- Only four of the eight execute anything. Peec AI, Semrush, Conductor and SE Ranking are dashboards with recommendations. FirePencil, Profound and Athena push changes to your site; Scrunch does it at the CDN layer.
- Only one prices in pounds. Everyone else bills in dollars, so a "$99/month" tool is nearer £87 once VAT is added and the rate moves.
- Entry plans track three engines, not "AI". Profound's $99 plan is ChatGPT only; Peec's plans cover three models with extra engines at $35–$165 each. Read the engine list, not the headline.
- Free exists. Athena has a real free plan; FirePencil is free to start; Conductor gives three weeks; Semrush, Scrunch and SE Ranking give 7–14 days.
- Two vendors changed hands this year. Scrunch became a Sitecore company in June 2026 and Semrush is now part of Adobe — good for longevity, watch the roadmap.
- UK presence is thin. Profound opened a London office in late 2025 and SE Ranking is registered in London; the rest sell from the US and Germany.
§ What is an AEO tool?
§ The 8 best AEO tools for UK businesses, compared
Prices are what each vendor published on its own website on 24 August 2026, monthly billing unless stated. Pound figures are conversions at the xe.com mid-market rate that day ($1 = £0.733), rounded, before VAT. "Monitors vs Executes" is our reading of what the product does to your site, with the evidence quoted in each review below.
| # | Tool | Best for | Monitors vs Executes | Entry price | ≈ £/mo | Free | Engines | UK base |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FirePencil.AI | Getting the work done | Executes (site + approval) | Free to start; plans on application | £ priced | Free to start | 5 | UK |
| 2 | Profound | Enterprise, London office | Executes (CMS content, approval) | $99 / $399 | £73 / £292 | Trial + free report | 1 → 3 → 10 | London office |
| 3 | Peec AI | SMB monitoring value | Monitors only | $95 / $245 / $495 | £70 / £180 / £363 | Trial | 3 (+ paid add-ons) | Berlin |
| 4 | Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Existing Semrush users | Monitors only | $99 per domain (annual) | £73 | 7-day trial | 5 | Boston |
| 5 | Conductor | Enterprise content teams | Monitors + drafts | Not published | — | 3-week trial | 7 | New York |
| 6 | Scrunch AI | CDN-layer AI crawler serving | Executes (CDN layer) | $250 (annual) / $300 | £183 / £220 | 7-day trial | 8 | Salt Lake City |
| 7 | Athena | Free tier + CMS publishing | Executes (CMS content) | Free / $295 | £0 / £216 | Free plan | 8 | San Francisco |
| 8 | SE Ranking AI Search | Budget SEO + AI tracking | Monitors only | $129 + $89 add-on | £95 + £65 | 14-day trial | 5 | London (registered) |
§ How we picked these eight
There are now more than forty products with "AI visibility" on the homepage. To be on this list a tool had to meet all four of these:
- Multi-engine tracking as a product, not a feature announcement. It must query at least three answer engines today, with the list published.
- A checkable price or a checkable trial. Seven of the eight publish a price; Conductor earns its place with a three-week no-card trial.
- Buyable from the UK without a US entity. Self-serve sign-up or a sales process that serves UK companies.
- Something a UK buyer can verify. Engine list, integrations and the monitor-or-execute claim all had to be on the vendor's own site, not a review aggregator.
The order runs from executes the most to monitors only, then by price and UK presence. FirePencil is our own product and sits first; the other seven are competitors, and the table lets you disagree with the order.
§ The eight, reviewed
1 FirePencil.AI Best for: the work done, not reported
Every other product here is, at heart, a measurement tool. FirePencil is an autonomous AEO agent: it runs the same prompt-set measurement across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, then does the work the dashboard would otherwise hand back to you — structured data, entity consistency across the web, answer-shaped content, machine-readable summaries such as llms.txt, and full SEO on autopilot. Every change lands in an approval queue before it ships, so nothing goes live on your site that you have not seen.
It is priced in pounds, there is no retainer and no minimum term, and onboarding is free to start, so you see the first round of findings and the first fixes before paying anything. The report itself is written for owners rather than analysts: which questions AI is asked about you, whether you are named, and who is being recommended instead.
Consider something else if you want a monitoring-only tool with 350 tracked prompts and a Looker connector for an in-house analyst, or you need enterprise SSO and a procurement-grade vendor questionnaire today. FirePencil does one job — moving the citation rate — and it is a young product.
2 Profound Best for: enterprise, with a London office
The category's best-funded platform — a $96m Series C at a $1bn valuation in February 2026 — and the only one on this list with a UK office, opened in London in November 2025. Pricing is public: $99/month Starter tracks ChatGPT only with 50 prompts; $399/month Growth tracks three engines and 100 prompts; Enterprise (custom) goes to nine or ten engines, including Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Claude, with SSO and SOC 2. Two months free on annual billing.
Profound earns its "executes" mark through Agents: they "connect to your existing CMS and publish approved content", with integrations for Webflow, Contentful, WordPress and Sanity, and "every Agent run includes an approval step before anything publishes". That is content execution; we found nothing on the site about editing schema or pushing code. Best fit: a mid-market or enterprise brand that wants the widest engine coverage and a UK account team. Watch: the $99 plan is a single engine — the real product starts at $399.
3 Peec AI Best for: SMB monitoring value
Berlin-built, launched February 2025, ~$29m raised, and the cleanest pure monitoring tool for a small marketing team. Published plans: $95/month Starter (50 prompts, three models of your choice, unlimited users), $245 Pro (150 prompts) and $495 Advanced (350 prompts, five projects), 15% off annually. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot are the base pool; Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral and others are paid add-ons at $35–$165 per model per month depending on tier. Agency plans run $245–$495 on a credit model.
Peec is honest about what it is: its own machine-readable page states it "does not write or publish content itself". You get share-of-answers, sources, sentiment, a Looker connector and an API on Enterprise, and then the fixes are yours. Best fit: a team with an in-house SEO who wants clean numbers at a low price. Watch: its own comparison pages still show older euro prices, so confirm the currency at checkout; no UK office.
4 Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit Best for: existing Semrush customers
Renamed from the AI SEO Toolkit and now sold two ways: standalone at $99/month per domain on annual billing (25 tracked prompts, one Brand Performance domain), or inside the "Semrush One" bundle from $199/month monthly ($165 annual) with SEO included. It tracks Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and its AI Search Site Audit flags crawler blockers. Claude appears only as a bot in the audit, not as a monitored engine. Semrush became an Adobe company in April 2026.
It monitors and recommends; nothing in the toolkit publishes to your site. Best fit: you already pay for Semrush, your team lives in it, and you want AI mentions in the same reports as rankings. Watch: 25 prompts is a small sample for share-of-answers, and per-domain pricing adds up across brands. No UK office; a London event is the only UK footprint.
5 Conductor Best for: enterprise content teams
The enterprise SEO platform repositioned as "#1 for Enterprise AEO". AI visibility sits in Conductor Intelligence, alongside Creator (AI content drafts), Monitoring (the former ContentKing) and AgentStack (MCP server and APIs). It tracks seven engines — ChatGPT in both Auto and Search modes, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Copilot — the broadest list of any monitoring-only tool here.
Pricing is not published: the pricing page shows Essentials, Growth and Enterprise with usage limits and no amounts, and its own academy page says plans are "customised". The redeeming feature is a genuine three-week free trial with no card. On execution, the honest reading is "drafts and recommendations": Creator writes content inside Conductor and Agents queue "recommended updates", but we found no page saying it publishes to your CMS, edits schema or pushes code. Best fit: a large content team that already wants an enterprise SEO suite and needs AEO reporting in the same place. Watch: budget a sales cycle; no UK office (New York, Kyiv, Brno, Berlin, Amsterdam).
6 Scrunch AI Best for: fixing what AI crawlers see, at the CDN
Scrunch takes a different route to execution. Beyond the usual monitoring of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Copilot and Meta AI, its Agent Experience Platform "auto-detects AI agents visiting your site" and, via Akamai, Cloudflare or Vercel, routes those bots to a server-rendered copy of your pages while humans hit your normal origin. No code changes, no CMS access — the fix lives at the edge. Published pricing: $250/month Starter on annual billing ($300 monthly), $417 / $500 Growth, Enterprise custom, seven-day trial with no card.
Founded in Salt Lake City in 2023 and acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, so expect the roadmap to tilt towards Sitecore's enterprise CMS base. Best fit: a JavaScript-heavy site that AI crawlers render badly, with a CDN already in place. Watch: its FAQ page still shows an older "Core $250 / Agency Core $500" scheme that contradicts the pricing page; go by the pricing page. No UK presence, dollar billing.
7 Athena Best for: a real free tier, plus CMS publishing
The only genuinely free plan on this list: Essential gives 300 credits (one credit = one AI response) at no cost, then $295/month Starter buys 3,600 credits for "self-guided SMBs", with Enterprise custom for SSO and white-glove onboarding. It tracks eight engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok — and its Content Hub publishes directly to Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Framer and Payload, generating "optimised titles, descriptions, metadata and FAQs" for Shopify products.
That is real content execution for an e-commerce or WordPress site, though there is no schema editor or code integration documented. San Francisco, Y Combinator W25, founded 2025 by ex-Google Search engineers. Best fit: a Shopify or WordPress business that wants to start free and have the tool write and publish. Watch: the credit model means heavy prompt sets burn through the $295 tier quickly; no UK presence.
8 SE Ranking AI Search add-on Best for: budget SEO + AI tracking
The cheapest way to add AI tracking to a full SEO toolkit, from a vendor whose registered legal address is in London (E11) even though it bills in dollars. The Core plan is $129/month ($103 annual) with 100 AI prompts a day included; the AI Search add-on is $89/month ($71 annual) for 200 prompts, rising to $276 for 1,000, and brings the AI Results Tracker across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity plus its SE Visible dashboard for mentions, citations and sentiment. Fourteen-day trial, no card. The standalone SE Visible product starts at $99.
It is monitoring and recommendation only — "specific steps to improve your AI rankings", nothing that touches your site. Best fit: an agency or small business that wants rank tracking, audits and AI visibility for well under £200 a month. Watch: the pricing-page add-on bullet lists four engines while the feature page lists five; no Claude or Copilot.
Tired of dashboards that tell you what to fix? FirePencil finds the gaps and ships the fixes — you approve each one.
Start free →§ Monitors vs executes: the only column that matters
This matters because the number you are paying to watch does not move on its own. A monitoring tool at £150 a month plus a person to act on it costs you that person's time every week; if nobody owns it, you are paying for a graph. That is why so many monitoring subscriptions end up bundled with an agency retainer — and why our UK AEO agencies guide found published retainers from £499 to £10,000 a month on top of the software.
Execution also splits three ways, and they are not equivalent. Content execution (Profound, Athena) writes and publishes pages, which is the slowest lever but the one that eventually earns citations. Edge execution (Scrunch) fixes what the crawler sees without touching your CMS — powerful for rendering problems, irrelevant for entity or content gaps. Site execution (FirePencil) covers structured data, entity consistency, answer-shaped content and machine-readable summaries together, with a human approval gate. Ask any vendor the same question: "What did the tool change on my site last month, and where do I approve it?" The answer tells you which column it belongs in.
§ How much does AEO software cost in the UK?
Three costs hide behind the headline. Engines: Profound's $99 tier is one engine and Peec charges $35–$165 per extra model, so the "from" price rarely tracks what you want tracked. Prompts: Semrush gives 25, Profound 50, Peec 50, SE Ranking 200 on the add-on; share-of-answers on 25 prompts is a noisy number. Currency: seven of eight bill in dollars, so your finance team gets a fluctuating invoice plus VAT. Against an agency retainer, though, every tool here is cheap: the least expensive published UK AEO agency tier is £499 a month, and most start above £1,000.
§ How to choose, in five questions
- Who will act on the findings? If the answer is "nobody yet", buy something that executes, or budget for the person. A monitoring tool with no owner is the most common wasted AEO spend we see.
- Which engines, on the plan you can afford? Get the list for your tier in writing. "AI search" on a pricing page can mean ChatGPT alone.
- How many prompts, and who writes them? Fewer than 100 well-chosen buyer prompts is too small a sample; 25 is a demo.
- Where does it touch your site? CMS publishing, edge rendering, schema, entity data — or nothing. Make the vendor point at the integration page.
- What currency, what term, what exit? Dollar billing, annual-only discounts and per-domain pricing all change the real cost. Prefer monthly terms until the numbers move.
§ AEO tool, AEO agency, or an AEO agent?
A tool measures and recommends for £70–£370 a month; an agency implements for £499–£10,000 a month; an autonomous agent measures and implements at software cost with a human approval step. The tools here that execute — Profound, Athena, Scrunch and FirePencil — are all converging on that third model from different directions, which tells you where the category is going. If you want the full argument, read AEO agency vs software vs an AEO agent; if you want to shortlist people rather than software, the 10 best AEO agencies in the UK is the companion to this page.
§ What changed in this update
24 August 2026 — first published. Eight tools compared. All prices, engine lists and execution claims taken from each vendor's own site on 24 August 2026; pound conversions at xe.com mid-market $1 = £0.733. Noted Scrunch's acquisition by Sitecore (June 2026), Semrush's move into Adobe (April 2026), Semrush's rename from AI SEO Toolkit to AI Visibility Toolkit, and Profound's London office. Conductor listed with no published price.
Start free with the UK's autonomous AEO agent
FirePencil does what the other seven tools stop short of: it measures your AI visibility across five engines and then ships the fixes itself, with every change waiting for your approval. Priced in pounds, no retainer, free to start.
§ Frequently asked questions
What is the best AEO tool in the UK?
What is the difference between an AEO tool and an AEO agency?
How much does AEO software cost in the UK?
Do any AEO tools charge in pounds?
What does "monitors vs executes" mean for AEO software?
Which AI engines should an AEO platform track for UK businesses?
Is there a free AEO tool?
Can an AEO tool replace my SEO agency?
Sources — checked 24 August 2026
- Profound pricing; Profound Agents (CMS publishing with approval); London office; ten engines.
- Peec AI pricing and Peec AI machine-readable facts (plans, add-on engines, "does not write or publish content itself", Berlin HQ).
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit pricing; features and engines; Semrush One bundle.
- Conductor pricing (tiers, no amounts); engine coverage; three-week trial; offices.
- Scrunch pricing; Agent Experience Platform (CDN-layer routing); Sitecore acquisition.
- Athena pricing; Athena CMS integrations; Y Combinator listing.
- SE Ranking pricing; AI visibility tracker; about (London registered address).
- xe.com USD→GBP, mid-market 24 August 2026, $1 = £0.7331.
FirePencil.AI publishes this page and sells an autonomous AEO agent, listed first. Prices, plan limits, engine lists and integration claims are as published by each vendor on its own website on 24 August 2026 and change frequently; pound figures are approximate conversions and exclude VAT — verify before purchasing. No company paid for inclusion, placement or review. Third-party names (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode) and all product and company names and trade marks belong to their respective owners; use is descriptive and does not imply affiliation or endorsement.