SEOAIO vs CrawlTide
Both sell AI visibility tracking, and both free checks ask no AI engine anything and say so: theirs and our free audit read your site instead. Our free checkup asks one engine, Google AI Mode read through a SERP vendor (DataForSEO), once per domain and only while we have it switched on. The split is in the paid product: how many answers stand behind each number.
Their side reflects public pages we reviewed on October 29, 2026. Products change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Where CrawlTide is genuinely strong
- An honest free check: the tool page and its FAQ say it sends no prompt to any AI engine, and explain that engine tracking costs money per prompt.
- 16 free tools in their sitemap, each usable 3 times a day without an account.
- Five engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity) on every paid plan from $39, with depth, not engines, gated by tier.
- A changelog that explains each scoring change. In October they replaced their readiness score with five documented checks shown as a pass count, and they do not compare old scores with new ones.
- One suite beside AI visibility: site crawler, keywords, backlinks, a local rank grid, server-log analysis and CMS publishing.
A comparison that finds nothing good in the other tool is marketing. If the rows above are what you need most, they may genuinely fit you better.
| What matters | SEOAIO | CrawlTide |
|---|---|---|
| What the free tool actually measures | The free audit reads your homepage, robots.txt and a few other public files, and asks no AI engine anything. The free checkup asks one engine, Google AI Mode through DataForSEO: up to 12 questions, 3 samples each, once per domain, and only while we have it switched on. | Their free AI Visibility Check says on the page and in its FAQ that it sends no prompt to any AI engine. Engine tracking is in the paid plans, which the FAQ says cost money per prompt; AI visibility is not on their Free plan. |
| Engine coverage and who runs the queries | We send questions to ChatGPT (OpenAI's API), Claude (Anthropic's API) and Perplexity (its Sonar API) ourselves. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews have no public API, so we read them through a SERP vendor, DataForSEO. Starter measures Perplexity and Google; Pro and Agency add ChatGPT and Claude. We do not measure Gemini. Up to 15 questions a run on Starter and 25 on Pro and Agency, and every sampled answer is stored. | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on every paid plan, run through a third-party search data provider their subprocessors page does not name, plus OpenAI's API for some checks. Refreshed every 14, 7 or 5 days by plan, for projects opened in the last 30 days. Prompts per cycle: 10 on ChatGPT and AI Overviews plus 2 on each of the other three (Standard), 15 plus 5 (Pro), 20 plus 10 (Enterprise). We found no samples-per-prompt figure. |
| Social proof | No customer logos render anywhere on our site until real customers agree to be named. | We found no customer testimonials on the pages we fetched. GetApp lists them with no reviews, and the AlternativeTo listing they submitted on October 14 had no reviews on October 29. |
| Price | $99 / $249 / $549 per month, published, with a printed fit rule per tier. Annual billing is 12 months for the price of 9 at the list price. No free trial; a one-time $29 Deep Scan is the paid first look. | $0 / $39 / $79 / $149 per month on their pricing page. Each paid plan has a 14-day trial: card required, no charge that day, a reminder email three days before it ends, and the subscription starts when the trial ends unless cancelled. Returning customers are charged at once. No annual billing yet. |
CrawlTide is cheaper and broader: five engines on every paid plan from $39, a full SEO suite beside them, and a free tool that now says what it does not do. Our Starter measures two engines at $99 a month, and they win that row. The difference is what stands behind each number. Their Standard plan asks 2 prompts per 14 days on three of its five engines and publishes no samples per prompt; we print the sample count and a 95% interval beside every share. If engine count at the lowest price matters most, pick them. If each number should show how many answers it rests on, that is what we built.
Run a free measured audit, no signupAll comparisons: vs MentionPilot · vs Clovion · vs CookMyRank · vs SeoVision · vs Scrunch · vs SE Ranking · vs Search Atlas · vs Opinly · vs RankMonster · vs Scope · vs Hike SEO · vs Doing it yourself in ChatGPT · vs BrandWell · vs CiteMetrix · vs ItGrows