Want to know how your medical device company shows up when buyers ask AI tools for recommendations, and which platform can actually measure it?
More and more of your buyers, whether they're clinicians, procurement leads or patients, now start their research by asking an AI tool rather than typing into Google. That shift has created a new discipline, answer engine optimisation (AEO), and a fast-growing set of tools that tell you whether AI engines mention, cite and recommend your brand. This article is an overview of the main options, comparing them on pros, cons and pricing so you can get your bearings and choose a sensible starting point. Think of it as the first in a series: we'll go into more depth on each of the AEO tools in later articles.
A quick note on transparency. Podymos is a HubSpot partner agency, and right now we use Searchable for our own AI visibility tracking. We're also trialling the other platforms covered here, so we're not tied to any single tool, and we've tried to treat each one evenhandedly, limitations included.
In this article we'll cover:
Search is moving from a list of links to a single synthesised answer, and that changes the question you need to measure from "do we rank?" to "are we the brand the AI recommends?" When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Mode about a treatment, a device category or a supplier, they often get one composed answer with a handful of cited sources, and no page of blue links to scroll through.
The scale of this is hard to ignore. AI Overviews now appear in around half of all Google searches, and more than 700 million people use ChatGPT every week. Gartner has forecast that traditional search volume will fall by roughly a quarter as people lean on AI tools and assistants instead.
This is a rapid shift rather than the death of SEO. The fundamentals that earned you Google rankings, clear structure, genuine authority and clean technical setup, are the same things that get you pulled into AI answers. If you'd like a refresher on those foundations, our comprehensive guide to digital marketing for medical devices is a good starting point. What's new is the metric that matters: not your position on a results page, but how often AI engines name you, cite you and describe you well.
A few terms are worth defining, since they're often used interchangeably. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is about becoming the answer AI tools give. GEO (generative engine optimisation) and LLM optimisation describe much the same work. AI Overviews are the summary boxes inside Google results, and AI Mode is Google's separate conversational search experience. Whatever you call it, the goal is the same, and so is the need to measure it.
Most AEO tools answer three core questions: are you mentioned, how often compared with competitors, and which sources the AI cites. Understanding these metrics makes it much easier to compare platforms, because nearly all of them report some version of the same things.
Visibility. How often your brand appears across a set of tracked prompts, usually shown as a percentage. It's the closest equivalent to a ranking, telling you whether you show up at all when buyers ask AI about your category.
Share of voice. How often you're mentioned compared with named competitors across the same prompts. This is the metric that shows whether you're leading or trailing in your space.
Citations. Which pages and domains the AI draws from when it answers. Citation data is the most actionable, because it tells you exactly which content is earning you a place in answers, and which competitor pages are winning instead.
A few tools also score sentiment, meaning how positively or negatively the AI describes you when it mentions you. It's useful context, though for most medical device teams visibility, share of voice and citations are the metrics worth acting on first.
Here's a quick comparison of the main platforms, ordered from most affordable to enterprise. Tool names link to each provider, and prices link to their pricing pages. Pricing is accurate as of May 2026 and shown in US dollars; some tools bill in euros or layer on per-engine add-ons, so the "starting price" is the headline entry tier, not always the usable one. The notes column and the write-ups below flag where the real working cost is higher. Always check the current figure before you commit.
| Tool | Best for | AI surfaces tracked | Starting price | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubersuggest | Basic AI visibility alongside SEO | ChatGPT, Gemini | $12/mo | SEO-first; AI visibility is light. Lifetime option available |
| Otterly.AI | Budget continuous tracking | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot (Gemini and AI Mode as add-ons) | $29/mo | Entry tier is just 15 prompts; realistic floor is $189/mo (100 prompts) |
| HubSpot AEO | Teams already on HubSpot | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini | $50/mo | 28-day trial (25 prompts); links to HubSpot CRM |
| Peec AI | Multi-market and multi-language brands | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini (more as add-ons), 115+ languages | $95/mo | Billed in euros (~€85); 1 country, 3 engines, 50 prompts. Multi-country from $245/mo |
| Profound | Enterprise multi-engine programmes | Up to 10 engines (1 on entry tier) | $99/mo | Starter is ChatGPT-only; multi-engine starts at $399/mo (Growth) |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Teams already on Semrush | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity | $99/mo | Add-on to a Semrush plan, or bundled in Semrush One from $199/mo. Free checker available |
| Searchable | Tracking, content and CRM in one | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews (Claude and Copilot higher up) | $125/mo | $50 Starter is ChatGPT-only, 1 domain; $125 Professional is the real entry. 14-day trial |
| Scrunch AI | Enterprise plus AI crawler tracking | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and more | $250/mo | 5 seats included; 7-day trial; SOC 2 |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | The largest real-prompt database | AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity (per index) | from $99/mo | Add-on to a base Ahrefs plan (from $129/mo); $99 per AI index, or $699/mo for all |
Once you want continuous tracking and proper competitor benchmarking, a dedicated tracker is the right tool, with realistic entry points ranging from about $50 to $125 a month. These are the platforms most medical device teams will end up choosing between. Watch the tier you actually need rather than the headline price, since several tools gate engines, prompts or extra countries behind higher plans.
At $29 a month, Otterly.AI is the budget entry point, though that Lite tier only tracks 15 prompts, which is enough to trial but not to cover a real keyword footprint; the realistic working tier is Standard at $189 a month for 100 prompts. Its base tiers track four answer engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, with Gemini and AI Mode as paid add-ons, and it carries solid third-party recognition. It's monitoring-first, so it tells you where you stand rather than writing the content to fix it, but for a first paid tool it's strong value.
Ubersuggest, Neil Patel's tool, folds basic AI visibility into a familiar SEO suite from around $12 a month, with a one-off lifetime option too. It's genuinely affordable and useful if you want SEO and AEO in one place. The AI visibility feature is still developing and currently focuses on ChatGPT and Gemini, so coverage is narrower than the dedicated trackers.
The paid version of HubSpot's AEO tool runs at $50 a month, with a 28-day trial that includes 25 prompts. It tracks visibility, citations and competitors across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and crucially it feeds straight into HubSpot's CRM, so you can link AI visibility to contacts and pipeline. If your team already lives in HubSpot, it's the most natural choice, and one of the better-value dedicated trackers. The limitation is the three-engine coverage.
Searchable, the tool we currently use, is an end-to-end platform that combines monitoring, content briefs and technical audits, and integrates with GA4, Search Console, HubSpot and Salesforce. It does list a $50 Starter plan, but that tier is ChatGPT-only on a single domain, so the realistic entry point is the Professional plan at $125 a month, which adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and a meaningful prompt allowance. Higher tiers widen coverage to seven engines, adding Claude, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek. Being transparent about the trade-offs, it launched in November 2025, so it has a thinner track record than older tools, the lowest tier is restrictive, and it's monitoring-led, meaning you still do the content work yourself. We're trialling it alongside the others precisely so we can keep that comparison honest.
Peec AI starts at around $95 a month (it bills in euros, roughly €85) and stands out for global reach, with support for more than 115 languages. One thing to watch for medtech: the entry plan covers a single country, three engines and 50 prompts, and multi-country tracking starts at the $245 a month Pro tier. For a company selling across the US, EU and UK that breadth is genuinely useful, but price it at the tier you'll actually need rather than the headline figure.
The next group suits larger medtech organisations, and teams already paying for a wider SEO suite. They add deeper citation analysis, more engines and, in places, crawler-level data, generally at a higher all-in cost.
Profound is a leading enterprise option with deep citation tracking and prompt-volume data across up to 10 engines. Its $99 a month Starter tier is ChatGPT-only and capped at 50 prompts, so multi-engine tracking really begins at the $399 a month Growth plan, scaling into the thousands for full enterprise use. The depth is the draw: rather than a single visibility score, you can see the actual prompts real users are asking in your category, which specific pages and competitor sources each answer cites, how your visibility breaks down by topic or buyer persona, and how often AI crawlers are visiting your site. For a well-resourced medtech team that wants to know exactly why an answer names a competitor and not them, that level of detail is the point, though it's priced and pitched at the enterprise end.
If your team already uses Semrush, its AI Visibility Toolkit adds AEO tracking for $99 a month as an add-on to a Semrush plan, or comes bundled into Semrush One from $199 a month. It covers ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, with Claude on enterprise plans, and there's a free AI search visibility checker for a quick scan. The advantage is having AEO and traditional SEO in one dashboard. The cost only makes sense if you're already paying for, or willing to adopt, the wider Semrush suite.
Ahrefs Brand Radar draws on one of the largest databases of real search prompts, and tracks engines including AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. The prompt data is its big strength. The catch is the cost stack: it's an add-on to a base Ahrefs plan (from $129 a month), with each AI index a further $99 a month, or $699 a month for the full set, so comprehensive coverage gets expensive quickly.
Scrunch AI, from around $250 a month, adds something the others mostly don't: tracking of how AI crawlers and agents interact with your site, alongside standard visibility tracking. It's pitched at the enterprise end, useful if you want to understand the bot-level picture as well as the answers. We trialled it ourselves and found it less targeted towards medical device than we'd hoped, and not as intuitive as some of the other platforms here, though that could have been down to how we used it rather than the tool itself, and your experience may differ.
There are free ways to get a partial read on AI visibility, but none of them gives you a dependable, full picture, which is why this comparison focuses on dedicated trackers. It's worth knowing what the free options are and where they fall short.
Google Search Console added an AI Mode filter in early 2026, but pulling that data out is fiddly rather than straightforward, and it only ever covers Google, so it tells you nothing about ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. Google Analytics 4 has an AI Assistant channel that captures some AI referral traffic, but it has real blind spots: free ChatGPT users send no referrer data, and Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks get bundled into organic or direct traffic. HubSpot's free AEO Grader gives you a one-off brand score, but it's a snapshot rather than continuous tracking, and you have to hand over your details to get it, which typically means a follow-up conversation about adopting HubSpot. Taken together, the free tools are a reasonable way to dip a toe in, but they give you limited, partial data, and for a clear view of where you stand you'll want a dedicated tracker.
One free development is worth watching, even though it isn't usable for medical device companies. At Google Marketing Live 2026, Google launched a free AI Performance Insights tool inside Merchant Center that benchmarks a brand's share of voice across AI Mode, Gemini and AI Overviews. It's tied to retail product feeds, so most medtech companies can't use it, but its significance is the direction of travel: free, built-in AI visibility measurement is becoming standard, much as Google Analytics did for web traffic.
Most of these tools were built for ecommerce and software brands, so a few medtech-specific factors should shape your choice. The right tool for a consumer brand isn't automatically the right tool for a regulated, multi-stakeholder market.
Prompt limits matter more than raw volume. Medical device queries are specialised and lower-volume, so you'll track a focused set of prompts, such as a specific device category for a specific indication. Watch the prompt allowance on each plan rather than being drawn in by big headline numbers built for mass-market categories.
Multi-market coverage. If you sell across the US, EU and UK, you'll want multi-country and multi-language tracking, which is where tools like Peec AI and Searchable's higher tiers earn their place.
Compliance comes before visibility. Being highly visible in AI answers only helps if what the AI repeats about your device is accurate and compliant. This comes down to staying within your device's intended purpose, or intended use, which is the term and the boundary that vary depending on which country you're marketing in. An AI tool confidently stating something beyond your approved intended purpose is a real risk, so it's worth checking what's being said about you, not just how often. Our guide on what you can and can't say in medical device marketing is a useful companion here.
Integration with your stack. Tools that connect to GA4, Search Console and your CRM let you tie AI visibility to leads and revenue, which is what turns a vanity metric into a business case.
Our honest steer is simple: pick one dedicated tracker that fits your stack and budget, start with its trial, then commit once you've seen the data. Here's how that breaks down by scenario, so you can match a tool to where you are right now.
The goal isn't to buy the most expensive platform. It's to choose the one that fits your market, your stack and your budget, and to actually act on what it tells you.
The tools tell you where you stand; the way you win is by publishing the clear, structured, trustworthy content that AI engines pull from, and that field is still wide open. AI engines cite content they can read, understand and trust, which means content has become more important than ever, not less.
The companies that win will be the ones that get over the old nervousness about putting content online. In a regulated industry it's understandable to be cautious, but caution has left most of the field empty. Very few medical device companies are publishing the volume and quality of genuinely helpful content that AI engines reward, which means the opportunity is there for those willing to take it.
It does call for a new way of working. The articles that drive AEO come from bringing regulatory, marketing and sales together: regulatory keeps every claim compliant, sales knows the real questions buyers ask, and marketing structures the answer so both people and AI engines can use it. Knowing exactly what you can and can't say doesn't slow you down, it frees you to write with confidence. This is also why publishing consistently, often best done with an in-house content team, tends to beat occasional campaigns, and why getting your messaging framework right underpins all of it.
We've seen this work in our own data. According to Searchable, as of May 2026 Podymos has the highest AI search visibility of any medical device marketing agency it tracks, at 34% against 9% for our nearest competitor, with a 23.9% share of voice compared with 6.4%. We put that down to the volume and depth of content we've published over the years. It's also the reason we felt able to write this comparison: we've lived the shift we're describing. The encouraging part is that none of it is a secret. Any company prepared to publish helpful, well-structured content can earn the same kind of visibility.
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It's the practice of structuring your content and brand so that AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI features find, trust and recommend you when people ask questions in your category. Success is measured through mentions and citations rather than clicks and rankings.
Yes, more than ever. This is a shift, not the end of SEO. You still need the foundations, clear structure, genuine authority and clean technical setup, because they're exactly what gets you cited in AI answers. What's new is that you now have to think differently on top of those foundations: writing content around the real questions AEO engines are being asked, structured so the AI can lift it straight into an answer. Foundations plus content is the formula. Get the SEO basics right, then make content king, and you give yourself the best chance of being the answer the AI recommends.
In practice, very little. AEO (answer engine optimisation), GEO (generative engine optimisation) and LLM optimisation are different names for the same goal: getting your content surfaced and cited inside AI-generated answers. Most teams use the terms interchangeably.
Yes, but with caveats. The free HubSpot AEO Grader gives you a one-off brand score (in exchange for your contact details), Google Search Console's AI Mode filter shows some Google AI-surface clicks but is fiddly to use, GA4 captures partial AI referral traffic, and Semrush offers a free AI search visibility checker. They're fine for a first toe in the water, but each gives limited, partial data, so a dedicated tracker is the better basis for an ongoing view.
It depends on your stack and budget. For the lowest entry cost, Otterly.AI starts at $29 a month, though a usable prompt allowance is nearer $189. If you're on HubSpot, HubSpot AEO at $50 a month is the most natural fit and links AI visibility to your CRM. If you sell across several markets, Peec AI offers the widest language coverage. The free tools, such as Google Search Console, GA4 and HubSpot's AEO Grader, only give partial data, so a dedicated tracker is the better basis for a real view.
The move to AEO is happening quickly, and the good news is that measuring your position has never been more affordable, with capable dedicated trackers starting at around $29 a month. This article has given you the overview; we'll follow it with closer looks at the individual tools, so you can compare the ones on your shortlist in more depth. Choose the platform that fits your market and your stack, then put your energy into the content that earns you a place in the answers.
If you'd like help working out where your medical device company stands in AI search, and how to build the content that wins it, book a call with our team.