Adobe Brand Visibility (LLM Optimizer) and Conductor are both sales-led enterprise platforms, but Conductor is far easier to try, with a three-week free trial, an API and an MCP server. Adobe limits its trial to existing Adobe customers and documents no API or MCP server, though it suits teams already on Adobe Experience Manager. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want more than tracking, because it tracks AI answers, writes the articles that close the gaps and publishes them to your CMS.
If you are weighing Adobe Brand Visibility vs Conductor, the first difference you will run into is how you get to try each one. Conductor lets you start a free trial yourself and publishes its API and MCP access. Adobe sells through a consultation request, and its trial is meant for people who already use Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics. This comparison covers that gap, then engines, pricing and what each tool does once it finds a problem. DeepSmith joins as a third option for teams that want the tracking and the content that fixes what it finds.
Adobe Brand Visibility vs Conductor: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and the articles that close the gaps in one self-serve platform, with plans from $99 a month, publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, and a 7-day free trial.
- Choose Adobe Brand Visibility if you already run Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics and want fixes pushed to your site at the CDN edge or in AEM, with revenue attribution inside Adobe Analytics, on a sales-led contract.
- Choose Conductor if you want to test the product before talking to sales and need an API, an MCP server and SEO plus AEO reporting in one enterprise platform.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Adobe Brand Visibility | Conductor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Not public (sales quote) | Not published |
| Annual price | $80/mo billed yearly (Pro) | Not public | Not published |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT (Pro) | Not listed | Not listed |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 10 LLM families, 5 named | 8 engines |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days, self-serve | Partial, existing Adobe customers only | Yes, 3 weeks, no credit card |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Content generation | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Publishes directly to a CMS | Yes | Partial | No |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| Public API | Yes, read-only | Not listed | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes, read-only | Not listed | Yes |
| AI traffic and revenue attribution | - | Yes, Adobe Analytics | Yes, via GA4 |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | Not listed | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 3.7/5 | 4.5/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Adobe Brand Visibility (LLM Optimizer)
Adobe Brand Visibility (LLM Optimizer) is Adobe's enterprise tool for tracking how a brand appears in AI answers and for fixing what it finds. Adobe launched it as LLM Optimizer in June 2025, folded it into Adobe Brand Visibility in June 2026 with Semrush prompt data, and stopped selling the LLM Optimizer name on 31 July 2026. Existing LLM Optimizer contracts carry over.
It is built for large enterprises, especially ones already on Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics or Customer Journey Analytics. It tracks mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice, benchmarks up to five competitors, and reads AI crawler traffic from CDN logs. The standout is that it can act on the site. Adobe says it deploys optimizations at the CDN edge, with Fastly, Akamai and Cloudflare named, or in AEM, with instant rollback.
The real limits are access and openness. There is no public price, and the only free access is a conditional trial for eligible existing Adobe customers. Adobe's pages don't describe a public API or an MCP server. Brand Presence refreshes weekly by default, and one G2 reviewer called CDN log forwarding an onboarding barrier because it pulls in IT and security work. Independent reviews are thin. G2 shows 3.7/5 from five reviews, four of them incentivized, checked September 30, 2026, and Capterra shows none.
Conductor
Conductor is an enterprise SEO and AEO platform founded in 2006 in New York. It sells four connected products: Intelligence for AI search and keyword reporting, Creator for drafting and scoring, Monitoring for 24/7 technical and AEO site checks, and AgentStack for the MCP server, Data API and agents. It is built for large and mid-sized enterprise SEO, content and web teams, often with several sites or brands.
The standout is how much sits in one place. AI mentions, citations and sentiment live next to keyword rankings, page-level data and technical monitoring, and the Writing Assistant links straight from a recommendation to a draft. The real limits are cost and publishing. Conductor publishes no prices, and its Writing Assistant says final publishing stays in your CMS. Its AI tracking runs on credits, with 2,500 AI Search credits a year listed on Essentials and Growth, and third-party research reports costs of 0.1 to 2 credits per response depending on the engine.
Reviewers like the support and the breadth. G2 shows 4.5/5 from 788 reviews, Capterra 4.7/5 from 118 and TrustRadius 9.3/10 from 393, all checked September 30, 2026. The common complaints are price for smaller teams and a learning curve.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks, writes and publishes
The gap both tools leave for this reader is the step after the finding. Adobe Brand Visibility is strong at fixing existing pages at the edge or in AEM, and its content briefs and off-site content for Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit are real help, but publishing new on-site articles is not described. Conductor goes further with full drafts grounded in Content Profiles and Knowledge Sources, yet it says publishing stays in your CMS. Neither repurposes an article into channel formats in a way its pages describe.
DeepSmith closes that gap in one platform. The AEO module tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice on a schedule and shows which of your pages AI actually cites. Opportunity Agents turn those gaps into ideas that each carry their evidence, and the Content Map shows where competitors cover topics you don't. The Writer then produces a finished article, researched, linked, with a cover image and metadata, grounded in your Deep IQ brand context. Autowrite can do it on a set date with no one in the app. Produced Content publishes straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks, and the Apps Library turns each article into versions for LinkedIn, X, newsletters and more.
Developer access is documented at docs.deepsmith.ai. A read-only REST API and a 23-tool read-only MCP server let you pull visibility data, the Content Map and the article library into your own tools. DeepSmith's plans don't include revenue attribution inside an analytics suite, so the way it serves the same goal is by reporting which pages earn citations and by producing the pages that close the gap.
Plans start at $99 a month for Pro, which covers 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and ChatGPT. Grow is $199 for 40 articles, 100 prompts and ChatGPT plus Perplexity, and Scale is $399 for 90 articles, 200 prompts and Gemini added. Annual billing brings those to $80, $160 and $299 a month. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
Free trial and hands-on access
Conductor wins this one clearly. It advertises a free trial with no credit card for Creator, Intelligence or Monitoring, and the page says three weeks. What the trial includes, such as AI Search credits, is not stated, so ask before you plan a pilot around it.
Adobe has a trial, but it is not open. The documented version is for eligible existing Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service or Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics customers, with 100 prompts, one domain and up to 50 URLs for one opportunity type for activations after April 1, 2026. Earlier activations had 200 prompts, and Adobe doesn't publish the length. Capterra lists no free trial, which fits with there being no public one. If you aren't an Adobe customer, you start with a sales conversation.
In the Conductor vs Adobe Brand Visibility comparison, this is the biggest practical gap, because a team that can test a tool in its own data learns far more than one that reads a deck.
What DeepSmith does: a 7-day free trial that you start yourself, with onboarding that fills a working workspace in minutes. Your brand brief, competitors, starter tracking prompts and first batch of ideas are there before you pay.
API, MCP and data access
On the Adobe Brand Visibility vs Conductor trial and API questions, Conductor wins here too. It documents a Data API, a Content API and a Monitoring Reporting API, plus an MCP server included on all three plans and official apps in ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. The Data API is included on Enterprise and marked "Available" on Essentials and Growth, and the pricing page doesn't say whether that means a paid add-on. The MCP server also exposes fan-out queries and, in beta, content tools.
For Adobe, the sources we reviewed describe no public API and no MCP server. What it does list is native Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics integrations, a Google Analytics integration for paid customers, Search Console prompt suggestions, CSV exports and email digests. Adobe also uses managed API keys for edge deployment, but that is a deployment setting, not a way to pull your measurement data into other tools. This may just be a documentation gap, and an Adobe rep could tell you more, though a buyer who needs programmatic access should get it in writing.
What DeepSmith does: a read-only REST API with scoped keys, 120 requests a minute per workspace and a published OpenAPI spec, plus a 23-tool read-only MCP server that works with Claude, Claude Code, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, VS Code and more. HMAC-signed webhooks tell your own systems when content status changes, so you can trigger your own publishing steps.
Engine coverage and tracking method
Conductor wins on clarity. It names eight engines, ChatGPT in Auto and Search modes, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Grok, and lets you set the cadence to daily, weekly or monthly per topic. It says it collects answers through official APIs wherever possible, which is its own description and not an independent audit. Which engines come with which plan is not published.
Adobe says it covers up to ten LLM families but names only five on its product pages: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Release notes add Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini and Google AI Overviews in specific modules, and no matrix shows what a given license samples. Adobe's security overview says it sends prompts to public LLM APIs and crawls public LLM interfaces, and an earlier description mentions statistically approximating some answers. The mix per engine isn't published, so test the same prompts in both tools before you trust a score gap.
Pricing and contract terms
This is a tie, because neither publishes a price. Adobe licenses a number of prompts per year in the sales order, and an older LLM Optimizer pricing page with a 1,000-prompt annual minimum now redirects, so don't treat that number as current. Conductor shows usage allowances for Essentials, Growth and Enterprise without dollar amounts.
The contract terms differ in what is known. Conductor's published US terms from May 2024 set fees in an order form, invoiced in advance, noncancellable and nonrefundable by default, with automatic renewal unless you give 90 days' notice. Adobe's cancellation and renewal terms are not published. Either way, expect a quote, an order form and a term.
What DeepSmith does: publishes its prices. Pro is $99, Grow $199 and Scale $399 a month, with article and prompt allowances listed on each plan, and you can start on the trial and pick a plan yourself. There are no long-term contracts and no cancellation fees.
From insight to action
Adobe leads on changing pages that already exist, and Conductor leads on drafting new ones. Adobe's pitch is that findings turn into action with little engineering: technical GEO fixes, edge deployment for AI agents only, AEM updates, and up to 1,000 optimization deployments a year per its product description. Its revenue attribution runs natively in Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics, which ties LLM referral traffic to conversions. Adobe's published customer results are vendor-reported.
Conductor's recommendations panel ranks actions from mention, citation and sentiment signals and links into the Writing Assistant, which produces outlines and full drafts, scored for topical coverage and intent alignment. It offers 60, 180 or 600 drafts a year by plan, though its pricing page also calls the Enterprise number custom, and it tells you to have people review every draft. It also reports AI referral sessions and revenue through GA4, and through Adobe Analytics on Growth and Enterprise.
So the two split the job. One fixes pages and measures revenue inside the Adobe stack, and the other drafts content and measures in the tools you already use. Neither takes a finished article all the way to your CMS.
What DeepSmith does: takes the whole path. Tracking finds the prompt where a competitor is cited and you aren't, an Opportunity Agent turns it into an idea with the data point attached, the Writer produces a publish-ready article, and Produced Content pushes it to your CMS. The same article then becomes social posts and email versions in the Apps Library. Because Deep IQ stores your product, persona and voice, every article is written with that context already in place.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams that want to see where AI engines skip their brand and then publish the content that changes it, without stitching a tracker, a writing tool and a CMS together. It is self-serve, publishes its prices and starts with a 7-day trial.
- Adobe Brand Visibility fits large enterprises already on Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics, with IT able to handle CDN log forwarding, that want edge fixes and revenue attribution in one Adobe contract. If you're deciding between Adobe Brand Visibility or Conductor, choose Adobe when your site and analytics already run on Adobe.
- Conductor fits enterprise SEO and content teams that want to trial a tool first, need API and MCP access, and want AI visibility reported next to keyword rankings and technical monitoring.
Start with a DeepSmith free trial to see your own AI visibility data and a first batch of evidence-backed ideas before you pay.
