Why Caijo is the best AEO scanner for brands and agencies.
The AEO tools market has two categories: diagnostic scanners that tell you what to fix on your site, and monitoring tools that tell you whether you are being cited after the fact. Caijo is the only diagnostic scanner that also tells you what to write to get cited. Here is what that means in practice.
The AEO Tools Market
Most AEO tools are not what you think they are.
When people search for "AEO tools" they find a mix of two fundamentally different types of product. Understanding the difference changes how you spend your budget and where you spend your time.
These tools send prompts to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI engines and report back whether your brand is mentioned. They track citation frequency, sentiment, and share of voice over time. They do not look at your website at all. They are useful but only after your site is already AEO-ready. Using a monitoring tool before fixing your site is like measuring how often your name appears in newspapers before you have done anything newsworthy.
These tools crawl or analyse your website and score the signals AI engines use to decide whether to cite you. They identify what is wrong, why it is wrong, and how to fix it. This is step one in any AEO programme. You cannot monitor your way to better AI citations. You have to fix the site first. The monitoring tools tell you whether it worked. The diagnostic scanners are where the work actually gets done.
Full Comparison
How Caijo compares to every significant AEO tool.
An honest, accurate comparison. Where a competitor does something well, we say so. The goal is clarity, not a rigged table.
| Feature | Caijo | Convrgent | Profound | Otterly | HubSpot AI | Surface checkers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | ||||||
| Tool category | Diagnostic scanner | Diagnostic scanner | AI monitor | AI monitor | AI monitor | Diagnostic (surface) |
| Crawls your actual website | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | Homepage only |
| Crawl quality | ||||||
| Pages crawled per scan | Up to 1005 free, 50 PRO+, 100 AGENCY | Up to 5Per their published spec | N/A | N/A | N/A | 1-2 pages |
| JavaScript rendering | ✓ | Partial | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Realistic browser fingerprinting | ✓Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari rotation | ✕ | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✕ |
| Scoring and output | ||||||
| AEO score out of 100 | ✓Deterministic, 7 categories | ✓Multiple score types | ✕ | ✕ | Sentiment only | Varies |
| Fix instructions in plain English | ✓Anyone on the team can act | Developer codeRequires technical implementation | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | Basic only |
| Points recovered per fix shown | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| CiteReady: citation content | ||||||
| Citation Gap analysis | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Generates citation-ready passages | ✓Powered by the Claude API | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Competitive intelligence | ||||||
| Competitor domain comparison | ✓Up to 9 domains on AGENCY | ✕ | Brand mentions | Brand mentions | Brand mentions | ✕ |
| Agency and client tools | ||||||
| White-label PDF exports | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Client project workspaces | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Scheduled automatic rescans | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ |
| Pricing | ||||||
| Free tier available | ✓3 scans, no credit card | Free trial | Free trial | Free tier | With HubSpot | ✓ |
| Entry paid price | $39/monthEarly bird $29/month | Per scan pricing | From $99/month | From $49/month | Requires HubSpot | Typically free |
Competitor data based on publicly available information as of May 2026. Features and pricing change. We will update this table when we become aware of changes. If you work at one of these companies and something here is inaccurate, let us know and we will fix it.
CaijoBot
Why the crawl matters more than you think.
Most AEO tools check your homepage. Some check two or three pages. They call this a scan. It is not. Your homepage is almost always your best-configured page because it gets the most attention. Basing an AEO score on the homepage tells you about the homepage. It tells you nothing about the service pages, product pages, and blog content that AI engines are actually extracting and citing from your site.
CaijoBot visits every page in your scan: up to 5 on Free, 50 on PRO+ Extensive, 100 on AGENCY Extensive. For each page it renders JavaScript, follows your sitemap, persists a cookie jar across requests, rotates realistic browser profiles, and extracts every signal that matters. It sees what a real visitor sees, including content that only appears after JavaScript executes.
The result is an AEO score based on what is actually on your site, not on what your homepage says about you.
The Scanned Pages table from the results page showing 40-100 pages listed with their individual scores, page types, and schema status. This visually proves that CaijoBot actually crawls the whole site.
The only AEO scanner that tells you what to write.
Every other AEO tool tells you what is structurally wrong with your site. CiteReady is the first feature in any AEO platform that tells you what to actually write to get cited. Generating the specific 115-180 word passages your pages need is something no competitor offers.
Convrgent's output includes code snippets your developer can use to implement fixes directly. For technical teams this is genuinely useful. For marketing managers, brand owners, and non-technical agencies it requires translation before anyone can act on it.
Profound tells you whether your brand is being cited by AI engines and how that trend is moving. It is excellent at what it does. But it does not tell you why citations are low or what to write to improve them. It monitors the outcome, not the cause.
Otterly tracks how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers across multiple engines. Good for monitoring share of voice over time. Does not identify why your site scores low or what content gaps are preventing citations.
HubSpot's tool measures how positively or negatively your brand appears in AI responses. It is a brand perception tool. It does not crawl your site, does not score your AEO readiness, and does not generate any content or fix instructions.
CiteReady does."
The CiteReady panel from the app showing a Citation Score of around 18/100, the Citation Gap questions listed, and one or two generated passages with the Copy button visible. This is the single most powerful screenshot on the entire site.
Fix Instructions
Fixes written for your whole team, not just your developer.
Knowing what is wrong is only half the job. The fix instructions are where most AEO tools let you down. Either they are too vague to act on, or they require a developer to understand them at all.
Convrgent generates actual code you can paste into your site to implement fixes. This is technically impressive and genuinely useful if you have a developer who can review, test, and deploy it. For a solo brand owner, a marketing manager, or an account executive at an agency who needs to brief a client on what to change, it is not actionable without translation.
Caijo's fix instructions are written so that anyone on the team can understand them and know what to do next. A marketing manager can implement most schema fixes directly in a CMS without touching code. An account exec can forward the fix list to a client with a clear explanation attached. For fixes that do require a developer, the instructions are specific enough to brief accurately without back-and-forth.
Your site does not have Organisation schema. This tells AI engines who you are as an entity. To fix it: in your CMS, go to your homepage settings and add a JSON-LD block with your company name, URL, and logo URL. If you use WordPress, the Yoast or RankMath plugins add this automatically once configured. Fixing this recovers up to 4 points.
Agency Tooling
Built for agencies. Not just brands.
No other diagnostic AEO scanner has agency workflow features. White-label exports, unlimited client projects, scheduled rescans, and 9-domain competitor comparison are built into the AGENCY plan and unavailable anywhere else in this category.
Export any scan result as a fully branded PDF with your logo and your agency name. Caijo's branding is nowhere on the document. Deliver AEO audits as your own work product.
Every client gets their own workspace with their own scan history, Key Pages, and saved reports. No limit on clients. Each client's data stays completely separate.
Set CaijoBot to rescan any client domain automatically on a schedule you choose. Score history updates without you lifting a finger. Essential for ongoing retainer management.
Build full AEO league tables for any competitive set. CaijoBot scores every competitor domain using the identical methodology so every comparison is genuinely like-for-like.
AGENCY runs CiteReady on all designated Key Pages, generating up to 8 passages per page with bulk download as a content brief. The passages are included in white-label client exports.
AGENCY subscribers can apply to join the Caijo Partnership Programme, get listed in our partner directory, and receive referred leads from brands who need professional AEO help. Only AGENCY subscribers can apply.
The Projects page from the Caijo app showing multiple client project workspaces listed with their domain names, last scan dates, and scores. Demonstrates the multi-client workflow in a single view.
Honest Positioning
Who Caijo is not for.
If your site is already well-configured for AEO and you only want to track how often your brand appears in AI engine responses, Caijo is not the right product for that job. Profound, Otterly, and Scrunch are purpose-built for AI brand monitoring and they do it well. Use one of them.
If you need a tool that generates developer-ready implementation code that your technical team can deploy directly, Convrgent's output format may suit your workflow better than Caijo's plain English instructions. Both approaches fix the same underlying issues. The difference is who on your team can act on the output.
If you need autonomous AI-powered content creation at scale to improve your organic search rankings, tools like RankAI are built specifically for that job. Caijo is a diagnostic scanner. It identifies citation gaps and generates targeted passages for your existing Key Pages. It does not replace a content agency or an autonomous content platform.
Caijo is the right tool if you want to understand exactly why your site is not being cited by AI engines, exactly what to fix, and exactly what to write on your most important pages to start earning those citations. That is the specific job Caijo was built to do, and it does it better than anything else in the market.
The Honest Summary
What Caijo does that no other AEO tool does.
Not a feature list. A plain statement of what makes Caijo categorically different from every other tool in this market.
CaijoBot visits every page in your scan, renders JavaScript, follows your sitemap, and extracts real signals from real pages. Up to 100 pages on AGENCY. No other diagnostic scanner at this price point does this.
Every point maps to a specific check with a defined pass condition, a specific point value, and a plain English reason when it fails. No black boxes. No mystery scores. Every point lost tells you exactly what it would take to recover it.
Powered by the Claude API. Written so that a marketing manager can implement most fixes without a developer. For developer-required fixes, detailed enough to brief accurately without back-and-forth.
The only feature in any AEO platform that generates the specific 115-180 word passages your Key Pages need to earn AI citations. Personalised to your brand voice, your citation gaps, and your industry. Powered by the Claude API. No competitor offers anything like this.
Your strategically important pages get their own AEO score, their own category breakdown, and their own CiteReady analysis. Because your homepage score and your service page score are not the same number, and treating them the same is how you miss what actually matters.
CaijoBot crawls and scores competitor domains using the identical methodology. No estimated scores, no assumptions. Every comparison is like-for-like because every domain is crawled fresh by the same bot with the same scoring model.
Unlimited client projects, white-label PDF exports, scheduled automatic rescans, and the Caijo Partnership Programme with its referral network. No other diagnostic AEO scanner offers any of this. These features exist because Caijo was designed from the beginning to support agencies, not as an afterthought.
Frequently Asked
Your questions, answered honestly.
How is Caijo different from Profound or Otterly?
Profound and Otterly are AI visibility monitors. They send prompts to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI engines and report back how often your brand is mentioned, what context it appears in, and how that trend is moving over time. They are useful tools and they do their job well.
Caijo is a diagnostic scanner. It crawls your website, scores the signals that determine whether AI engines can understand and trust you, identifies what is wrong, and tells you what to fix and what to write. It does not send prompts to AI engines or monitor your brand mentions.
The two categories are not competing. They are sequential. You fix your site with Caijo first. Then you use a monitoring tool to track whether citations improve. Using a monitoring tool before your site is AEO-ready is like monitoring your name in the press before you have done anything worth reporting on. Get the site right first.
Is Caijo better than Convrgent AEO Scanner?
Convrgent is the most technically sophisticated direct competitor Caijo has, and we respect what they have built. Their implementation code output is genuinely impressive for developer-led teams. Their multi-score model (AEO Score, GEO Score, Agent Readiness Score) addresses real questions. If you have a technical team who wants implementation-ready code, Convrgent deserves a look.
Where Caijo is clearly ahead is in three areas. First, crawl depth: Caijo crawls up to 100 pages per scan with full JavaScript rendering. Convrgent crawls 5 pages per their published specification. Second, CiteReady: no other scanner generates the actual content your pages need to get cited. Convrgent does not have an equivalent feature. Third, agency tooling: white-label exports, unlimited client projects, scheduled rescans, and 9-domain competitor comparison exist in Caijo and not in Convrgent.
Where Convrgent has an edge is their output format for technical users and their per-scan pricing model which suits occasional use better than a monthly subscription. The honest answer is that for a non-technical brand owner or a marketing agency running ongoing client work, Caijo is the better tool. For a developer-led startup doing a one-off technical AEO audit, Convrgent is worth considering.
Does Caijo actually crawl my site or does it use AI to guess?
Caijo actually crawls your site. CaijoBot is a real crawler. It visits each page using a realistic browser profile, renders JavaScript, follows your XML sitemap to discover pages, and extracts the actual signals from what it finds. Every score is based on what CaijoBot found on the real pages of your real site at the time of the scan.
There is no AI inference, no estimation from domain names, and no extrapolation from the homepage. If CaijoBot visits your /services/aeo-consultancy page and finds no Organisation schema, your score reflects the actual absence of that schema on that actual page. If you add it and rescan, your score reflects its actual presence.
The only place the Claude API is involved in the scan process is in generating the plain English fix instructions (PRO+ and AGENCY) and the CiteReady passages. The AEO score itself is calculated by a deterministic scoring engine running against what CaijoBot actually retrieved. There are no AI estimates in the score.
What is CiteReady and why does no other tool have it?
CiteReady is the content generation engine built into Caijo for PRO+ and AGENCY users. After CaijoBot crawls your Key Pages and stores their full text content, CiteReady analyses each page against citation criteria, identifies Citation Gaps (the specific questions your page should be answering but currently does not answer well enough to be cited), and generates 115-180 word self-contained answer passages for each gap. These passages are ready to copy and add to your page.
No other AEO tool has it because building it properly requires three things simultaneously: a real crawl to understand the existing content on each specific page, a citation gap analysis framework to identify what questions the page should be answering, and a language model capable of generating content in the right format personalised to that specific page and brand. CiteReady uses the Claude API with your page's actual crawl data as context. Generic AI prompts produce generic content. CiteReady produces content personalised to your specific pages and your specific gaps.
The passages are designed around research into what AI engines most frequently extract and cite: self-contained 115-180 word answer paragraphs, structured with the most important claim first, written in an authoritative tone with specific factual claims. That is not a style choice. It is what the research on 680 million AI citations says actually gets cited.
What does the AGENCY plan include that PRO+ does not?
AGENCY adds five things PRO+ does not have: 100 scans per month instead of 20, Extensive scans up to 100 pages instead of 50, CiteReady on all Key Pages instead of a selected 5, white-label PDF exports with your branding, and scheduled automatic rescans on a weekly to yearly cadence. It also adds unlimited saved reports and projects instead of PRO+'s limits of 25 and 5 respectively, and competitor comparison across 9 domains instead of 3.
AGENCY is also the entry point to the Caijo Partnership Programme, which gives qualified agency subscribers access to Caijo's referral network. Only AGENCY subscribers can apply to join the programme. If you are building AEO as a professional client service, the combination of the white-label tooling, the bulk CiteReady output, and the partnership programme is what makes AGENCY a different product category from PRO+, not just a higher tier of the same thing.
The early bird AGENCY rate is $149.99/month locked for life for the first 100 subscribers. Standard pricing is $249.99/month. See the full AGENCY details.
Why should I trust Caijo's AEO score over other tools?
Because every point in the Caijo score is explained. There are no mystery grades, no black-box algorithms, and no vague assessments. The score is deterministic: 100 points across 7 categories, each with defined checks, defined point values, and defined pass conditions. If you score 68/100, you can see exactly which checks failed, exactly how many points each failure cost you, and exactly what you need to fix to recover those points. That level of transparency is unusual.
The weighting is based on published research into AI citation patterns. Structured Data at 20 points reflects what the research says about schema's impact on AI engine comprehension. Content Structure at 20 points reflects research on citable passage formats. The weights are not arbitrary and they are published in the Features page for anyone who wants to scrutinise them.
We are also honest about what the score does not guarantee. A high Caijo score means your site is optimally configured for AI engines to understand and trust you. It puts you in the best position available. It does not guarantee you appear in every AI response, because other factors (query relevance, training data, competition) are outside any scanner's control. Any tool that claims otherwise is not being straight with you.
Can I use Caijo alongside a monitoring tool like Profound or Otterly?
Yes, and this is actually the recommended approach for any brand serious about AEO. Caijo fixes the site. A monitoring tool tracks whether the fixes are working. They are different tools for different parts of the same workflow and they complement each other well.
The practical sequence: run a Caijo scan to establish your baseline score. Work through the fix list. Add CiteReady passages to your Key Pages. Rescan with Caijo to confirm the improvements. Then monitor with Profound or Otterly over the following weeks to see whether your citation frequency increases. The Caijo score tells you whether you have done the structural work correctly. The monitoring tool tells you whether AI engines have caught up with those changes.
Most brands and agencies we speak with who are serious about AEO end up using both categories of tool. Caijo for the site-level diagnostic and content generation work, and a monitoring tool for ongoing brand citation tracking. They are not alternatives. They are a workflow.