Conductor and SE Ranking AI Visibility both track how AI engines mention your brand, but they are bought in very different ways. SE Ranking puts AI tracking inside suite plans with public prices and a no-card trial. Conductor sells credit-based tracking on a sales-led contract and adds query fan-out, AI referral traffic, SSO and SOC 2. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want tracking and article production together on public monthly plans, with a 7-day trial and no long-term contracts.
The Conductor vs SE Ranking AI Visibility decision usually starts with how you want to buy, and only then turns to features. One of them lets you read a price and start a trial the same day. The other asks you to talk to sales and sign an order form, but it measures more of what happens after an AI answer is given. This page lays out both using the figures on each vendor's public pages as of September 2026. It also places DeepSmith as a third option for teams that want to go from a tracked gap to a published article.
Conductor vs SE Ranking AI Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracking and article production on one public monthly plan, starting at $99 a month, with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
- Choose Conductor if you are an enterprise team that needs query fan-out, AI referral traffic, SSO and SOC 2 Type II, and you can buy through a sales-led contract.
- Choose SE Ranking AI Visibility if you want public prices from $129 a month, a 14-day no-card trial, and AI tracking next to rank tracking and site audits in one SEO suite.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Conductor | SE Ranking AI Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Not published (sales-led) | $129/mo (Core suite plan) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo (Pro) | Not published | $103.20/mo (Core) |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | Not published (2,500 AI Search credits a year) | 100 daily prompts |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | Not published per plan | 5 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 8 | 5 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 3 weeks, no card | 14 days, no card |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes | No |
| AI referral traffic | - | Yes | No |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Yes | Partial (suite-level) |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes | No | Partial (WordPress export) |
| SSO / SAML | - | Yes (Growth and Enterprise) | Not listed |
| SOC 2 report | Yes | Yes (Type II) | Not listed |
| API and MCP server | Yes (read-only) | Yes (MCP on all plans) | Yes (every plan) |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.5/5 | 4.7/5 (whole suite) |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
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, often multi-site teams that want AI visibility reporting in the same system as keyword, analytics and technical data, and that can buy through a usage-based contract.
The standout is depth. It tracks eight engines, with ChatGPT split into Auto and Search modes, and it reports fan-out queries, sentiment on a 1 to 10 score, AI referral sessions through GA4 or Adobe Analytics, and AI crawler visits from server logs. The real limit is access. No plan has a public dollar price, prompt limits and engine entitlements per plan are not published, and the US terms published in May 2024 set fees in an order form that is noncancellable and renews automatically unless you give 90 days' notice. Reviewers on G2 rate it 4.5/5 from 788 reviews. They praise the support and having SEO and AI reporting in one place, and they raise price for smaller teams and a learning curve as the main complaints.
SE Ranking AI Visibility
SE Ranking is an SEO platform founded in 2013, and its AI Search Toolkit adds AI answer tracking to the same account as rank tracking, keyword research and site audits. It is built for SEO teams and agencies that already run, or want, a full suite. Buyers who want AI visibility alone are pointed to a separate product called SE Visible.
The standout is the packaging. AI tracking comes with the Core plan at $129 a month and the Growth plan at $279 a month, an AI Search add-on runs from $89 to $345 a month, and API and MCP access come with every plan. It checks five engines daily by capturing answers the way a user sees them, and it records where the brand sits inside an answer. The real limits are narrower coverage and a split feature set. Claude and Microsoft Copilot are not tracked, sentiment sits in SE Visible, and query fan-out and AI traffic analytics are marked coming soon. Its G2 rating is 4.7/5 from 1,606 reviews, but that rating covers the whole suite and not the AI product. Reviewers of the AI features ask for more flexible ways to organize prompts and sources.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both vendors above do most of their work on the measurement side. SE Ranking's suite includes an AI Writer and content tools (25 articles on Core, 50 on Growth), but they sit apart from its AI tracking product. Conductor's Writing Assistant produces drafts and scores tied to its recommendations, and its own documentation says final publishing remains in your CMS. Conductor's record rates repurposing an article into channel formats as partial, and SE Ranking's lists nothing on it. DeepSmith is built to cover the whole loop, from the gap to the live page, in one platform.
DeepSmith is an AI search analytics and content production platform. Its AEO module checks the prompts you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a per-engine breakdown, the pages of yours that AI cites, and which competitor pages win citations. Content Map shows where competitors publish and you do not, and Opportunity Agents return content ideas with the data point behind each one. The Writer in Content Studio then turns a planned idea into a finished article, with internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata, all grounded in the brand context you store once in Deep IQ. Autowrite can run that on a schedule with no one in the app. From Produced Content you publish 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 other channels.
The cost is on the page. Pro is $99 a month with ChatGPT, 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles a month. Grow is $199 with ChatGPT and Perplexity, 100 prompts and 40 articles. Scale is $399 and adds Gemini, with 200 prompts and 90 articles. Billed annually those come to $80, $160 and $299 a month, and Enterprise is custom with all ten engines. There is a 7-day free trial, no long-term contracts and no cancellation fees. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Pricing and contract terms
SE Ranking AI Visibility is the clearer of the two on price, because it is the only one with numbers on the page. In a Conductor vs SE Ranking AI Visibility pricing comparison, that is the first difference you hit. SE Ranking lists Core at $129 a month ($103.20 a month billed annually) with 100 daily prompts, five engines and 10 projects, and Growth at $279 ($223.20) with 250 daily prompts and 30 projects. The AI Search add-on gives you 200, 450 or 1,000 checks a month for $89, $179 or $345. The units need care. The pricing page calls them prompts, while the help center says one check is one prompt on one engine, so a single prompt across five engines uses five checks. How the add-on stacks with the plan's daily prompts is not stated, so it is worth asking for in writing.
Conductor publishes allowances and no prices. Essentials and Growth list 2,500 AI Search credits a year, and Enterprise is custom. Third-party research reports that each response costs between 0.1 credit (Google AI Overviews and AI Mode) and 2 credits (ChatGPT Search and Gemini), so the same allowance covers very different numbers of answers depending on the engines you pick. Conductor offers a three-week trial with no card for Creator, Intelligence or Monitoring, though it does not say whether the trial includes AI Search credits. After that, the contract is the order form. SE Ranking documents self-service cancellation of renewal, and its trials do not convert to a paid plan on their own.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith lists four plans with the same two meters on each, tracked prompts and articles per month, so the content cost sits inside the same price as the tracking. You can pay monthly or annually, you can cancel without a fee, and the 7-day trial runs on a workspace set up from your own website, with starter prompts and ideas already in it.
Engine coverage
In SE Ranking AI Visibility vs Conductor terms, Conductor leads on engine coverage, with eight engines to SE Ranking's five. Conductor tracks ChatGPT in Auto and Search modes, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot and Grok. The catch is that it does not publish which engines each plan includes, so you cannot tell from the page what an entry plan would cover. SE Ranking tracks Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and the same five come with Core and Growth. It does not track Claude or Copilot. Region targeting applies to the Google engines and Gemini, and it is ignored for ChatGPT and Perplexity, which matters if you sell in several countries.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten engines in total: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten, so you see the engine list for each plan before you buy.
Tracking depth and data method
Conductor goes deeper on what it reports, and SE Ranking is clearer about how it collects. Conductor adds fan-out queries beside each answer, sentiment scored from 1 to 10 and grouped by business driver, share of voice by mentions and by citations, and daily, weekly or monthly cadence per topic. It says it collects answers through official engine APIs where possible. That is the vendor's description, and it has not been independently checked against what a user sees in the chat window.
SE Ranking sends queries to the AI platforms and captures the response as a real user would see it, once a day. It records mention position and link position inside each answer, and it tracks ads in ChatGPT and AI Mode answers, which Conductor's record does not describe. Full answer text is kept for 30 days and presence metrics for one year. Conductor does not state a retention period. Neither vendor discloses which model versions sit behind each engine, so treat both as a sample of what a buyer might see.
AI traffic and site monitoring
Conductor is well ahead here. Through GA4, or Adobe Analytics on Growth and Enterprise, it reports sessions, engagement, conversions and revenue from AI engines per page. Its log file analysis separates OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Meta bot visits, and Monitoring runs AEO checks such as JavaScript rendering mismatches and schema coverage around the clock. Log file analysis is included on Enterprise and marked Available on the other plans, and the pricing page does not say whether Available means a paid add-on.
SE Ranking's AI Traffic Analytics page is labelled coming soon, so today it offers estimated traffic potential from AI Overviews and AI Mode and not measured visits. Its Website Audit covers 250,000 pages a month on Core and 2 million on Growth, but no AI-readability audit is described for the AI toolkit. If proving AI referral traffic to leadership is the job, this is the axis that decides it.
From insight to action
Conductor is the stronger of the two at turning tracking data into content, though neither one publishes for you. Its recommendations panel picks actions from mention, citation and sentiment signals and links into the Writing Assistant, which produces briefs, outlines and drafts. Drafts are capped at 60 a year on Essentials and 180 on Growth, with 600 shown on the Enterprise plan card and Custom in the grid. Content Profiles hold voice and tone, and Knowledge Sources ground drafts in your documents. Conductor says every draft should be reviewed by people, and publishing stays in your CMS.
SE Ranking's AI Results Tracker also gives recommendations, such as sources that mention competitors but not you, and platforms like Reddit or YouTube worth a look. Writing happens in the suite, with 25 articles on Core and 50 on Growth, and the pages describe those tools as separate from the AI tracking data. A suite content add-on can export to WordPress. A team that uses either one still needs its own process to carry a gap through to a live page.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs that process inside the product. Opportunity Agents turn tracked gaps into ideas that carry their evidence, the Writer produces a publish-ready article grounded in Deep IQ, and Autowrite can do it on a set date. Produced Content publishes to your CMS in one action, and every article arrives with social posts already written.
Security and access
Conductor is the one with published credentials. Its Security Center lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001, and SAML SSO is available on Growth and Enterprise, with role-based permissions on Enterprise only. SE Ranking's pages state no SOC 2, ISO or SSO, and third-party research could not verify them either. That is an absence of evidence and not proof of absence, so a security review would need to ask SE Ranking directly. SE Ranking does describe participation in the EU-U.S., UK-extension and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks in its privacy statement.
On developer access the two are close. Conductor includes its MCP server on all three plans and the Data API on Enterprise. SE Ranking includes API and MCP access on every plan, with a hosted MCP server that exposes more than 180 SEO and GEO tools.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. Its REST API and MCP server are read-only, with scoped keys, 23 tools in the MCP server and reads that spend no credits, and its webhooks let your own systems react when content changes status.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: the broadest fit for marketing teams that want to see where they are missing in AI answers and then publish the content that closes the gap, on a plan with a posted price, a 7-day trial and no long-term contract. It also suits agencies that run several brands, since each workspace is billed and limited independently.
- Conductor: an enterprise SEO, content and web team that wants AI visibility, keyword data, technical monitoring and AI referral traffic in one system, and that is comfortable buying through a quote, an order form and a renewal notice period.
- SE Ranking AI Visibility: an SEO team or agency that already uses rank tracking and site audits and wants AI tracking added to the same account at a price it can read, with a no-card trial to test it.
If you want tracking and production in one place, you can start a DeepSmith free trial and see your own AI visibility and first article ideas before you pay.
