Profound Alternative: What to Look for in an AEO Tool

If you are looking for a Profound alternative, the question worth asking is which tool tells you why an AI answer named someone else — not which one has a longer feature list. This page sets out what AEOTrack does, precisely enough that you can verify it inside a trial, and gives you a test you can run against any tool in the category.

Engines covered

AEOTrack queries five answer engines on every check: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Grok. Each check is a live API call, and results are reported per engine rather than blended into one figure — because a domain can be strong in one engine and entirely absent from another, and an average hides precisely the gap you need to close.

Named is not the same as cited

Being named means the answer text says your brand. Being cited means an engine retrieved one of your URLs as a source. These fail for opposite reasons.

Across 446 answers tracked for one domain, 15% cited that domain and only 9% named it. On one engine, 22 answers cited the site and none of them named the brand — the engine read the page, used it, and recommended a competitor. AEOTrack reports both numbers per question and per engine and sorts every question into four states, so you can tell a positioning problem from a crawling one before you start work.

The sources you are competing against

Engines consulted an average of 7.7 other sources alongside the tracked domain in that dataset. AEOTrack lists them: which domains were retrieved, how often, and whether each one names you or a rival. That list is the real competitive set, and it usually contains publishers and review sites rather than the vendors you had in mind.

Crawler analytics that see non-JavaScript bots

Nearly every AI crawler reads HTML and never executes JavaScript, so a browser beacon under-reports badly while appearing to work. AEOTrack ingests server logs directly through Vercel and Cloudflare log drains, splits activity by crawler, and shows which pages each one fetched.

Scores that admit uncertainty

AI answers vary between runs, so every measurement carries sampling error. AEOTrack shows a range (the ± to expect between two checks) and a sample count alongside each score, versions the scoring method so history is not silently rewritten, and scores questions containing your brand name apart from the headline — they inflate every tool's numbers, ours included.

A test you can run on any tool

• Pick five questions a buyer would really type; at least three should not mention your brand.
• Run them in the tool and in the engine directly, and compare the answer text.
• For one answer where you appear: were you named, were you cited, and what else was read?
• Ask whether crawler numbers come from server logs or from JavaScript.
• Change nothing for a week and see whether the score moves more than its stated range.

Where AEOTrack fits

AEOTrack is built for teams who want the diagnosis and intend to act on it: five engines, naming separated from citation, the source list behind every answer, log-based crawler analytics, and an action plan that traces each item back to the check that produced it. Plans start at $39/month with a 7-day trial and no card required.

If what you need is one number for a slide, this is more product than you want.