What should I use (or build) for AEO?

The Buy vs. Build vs. Hire map for answer engine optimization (AEO) aka GEO. Research on the options in each category, and how I’d think about it, as of May 2026.

18 months ago AEO (aka GEO) wasn’t a thing. Now it’s a priority for every marketing team. Organic traffic is declining as buyer behavior moves from traditional search and web browsing to AI search and agents that handle vendor research, evaluation, and comparison on our behalf.

AEO (answer engine optimization), also called GEO (generative engine optimization), is the practice of getting your brand cited in AI-generated answers like ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini. SEO was about getting blue links, AEO is about getting LLM citations.

Most GTM leaders agree AEO matters. But the space has gotten messier.

In this post I’m taking a swing at mapping the options. I’ve created a deeper guide with the options & players here. This is the situation in May 2026. Things are moving fast, so I’ll update the guide as the market moves.

Like every real marketing shift, this one is driven by buyer behavior, not vendor roadmaps. Buyers have moved from typing keywords and scanning ten blue links to asking an AI model and reading synthesized answers. Increasingly they send an agent to do the research for them.

The academics got there before the vendors. Princeton and IIT Delhi coined “Generative Engine Optimization” in a peer-reviewed KDD 2024 paper, built the first benchmark for it, and showed the right optimizations can lift a brand’s visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.

If your buyers are asking AI instead of Googling, you now have to earn the citation. And the research shows that citations can be influenced by marketers.

So we all need a strategy.

It’s already showing up in the org chart. Stripe is hiring an AEO/GEO Marketing Manager. So are Hex, ClickHouse, and OneTrust. We counted 59 of these roles across 49 companies in our jobs tracker — Brex is hiring a Director of Organic Growth & Discoverability to “build Brex’s AEO/GEO playbook and own how Brex shows up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini.” And it’s accelerating — the share of GTM-hiring companies in our tracker with an open AEO/GEO role has roughly tripled since March, from ~3% to ~9%. When companies that aren’t selling AEO start budgeting headcount for it, the category is real.

As demand surges, the players are racing to deliver.

All the product launches, funding, and M&A have made the space increasingly confusing for buyers like me.

The first question isn’t which vendor fits. It’s whether to buy a tool, build your own, or hire an expert.

Let’s break down the top-tier options in each bucket and the considerations behind them.

A dozen-plus tools now sell this. They split into two camps: AEO-native specialists built for answer engines, and SEO/Mar-tech incumbents retrofitting platforms you may already own.

How the space evolved. It started as measurement — track where you’re cited. That commoditized inside a year (six vendors measure well now), so the leaders moved up-stack into optimization, automation, and source acquisition (getting cited by the publishers and review corpora the models trust).

Who’s leading the conversation. Profound is the anchor — the most complete stack (measurement + automation + a Content Marketplace), the loudest content engine, and G2’s lone Leader. Peec and AirOps are the challengers pulling up fastest (top velocity in our scoring). Bluefish owns brand protection — its AI Accuracy product verifies the claims AI makes about you. Scrunch is optimization-first: how you get served to crawlers and agents. AthenaHQ and OtterlyAI make it adoptable without procurement — self-serve, from $29–95/mo.

Here’s how I score the specialists. Presence = market standing now, Velocity = momentum, Agent-Readiness = how easily your own agents can build on it.

Or buy nothing new and let a tool you already own absorb it: HubSpot AEO, Adobe LLM Optimizer (its $1.9B Semrush acquisition, repackaged), and the SEO incumbents retrofitting — Ahrefs, BrightEdge, Conductor, Siteimprove, Botify. The bet here: AEO is a feature, not a category.

So which ones are actually getting picked? The first third-party scorecards just landed, and they agree on the shape. G2’s first-ever AEO Grid (December 2025) named Profound the lone Leader, with Otterly and Scrunch as High Performers and the incumbents (BrightEdge, Semrush, Conductor) as Contenders. Gartner named Otterly a Cool Vendor. Forrester gave Botify a Strong Performer in its SEO Wave. If you sent a hundred agents out with vanilla context and asked for the top AEO vendors, Profound is the name that comes back most — it has the funding, the logos, and the loudest content engine. Which is exactly why the next two doors matter: the default answer is getting expensive.

See the full profile on each vendor → (funding history, customer roster, free-trial terms, analyst placement, and the claim each one makes)

In 2026 the build-vs-buy line has shifted in every category. With agents, vibe coding, and GTM engineers, there are legit build options in AEO.

Clay is a natural puzzle piece, and they’ve published the playbook: three plays, an AI visibility dashboard built on Clay + Supabase + Claude Code + Vercel, two days to a proof of concept that cost “roughly five times less than the tools they’d evaluated.” Their existing orchestration and integrations provide a head-start for both measurement and content production.

Call it the build-with-primitives path. Clay’s edge isn’t the LLM calls; everyone has those. It’s the B2B data underneath, the pre-built integrations, and the ability to orchestrate AEO inside a system your GTM engineers already use and love.

The other path is fully DIY — Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor plus the open-source stack. Grab an OpenRouter account and you can query a wide range of models with one API call. It’s conceivable to stand up a custom agent for audit, visibility tracking, optimization, and even content creation in a few days.

There are 30+ active OSS projects you can leverage, fork, or learn from. A few of the top ones:

Claude Code / Codex skill packs — aaron-he-zhu/seo-geo-claude-skills (1,761★) and onvoyage-ai/gtm-engineer-skills (961★, MIT) drop AEO audits and content workflows straight into a coding agent.

Audit, from the research — Auriti-Labs/geo-optimizer-skill (432★) implements the actual Princeton KDD 2024 methodology.

Measurement, local-first — danishashko/geo-aeo-tracker (132★) is “the simple version of Profound,” with no data leaving your machine.

Infrastructure — dualmark serves markdown twins to AI agents and HTML to humans via content negotiation.

For the right team — technical enough, AI-pilled, with access to the adjacent tools — build is a credible option, not a fallback.

Just as SEO, social, and mobile agencies grew out of earlier internet waves, AEO agencies are coming online for the AI era. Many run a platform underneath (their own build, or Profound/AirOps). But you’re paying for deep domain experts who take you from “I need some AEO” to outcomes.

The landscape splits into the SEO old guard repointing decades of muscle, and the AI-native upstarts built for this from day one.

Graphite (Ethan Smith) — the sharpest operator method. The “5% of AEO” thesis, topic clustering, controlled testing against untouched controls, and the much-quoted “ChatGPT converts 6x Google” stat.

iPullRank (Mike King) — reframing the whole discipline as “relevance engineering.” Hosts SEO Week, the four-day single-track NYC conference where a lot of this thinking gets argued out.

Animalz (Ty Magnin) — the premium B2B SaaS content shop (Google, Amazon, Zendesk on the roster). Their AEO move keeps the editorial bar high: expert-interview content engineered to get cited, starting with an AEO audit and 90-day roadmap. Enterprise pricing (~$12K/mo+).

Foundation (Ross Simmonds) — distribution-led GEO. Ross wrote Create Once, Distribute Forever and has been one of the loudest practitioners on getting cited via Reddit, communities, and aggressive repurposing. Clients include Canva, Snowflake, Procore.

daydream — the AI-native version. “Agency-as-product”: SEO/AEO agents do execution at scale, a human Growth Lead owns outcomes. $15M Series A from WndrCo ($21M total), and YC just ranked AI-native agencies the #3 most-wanted startup category. Hiring this out isn’t a fallback — it’s a venture-scale bet.

The discipline has its own canon forming, which is the surest sign it’s past the hype debate. The loudest thinkers right now are Ethan Smith (Graphite), Mike King (iPullRank), Ross Simmonds (Foundation), and Aleyda Solis. The events are real: Profound runs Zero Click, iPullRank runs SEO Week, AirOps runs AirOps Next. Profound even launched Profound University to certify the “Marketing Engineer” role. When a category has its own conferences and certifications, the “is this real?” question is settled.

As I evaluate the options, I keep finding that AEO is really many sub-jobs. I can name at least six verbs: measure · diagnose · optimize content · optimize infrastructure · source acquisition · automate the loop

Most “platforms” nail one or two. If you build, you’ll struggle to cover everything right away.

Measurement is already commoditizing — six vendors do it well. The piece I’d actually defend is source acquisition: getting cited by the publishers and review corpora the models trust. That’s the only layer with real network effects, because citations compound. Automation is the frontier, and still too early to buy on faith.

AEO is one of the categories in the AI GTM 100 — funding, category tags, and what each company actually does. Profound, Bluefish, Evertune, Scrunch, Peec, AthenaHQ, Otterly, daydream are all in there now.

So which approach are you using? And who did I miss?