AEO Tool Feature Comparison (2026): Cadence, Multi-Brand, Competitor Tracking, APIs

The short answer

If your buying question is "which AEO tracker updates daily," the answer is most of them: Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, and HubSpot AEO run prompts daily on standard plans, and Profound does on Enterprise. If the question is "which one lets me control the schedule," the list collapses to two: Ahrefs Brand Radar and Rankshift. Multi-brand work points at Otterly, Rankshift, or Peec's agency plans. API access without an enterprise contract points at Ahrefs, Rankshift, or Otterly.

This piece is a feature matrix, not a ranking. For the overall buying decision, start with our guide to the best AEO tools; for what these platforms cost, see our AEO tools pricing guide. A method note: we run Peec AI daily on our own client tracking, so those observations are hands-on. Every other vendor's specs come from research on their live pricing and documentation pages, verified September 2026, and where a vendor publishes no number we write "not published" rather than guessing. That gap is information too: it usually means "ask sales."

The master feature matrix

Nine tools, six dimensions, all vendor-published specs as of September 2026.

The sections below take each column one at a time.

Which AEO tools update daily (and which let you choose)

Verdict: daily is the category default, but only Ahrefs Brand Radar and Rankshift let you configure the schedule yourself.

Peec runs every tracked prompt daily; we see fresh runs in our client dashboards each morning, and Enterprise accounts can drop to weekly. Otterly's own wording is that prompts are "automatically monitored daily across all AI search engines available in your account," with no frequency setting. Semrush tracks its 25 custom prompts daily with daily, weekly, and monthly data views. HubSpot AEO runs its prompt set daily across its three engines. Profound runs daily on Enterprise, while its free trial runs your 10 prompts exactly once, a snapshot rather than a tracker.

The two configurable options differ from each other. Ahrefs Brand Radar custom prompts can be scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly, and the frequency matters because it burns your monthly check allowance at different rates. Rankshift's published wording is "multiple times a day, a few times a week, or once a month," the widest cadence range in the category and the only sub-daily option anyone publishes.

Two vendors publish no cadence. Scrunch AI does not state how often prompts run; third-party reviews report daily runs for the first 14 days and every 3 days after that, but that is their claim, not Scrunch's. AthenaHQ likewise publishes no update frequency. If cadence is a hard requirement, put both on the ask-sales list.

One nuance on Ahrefs: the configurable schedule applies to your custom prompts. The underlying AI Visibility Index refreshes on its own rhythm, AI chatbot data roughly monthly and AI Overviews every few days, so the two data layers move at different speeds.

Which AEO platforms support multi-brand tracking

Verdict: Otterly.ai and Rankshift are the most generous on paper, Peec's agency plans are the most agency-shaped in practice, and HubSpot AEO is the most restrictive.

The unit of multi-brand work differs by platform:

• Otterly.ai uses workspaces as the brand unit. Lite gets 1 workspace; Standard and Premium get unlimited workspaces with your prompt allowance shared across them. Brand reports and team members are unlimited on all tiers.
• Rankshift publishes unlimited projects and unlimited seats on every paid tier, which is the least constrained multi-brand offer in the category as written.
• Peec AI includes 1, 2, or 5 projects by brand-plan tier, where a project is a brand or market space. The agency plans switch to pooled credits that spread across as many client brands as the pool covers. This is the setup we run our own client tracking on.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar treats brands as entities you can analyze ad hoc, with base-plan project counts of 5 on Lite, 20 on Standard, and 50 on Advanced.
• Profound publishes unlimited projects on Enterprise; its agency motion is 400 credits per month per client workspace, base price unpublished.
• Semrush prices per domain: each additional Brand Performance domain or location is $99/mo. Multi-brand is possible but strictly metered.
• Scrunch AI advertises multi-site, multi-region, and multi-client workspaces, but does not publish per-brand pricing mechanics.
• AthenaHQ publishes no multi-brand mechanics, although a vendor case study touts an agency running 10+ brands on it.
• HubSpot AEO covers one owned domain per setup. More brands require HubSpot's Brands add-on, whose pricing is not published.

If you run a client roster, our deeper dive on AEO tools for agencies covers how these models hold up in practice.

Which AEO tools track competitor mentions separately

Verdict: everyone claims competitor tracking; almost no one publishes limits. The differences are in mechanics.

All nine tools track competitor visibility in some form, so the checkbox alone will not narrow your shortlist. What varies is how competitors get into the system:

• Peec AI auto-suggests a competitor once it co-appears with you in two answers, plus manual adds. In daily use this matters: the engines surface rivals you did not think to list. No numeric cap is published.
• Otterly.ai ships dedicated comparison views, "Me + Top 5 competitors" and "Me + all competitors," without publishing caps.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar combines auto-detection with manual additions, no caps published.
• AthenaHQ is the one vendor that publishes "unlimited" competitor tracking, from its Starter plan.
• Rankshift pairs competitor visibility with citation analytics, so you can see which sources power a rival's presence.
• Profound, Scrunch AI, HubSpot AEO, and Semrush all offer competitor tracking with no published numeric limits. Semrush previously published a cap we could no longer verify on its live pages, so we are not restating it.

A tip from our own tracking: competitor mention counts matter less than competitor citation sources. Knowing a rival appears often is trivia; knowing which third-party pages put them there is a to-do list.

How prompt limits compare

Verdict: allowances range from 15 prompts to 850 per day, and three vendors meter by credits or checks instead, so normalize before you compare.

Published allowances, September 2026:

The trap is that a "prompt" is not one thing. On Peec's agency plans, one prompt on one model for one day is one credit, so a prompt set costs three times the credits across three models. Ahrefs meters in checks, consumed at different rates per platform (Claude costs 8 checks per update). HubSpot states the multiplication openly: 25 prompts daily across 3 engines is 2,500 answers a month. Multiply out prompts times engines times frequency for your actual setup, or the cheapest-looking plan will not be.

Vendors also sell headroom as a priced feature: Otterly sells +100 prompts for $99/mo on Standard and Premium, Ahrefs sells check packages at $50, $100, and $250/mo (which require a paid Ahrefs base plan), and HubSpot sells an answers-limit increase without publishing its price.

Which AEO tools offer API, MCP, or Looker Studio access

Verdict: Ahrefs Brand Radar and Rankshift give you API plus Looker Studio without an enterprise contract, Otterly publishes the clearest quotas, and HubSpot and Semrush's toolkit give you effectively nothing programmatic.

• Ahrefs Brand Radar: Brand Radar API and a Looker Studio connector, both verified live.
• Rankshift: MCP server, REST API, and Looker Studio, though tier gating is not clearly published, so confirm before you buy for this.
• Otterly.ai: API and MCP with published quotas of 2,000 requests/mo on Standard and 5,000 on Premium, plus a Looker Studio connector on Standard and up and GA4 integration.
• Peec AI: MCP access on all tiers (rare at the entry level), CSV export on all tiers, Looker Studio on Advanced and up, REST API on Enterprise only.
• Profound: REST API with Python and JavaScript SDKs plus a hosted MCP server, all Enterprise-gated, with CSV and JSON exports and a long documented integrations list.
• Scrunch AI: a Query API and Responses API, with the Enterprise Data API gated to Enterprise. Its standout is scheduled email reports with alerts on rank, citation, and bot changes, which almost nobody else publishes. No Looker Studio or MCP is published.
• AthenaHQ: CSV export from Starter up; API access is a paid add-on on Starter, and BI-tool dashboards live on Enterprise.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: 10 CSV exports a day at 1,000 rows each, no toolkit-specific API or MCP. Programmatic access appears in separate Semrush One bundles instead.
• HubSpot AEO: native HubSpot dashboards only, with no published API, CSV export, or Looker path for the AEO tool specifically. It is also still in beta.

If this column is about wiring tracking data into reports and alerts, that workflow has its own guide: AEO automation platforms.

Free trials, quickly

Rankshift publishes the longest trial, 30 days with no card. HubSpot AEO gives 28 days. Otterly.ai offers roughly a week free with no card, Scrunch AI a 7-day Starter trial, no card. Profound's free trial plan runs 10 prompts once, on ChatGPT only: enough to see the interface but not the tracking. AthenaHQ replaces the trial with a free tier (300 credits, 5 platforms). Ahrefs offers a free AI Visibility Checker preview rather than a product trial, Semrush publishes no toolkit-specific trial, and Peec's 7-day trial is reported by third parties but not stated on its own pricing page, so treat it as unconfirmed.

Key takeaways

• Daily updates are table stakes: Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Semrush, HubSpot AEO, and Profound (Enterprise) all run prompts daily. Only Ahrefs Brand Radar and Rankshift let you configure the frequency; Scrunch AI and AthenaHQ publish no cadence.
• Multi-brand capacity ranges from unlimited (Otterly workspaces on Standard+, Rankshift projects on all paid tiers) to one domain (HubSpot AEO without its Brands add-on). Peec's credit-based agency plans are what we run our own client roster on.
• Competitor tracking is universal but caps are almost never published; judge tools on mechanics like auto-detection and competitor citation sources instead.
• Prompt allowances are not comparable at face value: credits, checks, and prompts-times-engines-times-days math mean you must model your actual setup, and vendors sell headroom as priced add-ons.
• For programmatic access without an enterprise deal, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Rankshift, and Otterly are the shortlist. Profound's API and MCP are Enterprise-gated, and HubSpot AEO and Semrush's toolkit publish no API at all.
• "Not published" appears throughout this matrix on purpose. It is vendor-verified absence, and it tells you which questions to put in front of sales before you sign.

Match the matrix to your actual job

Feature matrices answer constraint questions; they do not make the buying decision. Once you know which tools clear your hard requirements, the ranking lives in our best AEO tools guide, the pure tracking angle in best AEO rank trackers, and the procurement-grade end of the market in enterprise AEO tools. Costs get their own treatment in the AEO tools pricing guide.

And if you want the hardest constraint decided for you, an AI visibility audit from AEO Labs baselines your citation share first, then tells you which tool, tier, and prompt set your program actually needs. We scope one for every client we onboard, which is why this matrix exists in the first place.