Best Generative Search Optimization Platforms for Agencies

A client forwards you a screenshot. They asked ChatGPT who the best vendor in their category is, and a competitor came back instead of them. Then comes the question you cannot answer with a rank tracker: "What are you doing about this?"

If that lands in your inbox and your stomach drops a little, that's normal. Most agencies are building this service line while clients are already asking for it. You're not behind. You just need the right tool underneath the offer.

This is a look at the best generative search optimization platforms agencies can actually run client work on: DeepSmith, Profound, AirOps, and Otterly.AI. Four platforms, four different bets on what an agency needs most.

Let's find the one that fits your roster.

The quick answer

Generative search optimization (GSO) platforms measure how often AI engines mention and cite a brand, then help you improve it. For agencies, four are worth your shortlist:

• DeepSmith is the best overall fit for agencies that want AI-search tracking and content production in one tool, with isolated per-client workspaces and publish-ready articles. Starts at $99/month.
• Profound has the deepest analytics and the widest engine coverage, up to 10 engines at Enterprise. Starts at $99/month billed yearly.
• AirOps suits agencies that think in workflows and want bulk content refresh across many client URLs. Free Insights tier, with paid plans reported around $200/month.
• Otterly.AI is the cheapest way to start a monitoring-first practice, with white-label Looker Studio reporting. Starts at $29/month.

None of them controls the answer engines. Every one of them tracks and recommends. Keep that straight when you write the retainer.

How we picked

A tool that works for one in-house brand often falls apart on client number four. GSO software client work runs on has to hold many brands at once, each with its own voice, its own products, and its own competitor set. So the criteria here are agency criteria, not brand criteria.

Multi-client architecture. Can each client have its own workspace, its own brand context, its own competitors and prompts, with no bleed between accounts? This is the first filter, and it eliminates more tools than you'd expect.

Engine coverage that matches your clients. Every platform tiers engine access by price. What matters is whether the engines your clients actually appear in are covered on the plan you can afford.

Client-ready reporting. If you cannot put the output in front of a client under your own brand, you'll rebuild it in a deck every month. That's margin gone.

A path from measurement to action. Diagnosis alone doesn't renew a retainer. Either the platform produces the content, or you're pairing it with something that does.

Pricing you can model per client. Agency economics live or die on cost per account. Opaque pricing makes proposals guesswork.

Single-brand point trackers and enterprise-only suites are out of scope here. This is about generative search optimization agencies can sell, deliver, and report on across a roster. An agency GSO platform has to earn its place twice: once on the analytics, and once on the delivery.

The four platforms at a glance

1. DeepSmith

Best for: agencies that want to answer "where are we missing in AI answers?" and ship the fix without switching tools.

Here's the problem with a tracker-only stack. You buy a tool that tells a client their citation rate is low on eleven prompts. Now what? A strategist exports the list, writes briefs, hands them to a freelancer, edits the drafts back into the client's voice, does the internal linking, and builds the report. The insight was cheap. The follow-through eats the retainer.

DeepSmith is built to close that loop. It tracks how AI engines answer questions about a brand, finds the gaps where the brand is invisible or losing, and produces on-brand content to close those gaps, all from the same context. Its stance is a production engine, not a writing assistant, which in practice means output is publish-ready rather than a first draft you rescue.

For an agency, the piece that matters most is Multi-Workspace. Each client gets a fully isolated workspace with its own brand context, content, competitors, tracked prompts, plan, and billing. One client's voice never leaks into another client's drafts. That single design choice is the difference between GSO software client work can scale on and a tool you quietly outgrow at account five.

Key features

• AEO (AI Search Visibility): mention rate, citation rate, and share of voice with trends, a per-platform breakdown, a competitor leaderboard, and the sources AI cites most. The Prompts view holds per-prompt rates and full answer history, and Discover Prompts generates a starter prompt set from the client's product, persona, and buyer-stage context, so onboarding a new account doesn't start from a blank page.
• Competitor citations: who wins citations on your client's prompts, on which exact pages, and how each competitor performs by platform. This is the slide that renews retainers.
• Content Studio: Idea Bank, Planned Content, and the Writer, which turns one planned idea into a finished, brand-grounded article with research, internal and external links, a cover image, and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite takes it further and writes on a schedule with no one in the app.
• Deep IQ: the brand context layer holding positioning, products, personas, brand voice, visual guidelines, and content types per client. This is why drafts come out on-brand without re-briefing.
• Native publishing and distribution: publish straight to WordPress, Strapi, Webflow, or your own webhooks, with Markdown and HTML export as a fallback. Every finished article arrives with social posts written, and the Apps Library adapts it for LinkedIn, X, Medium, Substack, newsletter and nurture email, Reddit, and more. You deliver a channel plan, not just a blog post.
• Sitemap: each client's published pages get an AI summary and classification, kept current automatically, powering internal links and coverage signals.

Pricing: Pro is $99/month ($80 annually) for 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts, 5 seats, ChatGPT tracking. Grow is $199/month ($160) for 40 articles, 100 prompts, 7 seats, adding Perplexity. Scale is $399/month ($299) for 90 articles, 200 prompts, 10 seats, adding Gemini. Enterprise is custom, covers all five named engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Mode), and adds 1:1 onboarding and a dedicated account manager. There's a 7-day free trial with real data and real drafts before you pay, and no long-term contracts.

That trial matters more for you than for an in-house team. You can stand up a workspace for one client, show them real citation data and a real article, and win the AEO line item before you've spent anything.

Honest limitation: engine coverage is tiered, so a Pro plan tracks ChatGPT only. If a client needs Perplexity or Gemini insight, you need at least Grow, realistically Scale. And because pricing is per workspace, a roster of many small clients adds up. Model your cost per account before you standardize. The Writer also produces publish-ready articles, not zero-touch perfection, so keep a review step in Produced Content for regulated or technical clients.

2. Profound

Best for: agencies whose clients want the deepest analytics in the category and will pay for engine breadth.

If your pitch is rigor, Profound is a strong hand to play. It's a purpose-built AEO platform organized into three modules: Monitor for answer engine insights, Create for agents, and Operate for orchestration. It treats AI visibility as a measurable engineering problem rather than a content experiment, and the depth shows.

Key features

• Engine breadth: up to 10 engines at Enterprise, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, and Claude. That's the widest coverage here.
• Prompt Volumes: surfaces what real users are actually asking the answer engines, by engine and over time. It's genuinely differentiated, and useful for finding prompt opportunities your competitors aren't monitoring yet.
• Agent Analytics: CDN-level monitoring showing which AI crawlers hit a domain, when, and how often. Handy when a client's dev team asks whether they're even being crawled.
• Shopping: tracks product visibility inside ChatGPT Shopping surfaces, which matters for e-commerce clients.
• Metrics: visibility, share of voice, sentiment, citations, and prompt-level answer history.

Pricing: Starter is $99/month billed yearly, ChatGPT only, 50 prompts and 1 seat. Growth is $399/month billed yearly, adding Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with 100 prompts and 3 seats. Enterprise is custom and brings multi-company tracking, SSO/SAML, SOC 2, a dedicated Slack channel, and a specialist with a 24-hour SLA. There's also a self-serve Agency Growth tier with 400 credits per month per client workspace.

Honest limitation: multi-client tracking really lives at Enterprise, which means a sales cycle and custom pricing rather than a card and a signup. Growth is the practical entry point for most agencies, and at $399 it's a step up from other entry tiers. It's also primarily an analytics and agent platform, so it isn't a full production engine with native CMS publishing. You'll still need something to write and ship in.

Pick Profound instead of DeepSmith if analytics depth is the product you're selling and you already have production handled.

3. AirOps

Best for: agencies that already think in workflows and want bulk operations across many client URLs.

AirOps came from workflow automation and added AI-search visibility on top. The center of gravity is still the builder, and that's the honest way to evaluate it. If you have a strategist who enjoys designing systems, this is a lot of leverage. If you don't, it's a lot of surface area.

Key features

• Workflow Grids: the signature capability. Run the same workflow across many URLs in parallel, so a refresh pass over a client's 200 pages is one run instead of 200 tasks. Nothing else here does this as well.
• Content Refresh: updates existing pages for AI and search discoverability based on visibility signals, which is often the fastest win on an established client site.
• Content Creation and Social Engagement: brand-kit-grounded long-form plus channel-native social, so refresh, creation, and distribution sit in one stack.
• Brand Kits and Knowledge Bases: per-brand positioning, voice, and grounding data.
• Integrations: 10+ data providers and 10+ CMS connections.

Pricing: there's a free Insights tier (1,000 tasks/month, 1 brand kit, 1 seat) and a 14-day trial. Solo is reported around $200/month with 100 tracked prompts and ChatGPT tracking; Pro is reported around $2,000/month with 250 prompts, multi-engine insights, and unlimited seats. Those two figures come from third-party reviewers, not from the vendor's pricing page, so confirm them before they go in a client proposal. The agency-shaped tier is Pages: custom pricing, 3 brand kits, unlimited knowledge bases, all four modules, a private Slack channel, and an account manager.

Honest limitation: the AI visibility module is the newer part of the product, and reviewers describe it as surface-level next to dedicated AEO platforms, with limited prompt-level depth. Billing is task-based, so heavy months bring overage and less predictable costs than flat-rate tools. Coverage skews US-centric below Enterprise. And with 1 brand kit on Solo and Pro, and 3 on Pages, the multi-client story needs a conversation with sales.

Pick AirOps instead of DeepSmith if bulk refresh across large existing client sites is your main service, and visibility tracking is a supporting metric rather than the offer itself.

4. Otterly.AI

Best for: agencies starting a monitoring-first AEO practice on a small budget, with production handled elsewhere.

Otterly is the easiest yes on price, and it's refreshingly clear about what it is. It monitors AI answers, audits pages, and tells you what to fix. It does not write. If you already have writers you trust, that's a feature, not a gap.

Key features

• Unlimited workspaces and team members on Standard and above. For an agency, this is the headline. No per-seat penalty as your roster grows, and no per-client workspace fee stacking up.
• Looker Studio connector: white-label client dashboards under your brand, not the vendor's. If monthly reporting is your time sink, this is the fix.
• GEO Audit: page-level AI-readiness scoring with specific recommendations, from 1,000 audits/month on Lite up to 10,000 on Premium.
• Agency Partner program: a certified badge, sales enablement, dedicated support, white-label Looker templates, and a directory listing alongside 50+ certified partners. It's the most explicit agency motion of the four.
• Metrics: mention rate, share of voice, sentiment, link citations, prompt-level performance, and a Brand Visibility Index. API access and MCP arrive on Standard.

Pricing: Lite is $29/month ($25 annually) for 15 prompts, 4 engines, and 1 workspace. Standard is $189/month ($160) for 100 prompts and unlimited workspaces. Premium is $489/month ($422) for 400 prompts. Enterprise is custom with SSO and a dedicated CSM. It tracks six engines in total.

Honest limitation: there's no production inside the platform, so the "now what?" after the audit is still yours to staff. Base coverage on Standard and Premium is four engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot), and Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini are paid add-ons, so budget for them if clients ask. The white-label templates and badge require acceptance into the partner program rather than arriving with any plan. SSO is Enterprise-only. And no free trial is publicly listed.

Pick Otterly.AI instead of DeepSmith if you want the lowest entry cost, you're happy pairing it with a separate production tool, and white-label dashboards are the deliverable your clients care about.

How to choose an agency GSO platform

Not sure where to start? Start with the shape of your practice, not the feature list.

If you're a small agency with three to five clients, the question is whether you also need production. If you have writers and just need reporting, Otterly.AI Standard at $189/month gives you unlimited workspaces and white-label dashboards for less than one freelance article. If your writers are the bottleneck, DeepSmith Pro at $99/month puts tracking and publish-ready production in one place.

If you're a mid-sized agency with ten to thirty clients, margin per account is the whole game. DeepSmith Grow or Scale keeps analytics and production in one workflow so a strategist reviews instead of assembles. Profound Growth wins if analytics depth is what you sell. AirOps Pages fits if bulk refresh is your core motion.

If you're an enterprise agency with fifty-plus clients, you're in custom pricing regardless. Profound Enterprise brings multi-company tracking, SSO/SAML, SOC 2, and a 24-hour SLA. DeepSmith Enterprise brings all five engines, custom limits, and a dedicated AM. Otterly Enterprise brings SSO and all available engines. Let procurement and engine coverage decide.

If budget is the constraint, Otterly Lite at $29/month is the lowest entry point in the category, and AirOps Insights is free if you want to poke around first.

One honest note before you commit. Every vendor here calls itself agency-friendly, and no single one wins on every axis. The best generative search optimization platforms agencies actually keep aren't the ones with the longest feature list, they're the ones that match how the team already delivers. The defensible way to choose is by workflow: monitoring-first (Otterly, Profound), workflow automation (AirOps), or integrated analytics plus production (DeepSmith). Pick the shape that fits, then check the price.

Run the numbers per workspace before you sign anything annual. All four price by workspace or brand at the agency tier, so the sticker price is never the real number. Multiply it by your roster, subtract it from the retainer, and see what's left. That's the calculation that decides whether this service line is profitable or just impressive.

And whatever you choose, match engine coverage to where your clients actually show up. Most B2B and SaaS clients live in ChatGPT first, then Perplexity. E-commerce and local clients weight Google's surfaces more heavily. Paying for ten engines when your clients only appear in two is margin you don't get back.

Take it one client at a time. Prove the service on one account, build the report your client actually reads, then roll it out to the roster. Momentum matters more than a perfect stack.

Try it on one client this week

You don't need a bigger team to launch an AEO service line. You need one client, one set of tracked prompts, and one article that proves the loop works.

Start a free DeepSmith trial and set up a workspace for a single account. You'll see real citation data and a real publish-ready article before you pay, which is exactly what you need to sell the retainer.