G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace, announced that its Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) software category has grown from just seven products at launch to more than 150 in under a year, marking over 2000% growth since March 2025. The category reached a major milestone with the release of its first G2 Grid® Report in the Winter 2026 Reports, signaling that AEO has matured into a recognized and essential market.

AI is now the starting point of the buyer journey

The explosive growth of AEO software reflects a fundamental change in buyer behavior. According to an August G2 survey:

• 50% of B2B software buyers now begin their purchasing journey in an AI chatbot, not a traditional Google search

• 74% of buyers name ChatGPT as their preferred large language model (LLM)

As AI chatbots increasingly deliver direct answers, recommendations, and comparisons, visibility within platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Mode has become a top priority for B2B vendors.

Rather than competing solely for page rankings and clicks, companies are now competing to be the answer.

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) software helps brands improve their visibility and representation across AI chatbots and LLM-powered search experiences.

These platforms go beyond traditional SEO by enabling organizations to:

• Optimize content for AI-generated answers and conversational interfaces

• Track brand mentions and citations within LLM responses

• Identify ranking and recommendation factors used by AI systems

• Detect misinformation, bias, or hallucinations in how AI describes a brand

“The modern buying journey is compressed by AI, and winning today means winning the answer, not just the click,” said Emily Greathouse, Director of Market Research at G2. “Companies need tools that move beyond traditional SEO metrics to focus on AI visibility and LLM ranking factors.”

First G2 Grid® Report for AEO released

A software category becomes eligible for a G2 Grid® Report once it reaches:

• At least six products, each with a minimum of 10 reviews

• A total of 150+ reviews across the category

The first Winter 2026 G2 Grid® Report for AEO featured nine products across four performance tiers:

Leader

• Profound

High Performers

• Otterly.AI

• Scrunch AI

Contenders

• Semrush

• BrightEdge

• Conductor

Niche

• Quattr

• GetCito

• GenRank.io

Since the Winter 2026 Reports launched on December 3, 2025, additional vendors—including AirOps, Hall, Waikay, Brandi, and Visby AI—have earned placement on the AEO Grid as of January 26, 2026. G2 updates category Grids daily to reflect the latest review and market data.

Vendors race to control AI-driven brand perception

As AI increasingly mediates software discovery, vendors are under pressure to ensure their brands are accurately represented—and favorably positioned—inside AI-generated answers.

“The way people discover, evaluate, and trust software has fundamentally changed,” said Trevor Pyle, Head of Marketing at Profound. “As buyers turn to answer engines for fast, direct guidance, demand is rising for software that powers AEO strategies.”

Profound, named a Leader in the inaugural Grid, focuses on mapping real buyer questions to how AI models interpret and cite brands—an approach that reflects the new mechanics of AI-powered discovery.

How G2 evaluates AEO software

To qualify for the AEO category, products must deliver clear value across four core capabilities:

1. Visibility into AI-generated answers
   Track where, how often, and in what context a brand appears in LLM responses.

2. Trustworthy brand interpretation
   Identify inaccuracies, bias, or hallucinations in how AI platforms describe a company or product.

3. Transparency into AI rankings and recommendations
   Reveal the signals influencing AI-driven citations and reduce the “black box” effect of LLMs.

4. Competitive benchmarking
   Compare AI visibility and positioning against competitors and category peers.

The bigger picture

AEO’s rapid growth on G2 underscores a broader reality: AI has become the front door to B2B software discovery. As search evolves from links to answers, companies that fail to understand—and optimize for—AI visibility risk disappearing from the buyer journey entirely.

The emergence of AEO as a formal software category marks a turning point: optimizing for AI isn’t experimental anymore—it’s foundational.

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