AIOSEO and Sona solve different halves of AI search. AIOSEO is a WordPress plugin that produces SEO signals and, on paid plans, reports your ranking position across five AI engines. Sona is a free checker that audits whether AI engines can actually crawl, read and trust your site, then tracks share of voice, trend and sentiment over time. AIOSEO is stronger on competitive ranking data. Sona is the only one of the two that audits AI readiness on your own pages, works on any platform, and costs nothing.
If you are still deciding what to measure, start with what AI visibility is and which signals matter.
If you run a WordPress site and you are trying to show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, AIOSEO is probably already installed. It is the most widely used SEO plugin that has added AI features, and its AI Suite is a genuinely good piece of work.
This comparison is deliberately specific about where it wins and where it does not, because most "vs" pages are not. We have read AIOSEO's feature pages, documentation, pricing and release notes, and where their own sources contradict each other we say so rather than picking the version that flatters us.
What each tool is actually for
The clearest way to think about this is generation versus diagnosis.
AIOSEO generates. It writes your titles and meta descriptions, outputs schema markup, builds your XML sitemap, creates an llms.txt file, and on paid plans produces AI content and images. It is a site management plugin. It puts signals onto your site.
Sona diagnoses. It fetches your real pages and checks whether the signals are correct and whether AI engines can use them: are AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, is your content in server-rendered HTML rather than JavaScript only, is your llms.txt a real file rather than a catch-all HTML page, is your schema valid, are your headings logical, are your pages stale. Then it asks real AI engines category questions and reports whether your brand comes up.
That difference explains almost every row in the table below. It also explains why the honest answer for most WordPress teams is to use both.
Full feature comparison
Free tier against free tier first, since that is the comparison most people actually make, with AIOSEO's entry paid plan included for context.
| Capability | AIOSEO Lite free, no card |
AIOSEO Basic $49.50/yr |
Sona AI Visibility free, no card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Queries live AI engines | Disputed, see note below | Yes | Yes, ChatGPT and Claude |
| AI engines covered | 5, if beta access holds | 5: OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity | 2 live in the free scan |
| Rank position per engine | If beta access holds | Yes, per engine plus combined rank | No, mention or no mention |
| Competitor discovery and ranking | If beta access holds | Yes, auto-discovered | No |
| Full AI response text | If beta access holds | Yes | Not surfaced |
| Cited source pages | If beta access holds | Yes | No |
| Share of voice per engine | No | No | Yes, free |
| Trend across runs | No, Brand Tracker unreleased | No, Brand Tracker unreleased | Yes, free |
| Sentiment analysis | No | No | Yes, free |
| AI crawler access audit (robots.txt) | No | No | Yes, plus live bot probe |
| Server-side rendering check | No | No | Yes |
| llms.txt validity audit | No | No | Yes |
| llms.txt generation | Basic file only | Includes llms-full.txt and markdown | Free standalone generator |
| Schema validation | Outputs schema, does not validate | Outputs schema, does not validate | Yes, validates required fields |
| Schema generation | Basic types only | Basic types, advanced is Pro tier | Not its job |
| On-page content analysis | TruSEO, 1 focus keyword | TruSEO, unlimited keywords | Content quality and heading structure |
| Freshness and staleness signals | No | No | Yes |
| Google Search Console | Verification only | Search Statistics | No |
| XML sitemap generation | Yes | Yes | Not its job |
| AI content and image generation | No credits bundled | 10,000 credits | No |
| Works on non-WordPress sites | No | No | Yes, any public URL |
| Usage limits | Not applicable | AI credits expire yearly | 5 scans per IP per day |
| Cost | $0 forever | $49.50 first year, renews higher | $0, no signup |
Pricing and feature data taken from AIOSEO's public feature pages, documentation, pricing page and 4.9.1 release notes, accurate as of August 2026. AIOSEO does not offer a credit card free trial; the nearest equivalent is a paid plan inside its 14-day money-back guarantee.
The AI Keyword Report caveat, stated plainly
Six rows above say "if beta access holds", and it is worth explaining exactly why rather than quietly rounding it in either direction.
AIOSEO's AI Keyword Report is the strongest AEO feature either product has. It queries five engines and returns a brands comparison table with overall rank and per-engine position, colour coded, alongside the full response from each engine and the web sources each one referenced. There is no equivalent to it in Sona's free checker today.
What is unclear is who can use it. AIOSEO's own pages say two different things:
- The AI Suite feature page states that keyword reports are free to all users, Lite included, during the current beta period.
- The AI Insights documentation states that the feature is available to customers with All in One SEO Pro.
Both descriptions agree it is in beta and framed as free for a limited time, which means it is a promotional window rather than a committed free-tier feature. If you are choosing tools on the strength of that report, install AIOSEO Lite and confirm the AI Suite menu item appears before you plan around it. We will update this page when the beta resolves.
Where AIOSEO is genuinely better
Four things, and they matter if competitive positioning is your priority.
- Ranking position, not just presence. Knowing you were mentioned is useful. Knowing you were fourth behind three named competitors is actionable. Sona currently reports mention or no mention.
- Competitor discovery. AIOSEO surfaces every brand that appeared for your query, including ones you had not thought to track.
- Cited sources. Seeing which pages an engine referenced tells you exactly which content to go and earn a mention on.
- Five engines against two. Sona's free scan runs ChatGPT and Claude. Perplexity is supported in our CLI but excluded from the free web scan because its per-request search fee dominated the cost of every scan. Gemini and DeepSeek are not yet covered.
If those four are what you need and you are on WordPress, AIOSEO's paid AI Suite is a reasonable $49.50 and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
Where Sona is better, at any price
AIOSEO publishes excellent guides on answer engine optimization. They recommend allowing GPTBot and ClaudeBot in robots.txt, writing answer-first content, adding FAQ and Article schema, and building off-site consensus signals. What their product does not do is check any of that on your site.
That gap is the entire reason Sona's checker exists. It audits the layer between "we published something" and "an AI engine used it":
- AI crawler access. Reads your robots.txt for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, then runs a live probe to confirm bots can genuinely reach your pages rather than being stopped by a CDN or WAF rule. A perfect llms.txt is worthless if Cloudflare is returning 403 to the crawler.
- Rendering. Confirms your content exists in server-rendered HTML. Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered page can look empty to them while looking fine to you.
- llms.txt validity. Not just whether the file exists, but whether it is a real llms file rather than a catch-all route returning HTML, which is a common and completely invisible failure.
- Schema correctness. AIOSEO writes schema. Sona checks whether it validates and whether required fields are actually present. Generating and verifying are different jobs.
- Structure and freshness. Heading hierarchy, content quality, and whether pages expose machine-readable last-updated dates.
On the measurement side, three things AIOSEO does not offer on any plan:
- Share of voice. The percentage of category prompts that return your brand, per engine, rather than a single yes or no.
- Trend across runs. Whether you are gaining or losing ground. AIOSEO's Brand Tracker is listed as coming soon, so right now nobody gets this from them at any price.
- Sentiment. How engines describe you, with strengths, concerns and positioning. Being mentioned dismissively and being recommended are not the same outcome, and a boolean cannot tell them apart.
And the practical one: Sona runs against any public URL. If you manage a WordPress site plus a Webflow marketing site plus a Next.js app, a WordPress plugin can only ever see one of them.
Which should you use
For most WordPress teams, both, because they overlap far less than the category names suggest.
Keep AIOSEO for what it is good at: producing metadata, sitemaps and schema inside WordPress, and, if you upgrade, tracking your competitive rank across five engines. Use Sona's free AI visibility checker to verify the signals AIOSEO produces are actually reaching AI engines, to catch the crawler, rendering and validity failures no plugin reports, and to track share of voice, trend and sentiment over time.
If you are not on WordPress, the comparison does not really apply. AIOSEO is a WordPress plugin and Sona works anywhere.
