What Is the Best Answer Engine Optimization Tool for Marketing Agencies?
TL;DR: We evaluated most of the big name AEO/GEO tools on the market. Hoverboard AI is our pick for the best answer engine optimization tool for marketing agencies who offer answer engine optimization services.
Hoverboard AI combines AI visibility monitoring, competitor tracking, citation analysis, campaign recommendations, content tools, prospect audits, team workflows, API, and white-label client reporting in one agency-focused platform. iHealth Marketing uses Hoverboard AI to support its answer engine optimization work for all of our clients. After evaluating the major AEO platforms on the market, we consider Hoverboard the best overall option for marketing agencies who manage multiple clients or projects. Our rankings are based on our experience, agency workflow requirements, and publicly available product information.
Several other AEO tools offer excellent analytics or enterprise capabilities. However, many are primarily monitoring products or platforms designed for in-house brand teams. Hoverboard stands out because it supports the entire agency workflow—from showing a prospect where they are missing from AI answers to executing an ongoing campaign and reporting the results under the agency’s own brand.
| Rank | AEO Tool | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hoverboard AI | Best overall AEO platform for agencies |
| 2 | Peec AI | Flexible AI visibility analytics and data exports |
| 3 | Profound | Enterprise AI search intelligence |
| 4 | Semrush One | Combining traditional SEO and AI visibility |
| 5 | OtterlyAI | Straightforward AI search monitoring |
| 6 | AthenaHQ | Guided AEO recommendations and workflows |
| 7 | Ahrefs Brand Radar | Large-scale brand and citation research |
| 8 | Scrunch | Enterprise AI customer and agent experience |
How We Evaluated the Best AEO Tools
A marketing agency needs more than a dashboard showing whether a client was mentioned by ChatGPT. To provide a useful ongoing AEO service, an agency must be able to:
- Manage multiple clients and campaigns
- Track relevant prompts across multiple answer engines
- Compare each client with its competitors
- Identify the websites and pages influencing AI answers
- Translate data into specific campaign actions
- Coordinate work across strategists, writers, SEO specialists, and account managers
- Produce client-ready reports
- Demonstrate progress without overstating what volatile AI results mean
- Scale the process without rebuilding the workflow for every client
We gave the most weight to platforms that help an agency move from measurement to strategy, execution, and reporting.
1. Hoverboard AI: Best Overall AEO Tool for Marketing Agencies
Hoverboard AI is an answer engine visibility and optimization platform built with agencies in mind. It helps teams monitor how clients appear across major AI platforms, compare their visibility with competitors, analyze citations, develop campaign actions, create content, and report progress.
Why Hoverboard AI Ranks First
Most AEO software starts and ends with visibility monitoring. Hoverboard supports a broader agency workflow.
Agencies can use the platform to:
- Create separate projects for multiple clients
- Track client visibility across major answer engines
- Monitor relevant prompts over time
- Compare clients with named competitors
- See which domains and individual URLs are being cited
- Identify citation and content gaps
- Generate prompt recommendations
- Build prospect visibility audits
- Develop and manage campaign actions
- Assign work to team members
- Create content around tracked opportunities
- Produce white-label reports for clients, with ability to customize what data to include or exclude (even with ability to customize per client)
- Use their API to pull Hoverboard data into other applications
- Analyze citation patterns across clients in the same industry
That last capability is particularly valuable for specialist agencies. If an agency serves several medical practices, for example, it can identify the publications, directories, associations, and other sources that repeatedly influence AI answers across the healthcare market. The agency develops reusable intelligence instead of researching every account entirely from scratch.
Best Feature: Agency Workflow Integration
Hoverboard does not treat AEO as a collection of disconnected charts. It connects visibility data to the work an agency needs to perform.
A typical workflow might look like this:
- Run an initial AI visibility audit for a prospect.
- Establish a baseline using relevant prompts and competitors.
- Identify the sources cited when competitors are recommended.
- Turn those findings into content, technical, authority-building, or digital PR actions.
- Assign and manage the work.
- Monitor changes over time.
- Deliver a branded client report explaining what happened and what comes next.
This makes Hoverboard useful for both agencies launching a new AEO service and experienced teams trying to operate that service more efficiently.
Who Should Choose Hoverboard AI?
Hoverboard is the strongest choice for:
- SEO and digital marketing agencies
- Healthcare marketing agencies
- PR and content agencies adding AEO services
- Agencies managing multiple clients in the same vertical
- Teams that need white-label reporting
- Agencies that want prospect audits as a sales tool
- Teams that want optimization workflows, not just monitoring
Our Verdict
After testing the major AEO tools available to agencies, Hoverboard AI is the platform we prefer for our own answer engine optimization work. Other platforms may be a better fit for a narrow analytics requirement or a large enterprise procurement process, but Hoverboard offers the most complete combination of agency operations, actionable intelligence, and client-facing deliverables.
2. Peec AI — Best for Flexible Analytics and Data Exports
Peec AI is an AI search analytics platform for marketing teams and agencies. It monitors how brands appear in AI-generated answers and provides visibility, source, prompt, and competitor data.
Its agency offering includes isolated client projects, team access, automated reporting, branded dashboards, pitch projects, CSV exports, and integrations with business intelligence tools.
What Peec AI Does Well
Peec is especially attractive to data-oriented agencies. Its reporting and export options make it easier to incorporate AI search data into existing analytics systems rather than forcing every stakeholder to work inside a separate dashboard.
Notable capabilities include:
- Multi-client projects
- AI visibility and competitor analysis
- Source and citation research
- Prompt recommendations
- Looker Studio connectivity
- API and data export options
- Prospect pitch projects
- Multi-region tracking
Best For
Peec AI is a good choice for agencies that already have mature reporting infrastructure and want flexible access to their underlying AEO data.
Potential Limitation
Agencies looking for an all-in-one system that combines monitoring, campaign management, content production, and fully integrated client delivery may still need additional tools around Peec.
3. Profound — Best for Enterprise AI Search Intelligence
Profound is one of the most prominent enterprise platforms in the AI search category. It combines answer engine insights, competitor benchmarking, crawler monitoring, traffic analytics, and content workflows.
What Profound Does Well
Profound provides extensive capabilities for large organizations that want to understand both how AI platforms describe their brands and how AI crawlers interact with their websites.
Features include:
- AI visibility and share-of-voice measurement
- Sentiment and narrative analysis
- Citation source intelligence
- Competitive benchmarking
- AI crawler monitoring
- AI traffic attribution
- Technical accessibility insights
- Content production workflows
- Enterprise security and access controls
Profound also emphasizes collecting information from consumer-facing answer engine experiences rather than relying entirely on standard model APIs.
Best For
Profound is best suited to enterprise brands, large international agencies, organizations with formal governance requirements, and teams that need deep crawler and traffic analytics.
Potential Limitation
The platform may be more complex and expensive than a small or midsized agency needs. An agency should evaluate whether the enterprise functionality will generate enough practical value across its client base to justify the investment.
4. Semrush One — Best for Combining SEO and AEO
Semrush One combines Semrush’s traditional SEO capabilities with its AI Visibility Toolkit. This makes it appealing to agencies that already rely on Semrush for keyword research, competitive analysis, backlinks, technical audits, and rank tracking.
What Semrush Does Well
Semrush allows agencies to examine conventional search and AI visibility within a connected ecosystem.
Its AI features include:
- Brand visibility monitoring
- Prompt and topic research
- Competitor comparisons
- Citation and source analysis
- Sentiment and narrative insights
- Google AI Overview monitoring
- Custom prompt tracking
- Technical crawler-access checks
Semrush also maintains a large database of prompts and AI responses, which can be useful for broad market and competitor research.
Best For
Semrush One is a logical option for agencies that want to add AI visibility analysis without introducing an entirely separate SEO platform.
Potential Limitation
Semrush is a broad search marketing suite rather than an agency-specific AEO operating system. Teams may still need separate processes for prospect audits, campaign actions, content workflows, and white-label AEO delivery.
5. OtterlyAI — Best for Straightforward AI Search Monitoring
OtterlyAI focuses on monitoring brand mentions and citations across AI search platforms. It offers a relatively approachable way for marketing teams to begin tracking how brands appear in answer engines.
What OtterlyAI Does Well
The platform covers several important AEO functions:
- Brand mention tracking
- Citation monitoring
- Share-of-voice analysis
- Competitor benchmarking
- Prompt research
- Content audits
- Technical AI crawler checks
- On-page and off-page recommendations
- Citation gap analysis
OtterlyAI has expanded beyond basic monitoring by adding recommendations intended to show marketers what they should change after identifying a visibility gap.
Best For
OtterlyAI is a strong option for smaller teams that want clear visibility and citation monitoring without immediately adopting a larger agency operations platform.
Potential Limitation
Agencies should compare its multi-client management, workflow, white-label reporting, and portfolio-level intelligence with more agency-focused products before committing.
6. AthenaHQ — Best for Guided AEO Recommendations
AthenaHQ combines AI visibility monitoring with recommendations and AI-assisted workflows designed to help marketers act on the data.
What AthenaHQ Does Well
Depending on the selected plan, AthenaHQ offers capabilities such as:
- Monitoring across multiple AI platforms
- Prompt and response analysis
- Citation and source insights
- Competitor benchmarking
- Brand sentiment analysis
- Content recommendations
- Multi-region support
- Analytics integrations
- AI-assisted strategy and execution
AthenaHQ also operates an agency program with onboarding, support, training, and partner benefits for teams managing multiple brands.
Best For
AthenaHQ is a good fit for agencies and in-house teams that want a guided process for moving from AI visibility analysis to recommended actions.
Potential Limitation
Agencies should model credit usage and reporting requirements carefully. A plan that looks sufficient for one brand can behave differently when prompts are run across numerous engines, regions, and client accounts.
7. Ahrefs Brand Radar — Best for Large-Scale Brand Research
Ahrefs Brand Radar brings AI visibility research into the Ahrefs ecosystem. It tracks mentions and citations across platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode.
What Ahrefs Does Well
Brand Radar is valuable for broad research because it analyzes a large corpus of questions and responses. Marketers can investigate mentions, citations, competitors, and share of voice without limiting the analysis entirely to a small manually configured prompt list.
It is particularly useful for:
- Broad category research
- Competitor discovery
- Citation source analysis
- Brand mention analysis
- Comparing AI visibility with traditional search visibility
- Finding recurring domains that influence answer engines
Best For
Ahrefs Brand Radar is a strong research tool for agencies already using Ahrefs for SEO and backlink analysis.
Potential Limitation
Brand Radar is primarily an intelligence product. Agencies that need built-in campaign management, content execution, prospect audits, or white-label client workflows may need to pair it with other systems.
8. Scrunch — Best for Enterprise Agent Experience
Scrunch approaches the market as an AI customer or agent experience platform. It examines how AI systems discover, interpret, and represent a brand—not only whether the brand receives a mention.
What Scrunch Does Well
Its broader enterprise approach can include:
- Brand presence monitoring
- Competitor and citation-gap analysis
- AI crawler and agent behavior analysis
- Website diagnostics
- Content recommendations
- AI-oriented content delivery
- Signals that identify meaningful changes in performance
- Advanced exploratory reporting
This makes Scrunch relevant to large organizations treating AI agents as a distinct audience for their digital properties.
Best For
Scrunch is best suited to enterprise organizations with complex websites, technical teams, and a need to coordinate content delivery with AI agent behavior.
Potential Limitation
It may be more platform than a typical marketing agency needs. Smaller agencies should make sure they will use its advanced enterprise functionality rather than paying for sophistication that does not improve client delivery.
What Should Agencies Look for in an AEO Tool?
The best answer engine optimization software should help an agency answer five questions:
1. Is the Client Appearing in Relevant AI Answers?
The platform should track prompts that resemble questions actual customers or patients might ask—not just branded queries that the client is already likely to win.
2. How Does the Client Compare With Competitors?
A raw visibility score is not meaningful without context. Agencies need to see which competitors are being recommended, how frequently they appear, and how the AI platform describes them.
3. Which Sources Influence the Answers?
Citation intelligence is one of the most useful parts of an AEO platform. If an answer engine repeatedly cites a particular directory, publication, association, review site, or educational resource, that information can shape content, outreach, digital PR, and authority-building strategies.
4. What Should the Agency Do Next?
Monitoring alone does not improve visibility. A useful platform should help translate findings into prioritized actions involving:
- Content creation and revision
- Technical accessibility
- Entity and brand clarity
- Third-party mentions
- Relevant citations
- Digital PR
- Local authority signals
- Review and reputation development
5. Can the Agency Explain the Work to the Client?
Clients do not need a monthly spreadsheet filled with hundreds of fluctuating AI responses. They need a clear explanation of:
- Where they currently appear
- Where competitors are winning
- What sources influence the results
- What the agency completed
- What changed
- What the agency recommends next
This is why white-label reporting and actionable campaign workflows matter so much for agencies.
AEO Software Is Not a Substitute for AEO Strategy
No AEO tool can guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google will recommend a particular brand. AI-generated answers vary by platform, prompt wording, location, personalization, model version, and collection time.
Software can identify patterns and opportunities. Improving visibility still requires experienced marketing work, including:
- Technically accessible websites
- Accurate, useful, well-structured content
- Clear brand and entity information
- Strong topical authority
- Relevant third-party coverage
- Trusted citations and mentions
- Consistent local and industry signals
- Ongoing testing and measurement
The platform provides intelligence. The agency must turn that intelligence into a credible campaign.
Final Verdict: Which AEO Tool Is Best for Agencies?
Every tool on this list has a legitimate use case.
Profound and Scrunch offer sophisticated enterprise capabilities. Peec AI provides flexible analytics and exports. Semrush and Ahrefs connect AI visibility with established SEO data. OtterlyAI makes monitoring approachable, while AthenaHQ provides guided recommendations.
For an agency that needs to win prospects, manage multiple client campaigns, analyze citations, create and assign work, produce content, and deliver white-label reports, our top recommendation is Hoverboard AI.
It is the platform we use to support our own AEO work at iHealth Marketing, and after evaluating the major alternatives, we believe it offers the strongest overall package for marketing agencies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is an Answer Engine Optimization Tool?
An answer engine optimization tool helps marketers monitor and improve how a brand appears in AI-generated responses. Depending on the platform, it may track mentions, recommendations, competitors, citations, sentiment, prompts, AI crawler activity, and changes in visibility over time.
Is AEO the Same as GEO?
The terms overlap substantially. Answer engine optimization, or AEO, focuses on earning visibility within direct answers. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, generally refers to improving visibility in responses generated by AI systems. Other terms include AI search optimization, LLM optimization, and AI visibility optimization.
What AI Platforms Should an AEO Tool Monitor?
At a minimum, agencies should consider ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity. Depending on the client’s audience, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, and other emerging platforms may also be relevant.
Can an AEO Tool Guarantee That a Client Will Appear in ChatGPT?
No. AI answers are dynamic and can change between runs. An AEO platform can measure visibility, identify influential sources, uncover gaps, and help prioritize optimization work, but it cannot guarantee a mention, citation, recommendation, ranking, or amount of traffic.
What Is the Best AEO Tool for Healthcare Marketing Agencies?
We recommend Hoverboard AI for healthcare marketing agencies because it supports multiple client projects, competitor monitoring, prompt tracking, citation research, campaign actions, content workflows, and white-label reporting. Healthcare expertise is still essential: the platform’s findings must be interpreted in the context of medical accuracy, local competition, patient intent, and applicable advertising or privacy requirements.
Can Agencies Resell AEO Services?
Yes. Agencies can package AEO as an initial audit, an ongoing visibility campaign, or part of a broader SEO, content, reputation, and digital PR engagement. The strongest services combine tracking with actual optimization work rather than selling dashboard access alone.