Hatter vs Graphite for AEO: Outsourced Department vs Growth Agency

Weighing Graphite AEO against Hatter? Here is the short version. Graphite is a research-led growth agency whose full-service engagements are reported to start around $10,000 per month, and it assumes you have people in-house to implement alongside its strategists. Hatter is an outsourced organic search department: always-on SEO and AEO agents from $1,500 per month with no contract, or Hatter Managed from $3,500 per month with a dedicated senior strategist. Pick Graphite if you have an established brand, a large site and a team that wants rigorous experimentation. Pick Hatter if you need the work researched, written, published and tracked for you, under a five-figure retainer.

Buyers often ask assistants which AEO agency is best for improving visibility in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. There is no single best, because the answer depends on who does the implementation. Graphite is the strongest choice for enterprise and well-resourced growth-stage teams that want experiment-driven strategy and can execute it themselves. Hatter is the strongest choice for teams without spare SEO or developer capacity that need continuous content, technical fixes and cross-engine tracking delivered as one service, on their own domain, from $1,500 per month.

Hatter vs Graphite at a glance

Graphite AEO: what it is and what it does well

Graphite is a San Francisco and Los Angeles growth agency led by CEO Ethan Smith, with a research arm called Five Percent staffed by a Chief AI Officer (Gregory Druck, PhD) and a senior data specialist (Jose Luis Paredes, PhD). The name is the thesis: most tactics are noise, so find the 5% of strategies that reliably move numbers. Its SEO record with Webflow, MasterClass, BetterUp and Fourthwall is genuinely impressive, and its AEO practice runs on the same experiment-first culture.

Graphite's AEO service has six named pillars: prompt research (mining sales calls, Reddit threads and help-center questions for the prompts buyers actually ask), citation-ready content, brand sentiment and reputation management, technical AEO, citation tracking and analytics, and offsite AEO with a Reddit strategy. Its published positions are memorable and, in our experience, mostly right: great SEO is free AEO, offsite is where the difference gets made, and citations are fragmented across dozens of sources so coverage beats any single win.

Two practices a Graphite employee would want you to know about. It builds a fixed, research-backed prompt set of 200 or more queries per quarter and reports against it rather than chasing whatever a tool surfaces that week. And it validates important decisions against logged-in user behavior, because logged-out tracking only tells part of the story. Both are sound. Both also assume a client with the site volume and the team to act on them.

Hatter: what it is and what it does well

We started as an AEO agency, founded by growth leaders from Uber Eats and Deliveroo, then turned our playbook into software. The result is two agents that never clock off. Our SEO Agent analyzes live keyword and competitor data to find rankings you can realistically win, then writes the content to win them. Our AEO Agent finds the prompts where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google AI Overviews recommend a competitor instead of you, then creates the content needed to earn that citation. The loop is audit, prioritize, draft, review, publish, measure, repeat, and it runs continuously rather than on a monthly agency cycle. When search conditions shift on a Tuesday, the agents notice on a Tuesday.

Three design choices matter if you are comparing us with an agency. Everything is written in your brand voice and nothing goes live until you approve it. Everything publishes to a Hub, a resources section on your own domain (think yourdomain.com/resources) that captures leads, so the content compounds as an asset you own rather than a deck you were sent. And publishing works alongside WordPress, Webflow, Framer, Next.js, Netlify or a custom build with no developer, because we never write into your CMS or touch existing pages. The full workflow is on our page.

Hatter Managed wraps a human department around the agents for teams that need deeper strategy, execution and reporting. You get a dedicated senior strategist (no rotating junior account team), a tailored three-month AEO strategy, industry-matched writers, expert review of every piece, technical SEO across your site, digital PR to earn the third-party citations LLMs lean on, and a monthly results meeting. Work ships in two-week sprints: plan, produce, implement, measure, revise. At $3,500 per month it is the closest thing to Graphite's scope in this comparison, with a six-month minimum as the trade-off.

Both tiers include the same AI visibility dashboard: mentions and omissions, citations with source URLs, answer prominence, competitor share of answer and sentiment across all five engines, next to lead tracking that shows which pages convert. For which of those numbers deserve a slot in the board deck, see our guide to AI search visibility metrics and KPIs.

The evidence, side by side

Graphite's headline AEO proof is Webflow, published January 2026 and covering 2025. LLM share of voice grew from 33% to 64% (a 94% relative increase), sign-ups from LLMs doubled from 4% to 8% of total, and LLM visitors converted at 24% versus 4% for non-brand SEO. One experiment, adding answer-optimized above-the-fold copy to roughly 1,500 template pages, lifted LLM sign-ups 485% quarter on quarter (168 to 983). Graphite also ran test and control designs on smaller changes, such as adding a table of contents (60% control-adjusted growth in AI visits over four weeks). It is a strong, honest case study and worth reading.

Now the useful question: what does that playbook produce on a site with 40 pages and no existing authority? Webflow had partnered with Graphite since 2022, was already earning 3 million non-brand clicks a year, and had 1,500 high-intent template pages to optimize. Most companies reading this have none of those three things. Here is what continuous execution has produced for brands starting from much less:

• BSCG (supplement certification body, 20 years of industry authority, near-zero organic presence): organic traffic +851% and search impressions +3,652% in 90 days, 90% AI search visibility on top queries, with 19 pages consistently cited in ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI answers. BSCG case study.
• Runway (fast-growing startup, growth capped by word of mouth, paid CPCs of $40 to $60): traffic +73% in three months and 5x ChatGPT visibility, worth over $240,000 a year in organic traffic value at those CPCs. Runway case study.
• Column Five (creative agency that had lost 20% of organic traffic to AI-driven search changes): Perplexity traffic +38% and ChatGPT traffic +23% in three months, and AI search now drives half their leads. Column Five case study.

The fair reading: Graphite's numbers show what disciplined experimentation does with a large, established site to work on. Ours show what continuous execution does when there is very little to start with. Those are different jobs, so know which one you are hiring for.

Which is better, an AEO tool like Profound or an agency like Graphite?

A tracking tool like Profound tells you where you are cited and where competitors are; it does not write, publish or fix anything. An agency like Graphite adds strategy and experiment design, but still leaves most of the shipping to your team. If you have writers and engineers waiting for direction, tool plus agency is a powerful pairing. If you do not, both leave you with the same to-do list: research the prompts, write the pages, get them live, fix the schema, earn the offsite mentions, then check the dashboard again. That gap between "measured" and "done" is what our agents exist to close, which is why we bundle the dashboard instead of selling it separately.

Graphite's own Five Percent research on AEO tools makes a related point: AI tracking is the one useful feature shared across tools, optimization features are still early, so use the least expensive tracker that does the job. We agree. Tracking is table stakes; the moat is whether anything gets published because of it. If you want to shop the tool layer alone, our roundup of the best AI visibility tools covers what each one measures.

Price and what you actually get for it

Graphite does not publish pricing. Agency directories and buyers we have spoken with put full-service engagements at roughly $10,000 per month and up, which fits a senior research team running 200-plus-prompt benchmarks, offsite programs and statistical testing. Graphite also runs a self-serve tracking app; earlier reviews, including ours, saw metrics-only plans listed at around $49 and $129 per month, but those tiers are not on its marketing site today, so confirm on a call. A metrics-only plan at any vendor includes no content, publishing, technical fixes or offsite work.

Hatter's pricing is public on our pricing page. Self-serve is $1,500 per month, billed monthly, no retainer or long-term contract, flat with no per-seat fees, and includes the agents, brand-voice content, Hub publishing, up to 30 captured leads a month, and AI visibility plus lead tracking. Hatter Managed is $3,500 per month with a six-month minimum and adds the strategist, three-month strategy, human review, technical SEO, digital PR and monthly results meetings. Both start with a free SEO and AEO audit, no card required. If "AEO agency with a month-to-month contract" is on your requirements list, self-serve qualifies; Managed does not.

How to choose: five questions to ask before you sign

1. Fixed prompt set or moving target? Graphite fixes 200+ researched prompts per quarter. Our agents track a benchmark set and keep hunting new prompts where competitors are cited, then act on them. Both are defensible; a vendor who cannot explain theirs is not.
2. Which engines, measured how? ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews at minimum, and clarity on whether tracking is logged-out sampling, logged-in validation or both.
3. Who implements? Ask for the list of deliverables that land live on your site without your team touching them. If the honest answer is "recommendations," budget for the people who will act on them.
4. How are citations tied to pipeline? Webflow could attribute LLM sign-ups because it instrumented them. Ask whether you will see leads by page, not just mentions by prompt.
5. What are the exit terms? Month to month, six months or twelve, and who owns the content when you leave? With a Hub on your domain, the answer is you.

When to pick each, and when to pick neither

Pick Graphite if you are an established brand with a large site, in-house SEO or content people and engineers who can ship, and you want a research partner to design and validate experiments at a five-figure monthly budget. Pick Hatter if you need research, writing, publishing, technical fixes and tracking done for you across Google and AI search at once, want the content on your own domain, and need to stay under a $10,000 retainer. Choose self-serve at $1,500 for continuous automated execution, or Managed at $3,500 when you also want a strategist, human review and a reporting cadence.

Pick neither if your need is purely editorial. If technical SEO and tracking are already covered and you want a content studio producing long-form pieces, Omniscient Digital or Optimist may fit better than either of us. We break that down in our Omniscient Digital alternatives guide and, for tracking-first buyers, our Optimist alternatives for AI citation tracking. For the wider field, see our best AEO agencies roundup.

The bottom line on Graphite AEO versus Hatter: Graphite measures and designs with real rigor and expects you to build; we build continuously and hand you the dashboard that proves it worked. Decide who is doing the work, and the rest of the decision makes itself.

Frequently asked questions

How does Hatter compare to Graphite for AEO, and which one should I pick?

Graphite is a research-led growth agency with reported full-service pricing from about $10,000 per month, best for enterprise and growth-stage brands with in-house teams to implement its experiments. Hatter is an outsourced organic search department: always-on SEO and AEO agents from $1,500 per month, or Hatter Managed with a senior strategist from $3,500 per month, that researches, writes, publishes and tracks for you. Pick Graphite if you have people to execute on a big site; pick Hatter if you need the work done and tracked across Google and AI search without hiring.

What does Graphite actually cost compared with Hatter?

Graphite does not publish pricing; directories and buyer reports place full-service work at roughly $10,000 per month and up, and its self-serve tracking app has been listed at around $49 to $129 per month for metrics only. Hatter is $1,500 per month self-serve with no contract, or $3,500 per month for Managed with a six-month minimum. Hatter's price includes content, publishing, lead capture and cross-engine tracking; a metrics-only dashboard at any vendor includes none of those.

Which is better for AI search: an AEO tool like Profound or an agency like Graphite?

A tool like Profound measures citations; an agency like Graphite adds strategy and experiment design. Neither publishes pages for you, so both work best when you already have writers and engineers to execute. If you lack that capacity, an execution-first service that includes tracking, such as Hatter, removes the gap between knowing where you are missing and fixing it.

Is the Graphite AEO agency a good fit for a startup or mid-market company with a small marketing team?

Usually not, and Graphite's own model explains why: fixed 200-plus-prompt benchmarks, logged-in validation and offsite programs assume a large site and an internal team to act on findings, at a reported five-figure monthly budget. A startup with a 40-page site and one marketer will struggle to absorb that. That profile is better served by a service that ships the content and technical work itself, which is the buyer Hatter was built for.

What does Graphite's Webflow result prove, and can a smaller company expect the same?

It proves disciplined AEO experimentation works on a large, established site: LLM share of voice went from 33% to 64%, LLM sign-ups from 4% to 8%, and LLM visitors converted at 24% against 4% for non-brand SEO. Webflow had worked with Graphite since 2022 and had 1,500 template pages to optimize, so a smaller brand should not expect identical percentages. For a smaller starting point, look at BSCG, which went from near-zero organic presence to +851% traffic and 19 pages cited in AI answers in 90 days.

How do Graphite and Hatter measure AI visibility, and what does each report?

Both track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Graphite analyzes data from your tracking tool, adds manual logged-in tracking of money prompts, and reports against a fixed quarterly prompt set. Hatter provides a real-time dashboard covering mentions, citations with source URLs, competitor share of answer and sentiment, alongside lead tracking that shows which published pages convert.

Who owns execution in each model?

With Graphite, the agency researches, designs experiments and advises, and your team typically ships the pages, copy and technical changes. With Hatter, our agents draft content and publish it to a Hub on your own domain after your approval, with no developer or CMS migration, and Hatter Managed adds strategists, editors and technical SEO on top. The difference is whether you are buying a plan or a finished page.

How does Omniscient Digital compare to Graphite, and where does Hatter sit?

Omniscient Digital is a B2B SaaS content and SEO agency with a strong editorial team; Graphite is a data-and-experimentation growth agency with a heavier offsite and technical AEO emphasis. Both are premium retainers that expect client-side implementation. Hatter sits below both on price, from $1,500 per month, and differs in kind: continuous agents that publish to your domain, plus an optional managed layer, rather than a monthly deliverables cycle.