The AEO tools tell you your score. Refraction tells you what it means and what to do — from an operator who ran the functions AI answers are built from, at Fortune 50 scale.
When a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini about your company — is it worth it, is it safe, why was I charged — the machine composes an answer from evidence. Some of that evidence is yours. Most of it is not: reviews, forums, affiliates, complaint threads, the residue of every customer experience you ever shipped.
The answer your customers hear may be accurate and still not yours. Your pricing explained by an affiliate. Your reliability narrated by Reddit. Your story, told by whoever published the most legible evidence — at the exact moment a buying or leaving decision is being made.
Executives already sense this. They ask the machine about their own company, read the answer, and walk into Monday asking their teams why it says that. Almost nobody can answer — because the tools measure how often you appear, not why the machine believes what it believes, or who owns changing it.
Profound, Scrunch, Otterly, AthenaHQ, Peec, SEMrush’s AI Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar — underneath the names, they are the same thing: monitoring software for marketing teams. They run the prompts you supply, score how often the AI engines cite you, and the better ones suggest content edits. The dashboard is the product. What it means, and what to do about it, is left to you.
An operator-led read on how AI engines actually describe your brand, why they describe it that way, and what to do about it. It measures the gap between what you say about yourself and what the edge — customers, reviews, forums, third-party citations — is telling the machine, then traces that gap back to the customer experience and operations producing it. Fixed scope. Not a subscription.
| Refraction | Profound & the AEO tools | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A senior-operator assessment | Monitoring software, sold by subscription |
| The question it answers | Why AI describes you this way — and what to do | Where you’re cited, and how often |
| What it reads | The full signal, whether or not you thought to track it | Only the prompts you supply |
| What you get | Judgment and a prioritized plan | A dashboard; execution is your problem |
| Root cause | Traces the gap to real customer experience and operations | Treats it as a content problem |
| Who delivers it | An operator who ran the underlying functions at Fortune 50 scale | Software, plus your in-house analysts |
| Cost model | Fixed-scope engagement | Subscription, self-serve to enterprise tiers |
| Best for | Leaders who need to know what the score means | Teams who want the numbers on a screen |
Every tool stops at the score. Refraction connects the machine’s version of your brand to the reality generating it, and hands you a prioritized plan — some of it content, but also the experience fixes that change what the edge says in the first place. Proactive, not damage control. Built by the operator who ran social care, reputation, executive relations, and the regulatory record at Comcast — the functions AI answers now read as receipts — before the category had a name.
Refraction is delivered as a fixed-scope engagement: your entity, your ecosystem, your machine layer — read, adjudicated, and returned as a plan with owners. justin@greenbaumlabs.com
justin@greenbaumlabs.com