On September 26, 2026 we asked OpenAI's model, with web search on, "How do I track my brand in ChatGPT?" three times. Two of the three answers named no tool. They talked about referral tracking in analytics and crawler checks instead, and only the third run named a vendor. That one result sums up the market for AEO tools, the tools that check whether AI answers name your brand.
The money keeps coming. Profound raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation on September 15, seven months after a $1 billion round. Adobe closed its Semrush deal on April 28. HubSpot bought XFunnel and turned it into a free grader and a $50-a-month add-on. We looked for a shutdown or a fire sale and found none.
The prices sort onto four shelves, taken from each company's own site on November 3, 2026. Add-ons from big SEO suites: free to $99 a month. Standalone trackers: about $20 to $295. Content tools that added tracking: about $39 to $82. Tools that also do the work: all over the map. Profound no longer lists a self-serve paid plan at all.
The answers are the weak spot. In our own test, five buying questions asked three times each, the tools named overlapped about 70% between runs. On OpenAI's side it was 58%, and on Perplexity's 82%. SparkToro had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts in January 2026, and the odds of getting the same list of brands twice came out under 1 in 100. Ahrefs tracked more than 1,300 prompts a day for 28 days, and two random days gave an identical brand list less than 3% of the time.
So we'd ask a vendor three things. How many runs sit behind a number? How is a failed check recorded? Which engines are in my tier? Claude and Grok are the ones that split the plans.
RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform, wrote the full analysis, and we sell in this market too, so read our take with that in mind. The full version is on Medium.