AEOeye vs LLMrefs: One-Off Audit or Weekly Keyword Tracking?

Choose by the job. If you must watch AI visibility every week, LLMrefs fits better. If you need to learn where you stand today, AEOeye is faster and cheaper.

• Pick LLMrefs if you work from SEO keyword lists, want weekly reports with share of voice and cited sources, and need many engines, countries or client projects under one subscription.
• Pick AEOeye if you have never measured this, want to read real answers from ChatGPT (free) or five engines ($29, once), and don't want a subscription.
• Use both, in that order: baseline with AEOeye, then add a tracker such as LLMrefs if the baseline shows something worth watching.

Our opinion: monitoring before a baseline is the common mistake. A dashboard tracking 500 prompts shows how a number moves; it can't tell you whether those were the right questions. Our guide to AI visibility trackers covers how that category differs.

LLMrefs is built for keyword-based tracking over time. AEOeye is built for a one-off audit of what AI engines say right now. The difference is the unit of measurement: keywords versus buyer questions.

LLMrefs says it tracks keywords, not prompts. You import or enter SEO keywords, it generates prompts from them, and it reports share of voice, position and cited sources per keyword (LLMrefs homepage). That mirrors how engines work: query fan-out is Google's term for splitting one question into several related searches.

AEOeye starts from unbranded buyer questions. The free audit asks ChatGPT three of them live and shows the full answers, the competitors named instead and starter fixes. The $29 report adds Claude, Gemini, Google AI and Perplexity and raises the count to 10 questions. Each engine runs at the default tier a free user gets. AEOeye is not a rank tracker.

LLMrefs is stronger for continuous, broad tracking, and we would not talk a monitoring team out of it. Its published strengths are real:

• Ongoing refresh. Its FAQ says every keyword is updated in the dashboard "at least once per week", and weekly reports are part of the plan (LLMrefs pricing).
• Engine breadth. The homepage lists eleven engines, including Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Copilot and Google AI Mode.
• Scale. Unlimited projects and team members, CSV export and API access, and monthly prompt-volume estimates sit in one plan.
• Capacity per dollar. 500 prompts for $79/month. Otterly's $29 Lite plan covers 15 prompts (Otterly pricing); Peec AI's $95 Starter covers 50 (Peec pricing).

One thing to check yourself: the pricing card says geo-targeting in 50+ countries and 20+ languages, while a homepage section says 20+ countries and 10+ languages. Confirm which applies during the 7-day trial.

AEOeye is stronger when you want an answer now without a subscription. A free check shows full ChatGPT answers; the $29 report covers five engines once.

• Free first answer. Three buyer questions, asked live to ChatGPT, with answers shown in full.
• One-off price. $29 once versus $79 every month. Twelve months of LLMrefs is $948 (our arithmetic, assuming the price holds).
• Default-tier testing. We don't use stronger models than your buyers see.
• Fixes included. The report adds a 5-layer SEO foundation audit and a full fix roadmap, emailed as a PDF.

The limits are just as real. AEOeye gives no history, no weekly refresh and no share-of-voice trend; to see change, you run it again. AI answers also vary between runs, and LLMrefs itself notes that models are non-deterministic, so one audit is a sample. In AEOeye's own audit records, only 157 of 892 engine answers (17.6%) named the audited brand; the samples are small and self-selected, so read that benchmark as a reason to test your own questions, not as a ranking of engines.

AEOeye costs $0 to start and $29 once; LLMrefs costs $79 per month after a 7-day trial. The LLMrefs pricing page labels $79 "Limited time only", so budget for the price to change.

• AEOeye: $0 for the ChatGPT check; $29 one-time for the five-engine report. Run the full report again and you pay again.
• LLMrefs: $79 per month, $948 over twelve months at today's price. It lists no annual plan, and the price of extra keywords is not published (the FAQ says you can upgrade).

One $29 report is just over a third of one LLMrefs month. If you only need a baseline, that gap is the whole decision.

Spend about an hour and no money: run the free audit, then trial the tracker with what you learned. This avoids paying $79 for a dashboard you won't act on.

1. Run the free audit on the AEOeye homepage and read the three ChatGPT answers. Note which competitors get named.
2. Turn each question into the keyword your buyers would search. See an example report for what the answers look like.
3. Start LLMrefs' 7-day trial, add those keywords, and check whether its generated prompts resemble your buyers' wording.
4. Keep the tracker only if you will act on weekly changes. If you won't, a one-off $29 report each quarter or so may be enough.

We fetched LLMrefs' public files once on 3 October 2026 for AEOeye's crawler access study. This is a neutral fact box, not a verdict on the product.

• robots.txt blocks only /account, /dashboard and /api, so AI crawlers can read the public pages (robots.txt).
• llms.txt exists at the site root.
• Homepage JSON-LD in the served HTML: Organization, WebSite and SoftwareApplication, plus contact and address details.
• Documentation: the Getting Started page said "Coming soon" when we checked (docs), and the free account's limits are not listed on the pricing page.

For comparison, aeoeye.com names six AI crawlers in robots.txt and carries FAQPage and Offer schema. One fetch on one day proves little; check both sites yourself.