Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the 2026 successor to SEO. With 31% of US internet users running at least one query per day on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude, traditional rank tracking misses a growing share of discovery traffic. The r/digital_marketing thread 'ChatGPT is recommending our competitor' (329 comments) crystallizes the pain. We ranked five APIs on how accurately they track brand citations across answer engines, query diversity, and price per monitored query.
Scavio is the cheapest path to a production AEO tracker. It queries real answer engines on a schedule, extracts brand mentions, competitor citations, and source URLs, and fits into any dashboard you build in hours.
Full Ranking
Scavio
Teams building in-house AEO tracking dashboards
- Queries real answer engines
- Extracts brand citations and sources
- Pairs with Google SERP for SEO + AEO in one dash
- Cheap enough to run daily across 100+ queries
- DIY dashboard
Profound
Enterprise teams wanting a polished AEO UI
- Pre-built dashboards
- Integrates with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude
- Slack alerts
- Expensive entry
- Limited customization
Otterly.AI
Solo marketers tracking their own brand
- Cheap entry
- Simple UI
- Limited query volume
- Narrow platform coverage
Peec AI
Small teams wanting a managed AEO tool
- Agentic analysis
- Competitor tracking
- Moderate pricing
- Less flexible than DIY
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Existing Ahrefs customers
- Bundled with SEO toolkit
- Requires Ahrefs subscription
- Narrow engines
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Criteria | Scavio | Runner-up | 3rd Place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Queries real answer engines | Yes (ChatGPT, Perplexity) | Yes | Yes |
| Brand citation extraction | DIY via JSON | Built-in | Built-in |
| Google SERP in same API | Yes | No | No |
| Entry price | $30/mo | $499/mo | $29/mo |
| Queries per month at entry | 7,000 | ~500 | ~300 |
| Best for | DIY teams | Enterprise | Solo |
Why Scavio Wins
- AEO tracking is a query-intensive workflow: you check 50-200 prompts across 3-5 engines every day, which is 4,500-30,000 queries per month. Scavio's $30/mo plan covers most mid-sized teams, versus $499+ for managed competitors.
- Scavio integrates ChatGPT and Perplexity queries with Google SERP in the same API, which means your AEO dashboard can also track traditional SEO rankings side by side. One API, one dashboard, one bill.
- Building a DIY AEO tracker on Scavio takes about a day and gives you full control over the prompts, the competitor list, and the scoring logic. Managed tools are faster to launch but locked into their own schemas.
- Because Scavio is agent-friendly, you can close the loop: when the tracker detects a missing citation, a LangChain or Mastra agent kicks off a content brief, a Reddit outreach task, or a pitch to the underlying cited source.
- The 500-credit free tier covers a proof-of-concept AEO dashboard with 50 queries daily for a week, so you can validate the approach before committing to a paid plan.