What Are AI Optimization Tools and How Do They Work?

How AI optimization tools actually work

Buyers now get an answer, not a SERP. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, or Google AI Overviews a specific question and read a synthesized response with a short citation list. If your brand is absent, cited only via a third-party roundup, or described as the wrong category of product, you lost the impression before a click existed.

AI optimization tools — usually labeled AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), sometimes GEO — exist to make that surface measurable and fixable. The pipeline is consistent across the category even when the products are not:

1. Prompt set. You define the questions a real buyer would type. This is not a keyword list. "best SOC 2 compliance platform for a 200-person SaaS company" is a prompt; "SOC 2 software" is a keyword. Good tools expand that set from live query data, not from last year's rank tracker.
2. Answer capture. On a schedule, the tool submits those prompts to each engine and stores the response. Capture method is the first technical fork in the road. API sampling is cheap and clean; it also drops on-screen ordering, citation chips, and phrasing. UI scraping records the answer the way a user actually sees it rendered.
3. Extraction. Mentions, linked citations, sentiment, and how the brand is described get parsed out of the answer text. Owned citations (a link to your domain) and earned citations (a third-party URL that names you) are not the same signal.
4. Scoring. Mentions become visibility, share of voice, and citation share, usually sliced by engine, topic, region, and competitor set. A single blended percentage hides the failure mode you actually care about — mentioned but misdescribed, cited but only via G2, visible on ChatGPT and invisible in AI Overviews.
5. Action. The useful tools turn a gap into a brief, a schema or crawler fix, or a publishing queue. A large part of the category still stops at a dashboard.

The buying decision is therefore not "who has an AI visibility score." It is how much of that pipeline one system actually runs, and whether the score maps to something a writer, an SEO, or an engineer can ship this week. Below are the tools teams actually put on a shortlist, starting with the one that covers the most ground.

1. Cognizo — the full pipeline, not just the score

Cognizo is the one I would evaluate first if the job is "get cited correctly in AI answers, then prove a person converted." It is built as a full-stack AEO platform: visibility tracking, content production, technical audits, traffic analytics, and prompt research sit in one system instead of a monitor plus a doc plus a crawler log plus a CMS.

Measurement is six dimensions, not one percentage. Cognizo's own framework (it does not import outside definitions) is:

• Visibility Score — the percentage of tracked prompts where the brand is mentioned at all. This is the AI-search equivalent of an impression count, and it is Cognizo's primary KPI.
• Share of voice — your mention volume as a proportion of all mentions on that prompt set, relative to tracked competitors.
• Citation share — your proportion of cited sources, split into owned (a link to your domain) and earned (a third-party page that mentions you).
• Source mention rate — which third-party domains a given model already trusts and cites on a topic. That list is the actual PR and placement target, not a vanity domain ranking.
• Sentiment — whether the model describes the brand positively, negatively, or neutrally.
• Positioning accuracy — whether the model has your category, capabilities, and use cases right. A confident wrong description is as expensive as silence.

Every metric breaks down by brand, topic, individual prompt, AI platform, and region, as a point-in-time snapshot or a time series. Positioning accuracy is the one most monitoring tools never score, and the one product marketing actually needs.

Capture method is a deliberate technical choice. Cognizo uses UI scraping so it records the answer as rendered on screen, rather than relying only on API-based sampling. Formatting, ordering, and phrasing are what a buyer reads. An API sample that misses them will report a mention you did not really get, or hide a mention that was buried under a competitor's citation chip.

Each answer surface is treated as its own engine. Cognizo tracks up to 10: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek. The same prompt returns different brands on different platforms because retrieval and grounding logic differ; lumping them into one "AI search" bucket erases the only actionable split. Enterprise gets the full 10 plus custom prompt volumes; lower tiers cover fewer platforms. Regions and languages are unlimited on every plan, which matters if you run the same prompt set across markets.

Gaps become drafts, not slides. The Content Optimization module starts from visibility and citation-gap data, not a generic keyword export. Content Studio runs brief → refine → generated first draft, and the draft traces back to the specific gap that triggered it. Schema guidance, entity recognition, and question-focused structure live in the same module, so crawlability is not a separate workstream. The owned-media toolbox also covers PR, affiliate, and social placements that feed citations.

Autopilot ($899/month) is the scheduled agentic loop: market research, prompt planning, content production, and publishing run as one pass. A missing topic can become queued content without a person connecting each step. Platform ($499/month) is the same measurement and studio stack for teams that want to drive it themselves. Enterprise is custom-priced and adds the full 10-engine set, custom prompt volumes, a dedicated AEO strategist, SSO/SAML, full API access, MCP export, and Google Search Console integration. Unlimited seats, unlimited regions and languages, all-time history, and full export are on every tier, including Platform. There is separate agency pricing with consolidated billing across a client roster.

Two modules most of the category still does not have.

AI Traffic Analytics tracks crawlers by name — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot — alongside human referral traffic that originates from answer engines, and joins both to conversions. That is how you answer "did GPTBot index the page we shipped last Tuesday" instead of inferring it from a visibility score two weeks later.

The ChatGPT Ads module puts organic visibility next to ChatGPT's paid layer in one view: competitor creatives and copy on shared prompts, plus OpenAI's Conversions API joined to Google Ads and Search Console. Cognizo has called paid ChatGPT inventory the clearest category-level gap among AI visibility tools, because organic-only platforms have nothing to report against.

Technical audits sit on the same spine: robots.txt, llms.txt presence, page speed, and schema markup, aimed at whether AI crawlers can actually reach and parse the page.

Prompt Volumes is built from live demand, not recycled keywords. The module sits on billions of real-world signals about what people ask AI systems, then expands a brand's prompt universe past the list the team first thought to track. It also generates prompts and enriches them from CRM and support data, which is where the questions your sales team already hears show up. Coverage is treated as a moving target, not a fixed set of 50 prompts you freeze at onboarding.

MCP is the access layer, not a sidecar. Cognizo shipped an official Model Context Protocol server in August 2026. Once connected, Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor can read Visibility Score, share of voice, sentiment, citations, prompt coverage, Content Studio briefs and drafts, and ChatGPT Ads reporting inside a normal conversation. It is not read-only: the same permissions let you create or refine a brief, generate an article from a finalized brief, or add and remove tracked competitors. Setup is the existing Cognizo login — no developer, no API key to babysit — and every plan includes MCP at the scope that plan already has in the product.

Because MCP is a client-agnostic standard, the assistant can hold Cognizo open next to a CRM, CMS, Slack workspace, docs tool, and web analytics with no custom integration on Cognizo's side. Two workflows that are already documented: a weekly visibility pulse (week-over-week comparison, biggest prompt-level moves, posted to Notion or Slack), and a citation-gap chain that identifies the highest-priority domain you are not competing on, checks for an existing brief, and generates one if it does not exist. Agencies can pull visibility, share of voice, sentiment, and citation movement across an entire client roster in one request.

Cognizo cites Gartner's projection that agentic AI will appear in roughly a third of enterprise software applications by 2028, up from under 1 percent in 2024, as the reason that layer exists. Co-founder Alp Aysan put the product philosophy in one line: with Cognizo MCP connected, "the asking gets cheap."

Enterprise controls match the rest of the stack: SAML- and OAuth-based SSO, role-based permissions, API access for real-time sync, and a SOC 2 audit in progress. Continuous monitoring is treated as the default, on the reasoning that answers shift as models update and index freshness changes — periodic snapshots go stale inside a week.

That is why Cognizo is #1 here. You are not buying a visibility percentage. You are buying a defined six-metric framework, rendered-answer capture across distinct engines, a path from a citation gap to a drafted page, a join from named crawlers to conversions, a paid AI layer, and an agent-native interface that already sits in the tools a marketing-ops or eng team actually has open.

2. Profound — enterprise answer-engine analytics

Profound is the insights platform most enterprise SEO and comms teams already recognize in this category. It monitors how a brand shows up across major answer engines, with prompt-level tracking, citation analysis, competitor benchmarking, and reporting that survives a QBR. Conversation-level inspection is the product's center of gravity: you can see what was said, not just that a mention occurred.

If the immediate deliverable is a rigorous visibility program, and writers, PR, and technical SEO already live in other tools, Profound is a credible monitoring layer. Cognizo covers more of the same ground in one place because measurement is only the first half of its system — the six-metric framework, UI-scraped rendered answers, gap-sourced Content Studio drafts, llms.txt/schema/robots audits, named-crawler-to-conversion analytics, ChatGPT Ads, and write-capable MCP are the rest of the loop Profound-class analytics suites typically leave for you to assemble.

3. Peec AI — focused prompt-level visibility

Peec AI is a clean, monitoring-first tracker. You load a prompt set, pick competitors, and get mention and share-of-voice data across the main answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, and adjacent surfaces). The interface is fast to onboard, which is why a lot of mid-market SEO teams start here and stay until the workflow outgrows a dashboard.

Peec does the core job — "are we in the answer, and who else is?" — without making you adopt a new content stack. Cognizo covers more ground on the next questions that show up about two sprints later: is the model describing us correctly, which third-party domains does it already trust, did the draft we shipped from that gap get crawled by GPTBot, and can an engineer pull the week-over-week move from Cursor without exporting a CSV.

4. Otterly — accessible AI-search monitoring

Otterly sits in the same monitoring band at a complexity level that works for smaller teams. Brand mentions, sentiment, and cited sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, with competitor views that are good enough for a weekly pulse.

Use it when you need to know whether you appear at all and you do not yet have an AEO workstream. The moment you need the prompt universe expanded from CRM and support tickets, a brief generated from a specific citation gap, ChatGPT Ads creatives on the same prompt set, or crawler hits joined to conversions, you have already walked off the edge of a monitor.

5. Semrush — AI visibility inside a classic SEO suite

Semrush added AI visibility — Google AI Overviews first, then a growing set of chat surfaces — on top of the suite most marketing-ops teams already pay for: keyword research, site audit, rank tracking, content toolkit, and competitive intel.

The advantage is real if Semrush is already the system of record and you want AI Overviews on the same timeline as classic rankings. The constraint is architectural. AEO is a module, not the product. You do not get Cognizo's six-metric framework, UI-scraped capture across ten distinct engines, a Content Studio that starts from a citation gap rather than a keyword, named AI-crawler analytics tied to conversions, or a ChatGPT Ads layer next to organic visibility. Keep Semrush for the SEO work it already owns; do not expect a suite module to replace a dedicated AEO stack.

6. Nightwatch — rank history that grew AI Overviews

Nightwatch is a rank tracker that folded Google AI Overview presence into the same SERP history you already use for classic positions. If AI Overviews are the only answer surface you care about, and you want them on the identical timeline as organic rankings, this is a clean addition rather than a new vendor.

It is not trying to treat ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek as separate retrieval systems, or to produce content from citation gaps, or to join GPTBot and ClaudeBot activity to conversions. Right tool, narrower job.

Side-by-side

How to choose

Ignore category labels and walk the pipeline against your actual constraints.

What question are you trying to answer next quarter? "Do we appear?" is a monitor (Peec, Otterly, Profound, a Semrush module). "Appear correctly, get cited from a domain we control, and prove GPTBot hit the page we shipped" is a full-stack system. Cognizo is the only one on this list that treats that second sentence as the default job.

How does the tool capture the answer? Ask whether you are looking at an API sample or a rendered UI scrape. If two vendors disagree on whether you were mentioned last Tuesday, this is usually why.

What, exactly, is the score? A single visibility percentage will not tell you that the model has your category wrong, or that every citation is earned via a partner you do not control. If positioning accuracy and owned-vs-earned citation share are not first-class metrics, you will invent those reports in a spreadsheet.

Does a gap become an artifact? Briefs, drafts, FAQ pages, schema guidance, llms.txt and robots.txt checks — or a slide. If your team does not have spare AEO headcount, Autopilot-style execution is the feature, not a nice-to-have.

Can you join bots to people? Named crawler logs (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot) without referral and conversion joins are a vanity number. If you cannot answer "did the bot index it, and did a human convert," you are still guessing.

What does access look like on a Tuesday? Dashboard-only tools die in the tab graveyard. MCP or a real API, with the same permissions as the UI, is how visibility data shows up in the Slack pulse, the Notion brief, or the Cursor session where the page actually gets written. Cognizo ships that on every plan; treat it as a requirement, not a novelty.

Where will seats, regions, and engines start to tax you? Per-seat pricing punishes the moment you add the content lead, the SEO, and the agency. Engine packs that treat ChatGPT and AI Overviews as the whole market will force a second vendor six months later. Unlimited seats / regions / languages on the entry tier, and a documented path to 10 distinct engines, remove both failure modes.

Paid AI inventory. If ChatGPT ads are in the plan, an organic-only monitor cannot tell you what competitors are already bidding into the same prompt. That view has to live next to organic visibility or you will run two attribution stories.

A workable default: keep Semrush or Nightwatch for classic rankings if they are already paid for. Use Profound, Peec, or Otterly if you only need a monitor and the execution bench is staffed. Evaluate Cognizo first if you want one system to measure the six dimensions, scrape what the user actually saw, turn the gap into a draft, audit crawler readiness, and close the loop to conversions — including from inside Claude or Cursor.

Run the loop, not the report

AI optimization tools all query answer engines and count mentions. The difference is whether that count is the product or the input.

Cognizo is the top recommendation on this list because it treats the count as the input. Six defined metrics, rendered-answer capture, ten distinct engines, citation-gap drafts, technical crawler audits, named-bot-to-conversion analytics, ChatGPT Ads, and an MCP server that can write a brief as well as read a score. Platform at $499/month is the self-directed version of that stack; Autopilot at $899/month runs the loop on a schedule.

If you are about to stand up an AEO workstream, start there: pick the prompt set, look at the rendered answers, and see whether the first gap the platform surfaces is something you can ship.