.

The two sound similar, but they're completely different games.

Two Tools I Looked at Recently

Once AEO heated up, tools came out of the woodwork. I picked the two with the loudest buzz right now, and I'll walk through them one at a time.

The first one first.

It's backed by a large marketing-cloud company, and the product was officially launched in the spring of 2026. Its biggest feature: it lives inside your existing customer-management system.

What does that mean?

You don't have to fill out a stack of forms from scratch. The moment you turn it on, it already knows what you sell, who your competitors are, and what your customers look like. Why? Because that data is already sitting in your system — it just pulls it in and uses it.

God, the time savings are unreal.

It watches three AIs: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. It runs once a day on your behalf, checking your brand's visibility and how often it gets cited across the three, and whether competitors rank ahead of or behind you.

Price? $50 a month standalone, with a 28-day free trial and no card required. But if you're already on their pricier marketing bundles, this feature comes free — no extra charge.

Now the second one.

This is built by an independent company. The founders are a group of marketing-agency folks; it started as an internal tool they used themselves, and only later opened it up to the outside world. Today, brands like Mastercard, Procter & Gamble (P&G), and 7-Eleven are all on it.

Its ambitions are clearly bigger.

Six AIs, watched at once.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, plus Claude, Grok, and Google's AI Mode. One dashboard to see them all.

And it doesn't just watch — it does the work for you. It has a built-in content factory that can directly produce eight article formats specifically tuned for AI citations. It runs technical audits, over 100 checks in a single pass. The wildest part is an "outreach" feature that uses its own algorithm to tell you which sites are actually worth pitching for citations — instead of foolishly hammering at Wikipedia, a place you basically can't get a contribution into anyway.

There's also a cool design touch: an AI copilot that lives in the corner. Ask it in plain language — "how's my visibility this week?" — and it answers, and it can even edit drafts and run operations right inside the canvas.

Pricing is credit-based. Starts at $49 for 150 credits. One credit = one question scanned across all six AIs. Credits can also be spent generating articles and running audits. Flexible.

A Table Makes the Differences Clear

I pulled out the most critical lines for you.

How many AIs does it watch? The first watches three; the second watches six. The gap is Claude, Grok, and Google AI Mode. If anyone in your customer base has started asking questions on Claude, the first tool won't see any of that.

Does it connect to your customer data? This is the first one's killer feature: native integration. It knows what industries your contacts are in, what your buyer personas look like, and how far along the sales funnel each deal sits. The second one doesn't have this — if you want it, you wire up the API yourself.

Can it do the work for you? On its own, the first is mainly a "monitor" plus recommendations; to actually produce content you have to add its content module separately. The second is "monitoring + content factory + outreach + audits" as one end-to-end package — one subscription covers it all.

Is it agency-friendly? The second has a dedicated agency plan that can manage up to 1,000 brands, with white-label reports and a client portal. The first is essentially built for a single brand.

So Which One Should You Pick?

My take is simple.

If you're already using the first company's product suite, use it. Don't even think about it. Your customer data is already in there — flip a switch and it's on, basically free. And it can pipe the traffic coming in from AI straight into your sales funnel, which the second one can't do.

If you're not in that ecosystem, or you need to watch more AIs, or you need someone to produce the content alongside the monitoring — pick the second one. Especially agencies managing dozens or hundreds of clients: its agency toolset is practically tailor-made for you.

There's one more group of people: not ready to spend money yet, just want to see where you currently stand.

Then start with the free versions.

The first has a free AI search audit tool — type in your brand name, and in two minutes you get a report: your visibility score, sentiment score, and share of voice.

The second goes even harder, giving away four free mini-tools in one go. You can check visibility, check "AI readiness," generate geo-optimization prompts, and even check in real time whether your robots.txt lets AI crawlers in.

Grab a baseline with the free versions first, then decide whether to pay. That's the safest order.

One Last Thing

The AEO category didn't even exist two years ago.

Now 42% of buyers use AI to make decisions, and this group buys the most. Whether your brand shows up in what the AI says — the difference isn't traffic. It's whether, before that conversation even starts, you're already eliminated — or remembered.

The tool is secondary.

First, use a free one to see where you stand. Then pick one that fits into your daily workflow, and use it.

I recently took that free audit tool and ran our own brand through it. When the score came back, honestly, it was lower than I expected.

But that's good. Knowing where you are is the only way to know where to go.

Here's hoping your score beats mine.