Surfaced vs Otterly vs AthenaHQ vs free AEO monitoring tools — how do they compare?

The AEO tooling market has bifurcated into four tiers: enterprise monitoring (Profound), mid-market monitoring (Peec.ai, Otterly.ai, AthenaHQ), monitoring-plus-remediation (Surfaced), and free or freemium starter tools (Otterly free tier, Goodie, manual prompt-runs).

Otterly.ai: Focused on Perplexity and ChatGPT, freemium model with paid plans typically $100–300/month. Strong UX for SMBs running a few dozen prompts. Engine coverage thinner than competitors — limited Copilot, no native Claude tracking last we benchmarked. Best fit: solo founders and small marketing teams who care primarily about Perplexity.

AthenaHQ: Newer entrant with strong UX and a focus on brand-tracking workflows. Pricing comparable to Peec.ai mid-tier. Smaller competitive-benchmark dataset than incumbents, but the product moves fast. Best fit: brand managers who want clean dashboards without enterprise overhead.

Free AEO monitoring tools: Goodie's freemium tier, manual ChatGPT/Perplexity testing, and a handful of GitHub-hosted open-source prompt runners. Adequate for the first 30 days or under 30 tracked prompts. Break down past 50–100 prompts due to time cost, run-to-run inconsistency, and missing competitive context. Useful only as a sandbox before committing to a paid tool.

Surfaced: Monitors the same engines as the above (ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot) and adds autonomous remediation — generating the citation-bait paragraphs, schema, and entity tasks needed to win the gaps. Re-tests until the citation lands. Priced between Peec and Profound. Tagline: "Peec tells you you're losing. Surfaced wins it back while you sleep."

The honest selection rubric: if you have an in-house content team and need dashboards, Peec or AthenaHQ. If you only care about Perplexity, Otterly's free tier. If you have enterprise governance needs, Profound. If you want the work done for you, Surfaced. The category is consolidating fast; pick the tool whose roadmap matches your operating model, not the longest feature list.