EX-14. AEO agencies and AI visibility tools. AI visibility audit.

The category, audited by us.

The Hint Co. runs the Hint Co. protocol on the Hint Co. category. Right of reply extended to every named vendor. Findings publish alongside.

Hint Co. appears in zero of ninety responses.

The Hint Co. was named zero times in the Anthropic Claude subset of this audit. The site is three weeks old. Zero third-party citations. No Wikipedia entry. No Reddit or industry-publication presence yet. This is the honest baseline.

0/90

The Hint Co. in the Anthropic Claude subset

The AEO agency that publishes its methodology does not yet exist in the AI answer graph.

Zero mentions across all 30 buyer questions, three samples per prompt, on Claude web search. This is Day 0. Every published answer page, every case file, and the two-stage-matcher plus recommendation-classifier methodology are new content that the engines have not yet crawled or indexed. The 30-day re-audit measures whether that changes.

The competitive landscape Claude actually knows about.

Filtering out AI engines themselves (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, Claude, Gemini appear at the top of the raw leaderboard because they are the platforms being asked about, not the agencies serving them), the AEO-agency category as Anthropic Claude sees it looks like this.

#	Vendor	Appearances	% of 90
01	Profound	45	50.0%
02	Otterly.AI	36	40.0%
03	Peec AI	32	35.6%
04	Athena HQ	28	31.1%
05	Semrush	19	21.1%
06	Scrunch AI	17	18.9%
07	First Page Sage	9	10.0%
08	Ahrefs	9	10.0%
09	Conductor	5	5.6%
10	Amsive	3	3.3%
11	Rankscale	2	2.2%
n/a	The Hint Co.	0	0.0%

Profound is the category leader Claude knows about. Appearing in half of all responses. Otterly.AI and Peec AI are the two other consistently-named platforms. Athena HQ is meaningfully present at 31.1%. Below the top four, the category diffuses across monitoring tools (Scrunch AI, Rankscale), traditional SEO platforms with AEO features (Semrush, Ahrefs, Conductor), and content agencies bolting on AEO service lines (First Page Sage, Amsive).

Traditional SEO tools still route into AEO answers.

Semrush appears in 21.1% of responses. Ahrefs in 10.0%. Conductor in 5.6%. These are established SEO platforms that have added AI-visibility tracking to their existing feature sets. Claude routes to them alongside the dedicated AEO tools.

The category boundary is fuzzy in the current AI answer graph. Buyers ask "who does AEO" and get a mix of pure-play AEO tools, hybrid SEO-AEO platforms, and content agencies. Depending on the framing of the buyer question, the shape of the answer shifts.

An open question for a challenger: is the winning positioning "dedicated AEO" (compete inside the pure-play cluster), or "the diagnostic version of SEO" (compete against Semrush and Ahrefs directly, positioning yourself as their audit layer)? This audit does not answer that. It surfaces the tension.

What is missing from the leaderboard.

Two absences worth naming.

The Hint Co. is absent. As stated above. This is expected at three weeks in. It is also the reason to publish this audit. Every read customer will ask "why should I buy an audit from a company that does not appear in AI audit answers." The honest answer: because we run the same protocol on ourselves that we run on every named client, and here is the baseline. Watch the 30-day re-audit to see whether the strategy works.

Named individuals are also mostly absent. Aleyda Solis, Kevin Indig, and the practitioners driving public AEO thinking do not show up prominently in the Claude subset. The AI answer graph currently treats AEO as a category of tools and service lines, not a category of expertise. Individual-brand entity work in this category has not yet been done.

Methodology and caveats.

Run date. 2026-07-28 UTC.
Sample. 30 buyer questions across 8 buckets, 3 samples per engine. Target 270 responses.
Engines run. Anthropic Claude with web_search tool enabled. OpenAI GPT-4o Search Preview and Perplexity Sonar-Pro both returned quota-exceeded errors during this run and are excluded. Full three-engine coverage will be republished as v0.2 when the OpenAI and Perplexity API budgets are topped up.
Recommendation classifier not run on this audit. The v0.5 methodology adds a third pass that classifies every confirmed mention into one of six treatment codes (SOLE, PRIMARY, ALTERNATIVE, CONDITIONAL, NEUTRAL, UNFAVORABLE). That pass has not been run against the EX-14 responses yet. When it runs, the leaderboard will be updated with pick share of total.
Two-stage matcher (v0.4). Every candidate brand mention is confirmed by a second-pass LLM adjudicator against the surrounding context. Ambiguous vendors in the config include Profound (also a common English word), Public, Claude (also a first name), Gemini (also a zodiac sign), Nozzle, Conductor. Adjudication cache is publicly declared.
Engine self-mentions filtered. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, Claude, and Gemini appear at the top of the raw leaderboard because the buyer questions ask about AI visibility inside those platforms. They are the subject of the questions, not agencies serving the answer. The competitive-landscape table in this exhibit excludes them.
Self-audit disclosure. This audit was run by The Hint Co. on a category that includes The Hint Co. The protocol is identical to every other audit in the research library. The Hint Co. was included in the vendor list. The Hint Co. appears zero times in the results. If any reader wants to run the audit independently, the config is at github.com/Daryllsaints/hint-co/audit/configs/14-aeo-agencies.json.
Right of reply. Any named vendor can request a free counter-audit of their own category or a counter-audit of this one with their preferred prompt bank. Findings publish alongside. Contact: reply@itshintco.com.
No editorializing. This exhibit reads the data. It does not rank vendors by quality. Profound at 50% means Claude names Profound in 50% of responses. It does not mean Profound is the best AEO agency.

What happens next.

The Hint Co. shipped five answer pages under /answers/ on 2026-07-28. The methodology page added chapter 05 (recommendation classifier). The glossary added six new terms. The homepage added an /answers/ nav link. Social distribution begins tonight.

The 30-day re-audit runs 2026-08-27. That measurement will show whether any of the shipped content moved the number from zero. The result publishes here as EX-14 v0.2 whether the movement is positive, negative, or nil.

Apply for a pilot or read

Or read the rest of the research library to see how the protocol runs on categories where we do not have skin in the game.