Agencies Ask About AEO Tools Far More Than They Name Them

Most agencies doing AEO in 2026 are still working it out in public. In our count of 71 r/localseo and r/bigseo posts about AEO, GEO or AI visibility, half have a question as their title. Dedicated AEO tools are named in only four posts, each tool once. General assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are named in 20. As of September 2026 the tool market is young, and the working method for most practitioners is asking the assistants directly and writing down what comes back. On 3 August 2026 someone asked r/bigseo "what tools are people using for AEO?", for tracking, auditing and optimising. The thread drew 36 comments, and the poster later added that they had started using Similarweb for AEO research.

  AEO / GEO / AI-VISIBILITY POSTS — r/localseo + r/bigseo, our cached corpus
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬────────┐
  │ posts about AEO, GEO or AI visibility                │ 71     │
  │ titles that are questions                            │ 36     │
  │ posts naming a general assistant                     │ 20     │
  │ posts naming a dedicated AEO tool                    │ 4      │
  │   (Otterly, Profound, Similarweb, Search Atlas — 1 each)       │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────┘
  Aug 2025 – Aug 2026 · titles and bodies · counted 21 Sep 2026

The Questions Outnumber the Answers

Half the AEO posts in our corpus ask rather than tell. The questions run from "what do I even deliver?" to how others track AI visibility for local searches. A local practitioner in June 2026 described it as "one of those areas where best practices haven't settled yet", and asked whether Business Profile performance and map pack rankings were still the main metric regardless.

When a Client Asks for "GEO", the Hard Part Is the Deliverable

A practitioner on r/bigseo in March 2026 had been doing ordinary SEO when the client asked for more visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity:

I need something I can actually do, charge for, and report on.

r/bigseo, March 2026

Their edit said they would use Profound for visibility checks and another tool for applying fixes. That's one of the four dedicated-tool mentions in our whole set. What they asked the room for first was a list of tasks, and proof to show the client. The need was the deliverable: tasks, and something to show the client. The tool was a way to produce that.

The Tools That Do Get Named Do Different Jobs

The four named tools don't do the same thing. Some track visibility across prompts, some are broad market-research suites, and some are SEO platforms that added AI features. The August thread's poster chose a market-research suite. The March poster chose a visibility tracker. Neither choice says much about the other, which is why "what AEO tool should I use?" has no single answer. It depends on which of these three jobs you actually need done:

  JOB                         WHAT IT NEEDS
  tracking visibility         a frozen question set, repeated runs, a share
  auditing why you're absent  sources and framing behind each answer
  improving it                pages, reviews and listings — mostly not a tool

For Local Clients, the Method Matters More Than the Brand

For a local business, the measurement that matters is a protocol: buying questions in customers' words, asked from the client's town, several times each, with the model version logged. We set that out in run the same AI test the same way or it proves nothing. A tool is worth paying for if it runs that protocol for you, and not if it reports a single "visibility score" whose method you can't inspect. The buying checklist is in an AEO add-on is only useful if it asks customer questions.

What to Use for AEO Right Now

1. Start with a spreadsheet and the assistants themselves. Most practitioners in our corpus appear to be doing exactly this today.
2. Write the protocol down first: questions, location, runs, fields.
3. Buy a tool only to automate that protocol, and check it logs model version, location and every business named.
4. Keep the deliverable concrete: recommendation share, stability, and the fixes you made.
5. Report it next to the map pack, which is still where most local calls come from. For the starting point, see local businesses invisible to ChatGPT.

Our Interest, Stated

RankMap makes a map rank tracker and is exploring AI visibility for local businesses. A page saying "use a protocol before a tool" is still written by a tool maker, so apply the same test to us.