What are the three kinds of AEO and GEO tools?
Buyers meet three different jobs under one label, and the tools are not interchangeable.
- AI visibility trackers run a panel of prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews on a schedule, then report how often your brand or URL is mentioned or cited compared with competitors. Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Ahrefs Brand Radar, and the Semrush AI Toolkit follow this pattern. Published entry prices in 2026 ranged from about $29 to several hundred dollars a month, and change often, so check each vendor's pricing page.
- Cloud page scanners take a URL you paste into a web form, fetch it from their servers, and return a score against a fixed list of factors. aeoagent.ai is one example of this pattern.
- Local desktop auditors run the fetch, parse, and scoring on your own computer. XEO Agent is in this group.
How do they differ side by side?
| Dimension | XEO Agent | Cloud page scanner | AI visibility tracker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | Your computer, in a local SQLite file | Vendor's servers | Vendor's servers |
| What is scored | Server-delivered HTML: SEO, AEO, GEO, and Local signals with evidence | A URL's HTML against a factor list | Brand or URL mentions in sampled engine answers |
| Live engine sampling | No | Usually no | Yes, that is the product |
| JavaScript rendering | No; flags client-rendered pages | Varies by vendor | Not applicable |
| Whole-site crawl | Yes | Rarely | No; tracks prompts, not pages |
| Account required | No | Usually | Yes |
| Price floor | Free | Free tier or low monthly fee | Roughly $29 to $399+/month in 2026 |
| Best for | Fixing pages before or alongside tracking, and any team that cannot upload HTML | Quick one-off checks | Measuring citation share over time |
When should you use a tracker instead?
Use a tracker when your question is "are we being cited, and how does that change week to week?" That requires querying engines repeatedly, which a page audit cannot do and XEO Agent does not attempt. Trackers are also the right tool for competitive share of voice across a category.
When should you use XEO Agent instead?
Use XEO Agent when your question is "why would an engine cite this page, and what is missing?" It reads the same HTML a search crawler reads and reports the specific tags, headings, schema, and provenance signals that are absent. It is also the right tool when page content cannot leave your machine, or when you want a deterministic rubric you can reproduce rather than a score explained by a language model.
Can you use both?
Yes, and that is the common pattern. Fix the page with a local audit so it has an indexable title and canonical, question-led headings with short answers, valid schema with stable identifiers, external references, and a visible author and date. Then watch the tracker to see whether citation share moves. A tracker shows whether you are cited. XEO Agent shows whether the page is even citeable.