GEO tools help your brand show up in the answers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews give. The best GEO tool depends on which part of the work you need help with: tracking whether the engines name you, fixing your pages, getting mentioned on the sites they cite, or making sure AI crawlers can read your site.
Prices and features checked between 11 October 2026 and 9 November 2026 on each vendor's own site. Peak Answer is the author's product, and the sections below say where it isn't the right fit.
Quick picks:
- Peak Answer: best all-in-one for small teams. It tracks your buying questions on 6 engines, then writes the articles, finds the sites to get mentioned on and drafts the outreach.
- Peec AI: best for a clean daily tracker.
- Otterly: best low-cost tracker.
- Semrush, SE Ranking or Ahrefs: best if your team already pays for one of them.
- Profound: best for large teams that buy through sales.
What a GEO tool does
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of getting your brand named and cited in AI answers. It covers four jobs, and most tools only do one or two of them:
- Tracking: asking the engines your buyers' questions on a schedule and recording whether you're named, how you're described and which pages get cited.
- Fixing pages: writing or rewriting the pages that answer those questions, so an engine that searches can find and quote them.
- Getting mentioned: getting onto the roundups, directories, reviews and threads the engines already read.
- Technical access: making sure AI crawlers can reach and read your site.
If you only need one job done, a specialist is usually cheaper. If you want all four, look for a tool that tracks and then helps with the work, or plan on using two tools.
GEO tools compared
The table covers the 11 paid tools by their main job. The free tools are further down.
| Tool | Main job | Price from | Engines on the entry plan | Free plan or trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peak Answer | Tracking, content, mentions, technical | $49/month | 6 | 7-day trial |
| Profound | Tracking (enterprise) | Custom (Tailored packages, no dollar amounts) | 3 on the trial, up to 9 on Enterprise | 7 day free trial: 50 prompts and limited AI Marketer credits |
| Peec AI | Tracking | $95/month | 3 of your choice | A free trial is offered. The page doesn't give its length |
| Otterly | Tracking | $29/month | 4, more as add-ons | Free trial |
| AthenaHQ | Tracking, content | $295/month | 11 on Starter | Essential is free, with 300 credits and a $25 credit |
| Semrush AI Visibility | Tracking inside an SEO suite | $165.17/month billed annually, $199 monthly | 4 | The Toolkit has no free trial. Semrush plans can be tried free for 7 days |
| SE Ranking | Tracking inside an SEO suite | $71/month | 5 or more | 14-day free trial, no card |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Tracking inside an SEO suite | $50/month | Up to 7 | Custom Prompts Lite is free with a paid Ahrefs Lite plan or higher. A free preview of AI visibility is offered |
| Writesonic | Content, tracking | $79/month billed annually | 3 | Start free with no card, with limited trial runs |
| AirOps | Content | Free plan, Pro price not listed | ChatGPT on Solo, 10+ on Pro | Start for free on Solo and Pro. The FAQ mentions a 14 day free trial |
| Scrunch | Technical access, tracking | $250/month | 4 | 7 day free trial of Core |
GEO tracking tools
Peak Answer
Best for: small teams that want the tracking and the work that follows it in one tool.
Peak Answer is an AI visibility tracker that runs your buying questions on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, with 50 questions on Starter, the top 10 daily and the rest weekly. Then it works on the questions you lose. It writes articles aimed at them and sends them to your CMS as drafts. For external authority, it ranks the sites the engines already cite or use as sources for your category and drafts the outreach to them, finds Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn threads worth answering, and flags technical problems that stop crawlers reading your site. It also gives you detailed info on tracking runs, not just high level reports. It separates answers from search and answers from memory, scores sentiment, and even shows you the full answer texts and citations for each tracked question. It connects directly to Search Console and GA4 for better insight into your site data, and has an API and MCP server on all plans.
Skip it if you need more than one country per brand, or a free plan to start on.
Price: $49/month, with a 7-day trial.
Profound
Best for: large teams that buy through sales.
Profound has a free 7-day trial with 50 prompts, checked daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise is custom and goes up to 9 engines, including Claude, DeepSeek, Exa and Meta's Muse Spark, with crawler log analytics, AI Marketer agents for content and outreach, CSV and PDF exports, an API and SSO. There's no self-serve price for brands.
Skip it if you want to see a price before a sales call.
Price: Trial Free. Enterprise Custom (Tailored packages, no dollar amounts).
Peec AI
Best for: a clean daily tracker.
Peec AI tracks daily on every plan. Starter covers 50 prompts on 3 models, chosen from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, with unlimited users. Perplexity is a paid add-on, and Claude Sonnet 4 is Enterprise only. It has an MCP server on every plan and an API from Pro. Peec's AI instructions page says it doesn't write or publish content itself.
Skip it if you want articles from the same tool.
Price: Starter is $95/month.
Otterly
Best for: a low-cost tracker.
Otterly Lite covers 15 prompts, checked daily on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude are paid add-ons on every plan. Standard and up add an API, an MCP server, crawler analytics from your logs and unlimited workspaces. It writes content briefs and doesn't write full articles.
Skip it if you need Claude or Gemini without paying for add-ons.
Price: Lite is $29/month.
AthenaHQ
Best for: tracking across a long list of models.
AthenaHQ has a free Essential plan with 300 credits on 5 engines. Starter includes 3,600 credits a month and covers 11 models, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Its Content Hub writes full articles and publishes to 8 CMSs, and it connects to Search Console and GA4.
Skip it if you want a flat monthly allowance of prompts. One credit is one AI response.
Price: Starter is $295/month.
Semrush AI Visibility
Best for: teams already in Semrush.
Semrush's AI search tracking sits inside its main plans. Starter tracks 50 prompts daily on 5 websites across Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, next to the rank tracking and keyword research the team already uses. Content writing is a separate Semrush product.
Skip it if you don't already use Semrush.
Price: Starter is $165.17/month billed annually, $199 monthly.
SE Ranking
Best for: teams that want AI tracking added to an affordable SEO suite.
SE Ranking sells AI visibility tracking as a standalone add-on, with 75 prompts checked daily on AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot and more, and unlimited users. Its Core SEO plan includes 25 AI prompts daily on 5 engines, alongside rank tracking, site audits, and Google Analytics and Search Console integrations. There's a 14-day free trial with no card.
Skip it if you want help with the content and outreach after the tracking.
Price: AI visibility from $71/month. Core is $129/month.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Best for: teams already on Ahrefs, or anyone who wants to look up competitors without setting up prompts.
Brand Radar works two ways. Custom prompts track the questions you choose, refreshed daily on AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude. The AI Visibility Index lets you look up any brand across 538 million prompts Ahrefs has already run, with no setup, refreshed monthly. Paid Ahrefs plans include 5, 10 or 20 custom prompts.
Skip it if your brand is new and has little search demand. Ahrefs says the index works best for brands that already show up.
Price: custom prompts from $50/month. The AI Visibility Index is $199/month.
GEO tools for content and AI crawler access
Writesonic
Best for: AI writing and tracking from one vendor.
Writesonic writes AI articles and tracks AI visibility in the same plans. Every paid plan tracks daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and Enterprise covers 9 platforms. Starter includes 15 articles a month and site audits, and its Action Center for outreach starts on Growth.
Skip it if you need more than 3 engines below Enterprise.
Price: Starter is $79/month billed annually.
AirOps
Best for: content teams that want workflows for producing and refreshing pages.
AirOps is built around content production. Its free Solo plan gives one user ChatGPT insights and 35,000 content tasks a month. Pro adds insights across 10+ answer engines, 100,000 tasks, CMS, SEO and social integrations and unlimited seats. Its pricing page doesn't list a price for Pro.
Skip it if you want a public price for the paid plan, or tracking without the content workflows.
Price: Solo is free. Pro and Enterprise prices aren't listed.
Scrunch
Best for: how AI crawlers and agents see your site.
Scrunch Core includes 125 unique prompts and 5 user licenses and 5 site audits a month, on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Its AXP product serves an AI-friendly version of your site at the CDN layer.
Skip it if you want articles written. Its page lists Content Generation as Basic on Core and doesn't say what that covers.
Price: Core is $250/month.
Free GEO tools
You can do a lot of the groundwork for free before paying for anything:
- Google Search Console: shows the searches your pages get impressions for, which is where AI Overviews and AI Mode draw from too.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: shows whether Bing has indexed your pages. ChatGPT search partners with outside search providers, so pages Bing can't see are less likely to show up there.
- Peak Answer's free tools: the AI visibility checker asks ChatGPT 5 buying questions in your category and shows who it names, the AI Overview checker shows which pages an AI Overview cites for a search, the AI crawler checker tests whether AI crawlers can reach your site, and the llms.txt checker tests your llms.txt. None of them need an account.
What free tools can't give you is a trend. Answers change from one run to the next, so you need the same questions asked on the same schedule and recorded. That's the part the paid trackers do.
How to choose a GEO tool
Start with the job you need done. If you have a content team and only need numbers, a tracker is enough. If you're a small team without time to act on the numbers, look for a tool that does some of the work too.
Then check these before you buy:
- Engines: the ones your buyers use, and whether they're included or paid add-ons.
- Refresh and runs: how often each question runs, and how many times. AI answers vary between runs, so one run can miss a real change.
- Answers and sources: whether you can see the full answer text and the pages cited behind it.
- Price per answer: prompts times engines times runs a month. The cheapest monthly price is often the most expensive per answer.
- What happens after tracking: content, outreach and technical fixes, or just a dashboard.
The best AI visibility tools and best AEO tools roundups cover the trackers in more detail.
What the AI engines recommend
On 5 November 2026, Peak Answer asked ChatGPT (3 runs), Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode "best generative engine optimization tools". Here's who each one named, in the order it named them.
| Engine | Tools named |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT (the same list on all 3 runs) | Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs, Writesonic, AthenaHQ |
| Claude | Profound, AthenaHQ, Writesonic, Scrunch, Peec AI, Otterly, HubSpot AEO Grader, Semrush AI Visibility |
| Perplexity | Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch, Semrush AI Visibility, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Writesonic, AirOps, Mangools AI Search Grader, Elmo |
| Gemini | Profound, Scrunch, Geoptie, Writesonic, Contentpen, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, SE Ranking, Otterly |
| Google AI Overviews | No tools named. The overview was a one-sentence definition of GEO tools with no list |
| Google AI Mode | SE Ranking, Semrush AI Visibility, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound, Otterly, Peec AI, Rankscale AI, HubSpot AEO Grader, Mangools AI Search Grader |
Profound, Otterly and Semrush were named by all 5 engines that listed tools. Peak Answer wasn't named by any engine.
FAQs
The best GEO tool depends on the job. Peak Answer is the best all-in-one for small teams, since it tracks and then helps with content, mentions and technical fixes. Peec AI is a strong daily tracker, Otterly is the cheapest, and Semrush, SE Ranking and Ahrefs make sense if your team already pays for one of them.
Yes, there are free GEO tools. Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Peak Answer's free checkers cover crawler access, AI Overviews and a first look at who ChatGPT names. AthenaHQ has a free plan with limited credits, and AirOps has a free Solo plan.
An SEO tool tracks where your pages rank in Google's results. A GEO tool tracks whether AI engines name and cite you in their answers. Some SEO suites, like Semrush, SE Ranking and Ahrefs, now include AI tracking too.
A GEO tool shows you where you stand and, depending on the tool, helps with the work. An agency does the work for you at a higher monthly cost. If you have someone in house who can write and send outreach, a tool is usually enough.
GEO tools range from free plans to custom enterprise pricing. Most paid trackers start between $29/month and $295/month, and Peak Answer starts at $49 a month.
You don't need a GEO tool to start. A free check and a few questions asked by hand show where you stand. A tool becomes worth it when you want to track changes over time, or want help with the work across many questions.