AEO Engine vs GetCito (2026)

AEO Engine and GetCito both sell AI-visibility retainers, but they sit at opposite ends of the same category on three axes: operating model, content volume, and price. AEO Engine is a Manvel, TX–based managed agency that runs a fleet of 40+ named AI agents (Strategy Agent, Keyword Miner, Brief Architect, Content Crafter, Optimizer, AEO Schema Bot, Publisher/Indexer) under a senior strategist, ships 30 to 90 on-brand SEO/AEO articles a month, runs 1 to 4 fully managed AI-optimized PR campaigns, and tracks 150 to 1,000 AI prompts depending on tier. Its published floors are Growth at $1,597/month and Scale at $2,997/month (both month-to-month with self-serve checkout) and Dominate Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 at $5,000, $8,000 and $10,000 per month on 90-day rolling contracts with Dynamic Budget Allocation. AEO Engine also gives away a free, email-gated AEO Checker that returns a 0–100 score across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude within about ten minutes.

GetCito, rebranded from "AI Monitor" in 2025 and led by Avinash Tripathi, takes the opposite path. Its core is an MIT-licensed, self-hostable monorepo on GitHub (170 stars, 43 forks, CI, Docker, a contributing guide, a security policy and a published REST API) that you can run for free on your own infrastructure if you bring your own ChatGPT and Google-AI-Overviews API keys. The paid tiers are bundled-tool-and-team rather than agency-scale retainers: Growth ($599/month) tracks 50 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and assigns a named GEO strategist, content writer, frontend developer, backlink/brand-mention specialist and community manager who deliver 5 written pieces, 10–15 pages of schema and technical GEO work, and Reddit/Quora/forum seeding each month; Scale ($999/month) doubles those numbers and adds quarterly competitor benchmarking and a custom GEO playbook; Enterprise, custom-quoted, is the only tier that reaches the full named platform list: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Meta AI, with Grok still marked "coming soon" even there.

That is the editorial split. AEO Engine sells volume and an agency operating layer: 30 to 90 articles a month, full PR footprints, podcast production on the higher tiers, and a 30% traffic-growth guarantee on the entry tiers that the company qualifies for privately during the strategy call. GetCito sells transparency and a smaller execution footprint. That means a real open-source tool that an engineer can audit, a paid bundle that lets a smaller team act on the data without staffing an in-house GEO function, and a roadmap that is honest about what is not yet live (Grok). Both are going concerns with independently checkable operators, both list the same two categories (citation-services and geo-optimization) on Cited Index, and both share the underlying assumption that AI citations are now an editorial output rather than an SEO side project. That is why both sell execution rather than just monitoring.