AEO

An AEO checker tells you whether the AI answers your buyers rely on actually mention your brand. People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini a question and act on the reply without clicking a link, so visibility that once showed up in your rankings can vanish into an answer you never see.

This Scrunch vs. Peec AI comparison evaluates how both tools measure AI answer engine representation across different buyer segments, price points, and feature scopes.

Something big just shifted in how people find answers online.

More buyers are skipping the investigation and deliberation of clicking through blue links on Google, in favor of asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the like for one direct answer.

Learning how to optimize your website for AI search is one of the hottest skills for marketers right now, because the audience for these tools is growing fast. Monthly unique visitors to the major answer engines climbed from 634 million in Q1 2025 to 904 million in Q1 2026, up more than 40% in a year, according to Wix Studio.

How much does AEO cost? The short answer is roughly $30 a month for a monitoring tool you run yourself to over $15,000 a month for a full-service agency program that handles everything for you — with a wide middle in between.

Over the past few months, I noticed a pattern while researching for clients. When I searched Perplexity for B2B reports or insights that I could cite for a project, the source list would look like this: Gartner, McKinsey, peer-reviewed paper, then … John Smith on LinkedIn?

Answer engine optimization is disrupting search as we know it. What once was predictable — add a keyword, focus on high-quality backlinks, increase your domain rating — has become a new game that doesn’t play by the same rules.

If you’ve been tracking your brand’s presence in AI-generated answers, you’ve probably noticed something confusing: your brand name shows up all the time, but that traffic isn’t materializing. The reason is usually the gap between an AEO mention and an AEO citation, and if you’re measuring the wrong one, you’re missing most of the picture.

Peec AI alternatives are AI visibility platforms that go beyond monitoring to help marketing teams close citation gaps, connect AI search data to CRM attribution, and run programs across multiple regions and content workflows.

AEO audit tools have become essential for any team that needs to know whether answer engines are citing their brand, and whether those citations are accurate. While traditional SEO audits track rankings and crawl health, AEO audit tools measure answer engine visibility across the platforms where buyers now get direct recommendations. For SEO managers, content strategists, and growth marketers, this is the new measurement layer most teams don’t have in place yet.