GEO tools, grouped by what they actually do

GEO here means generative engine optimization — getting mentioned and cited inside AI-generated answers, not anything geographic. Short answer: if you already pay for an SEO suite, start with the AI module you have — Ahrefs Brand Radar or SE Ranking if you're in those, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month per domain if you're there. If you need standalone tracking on a budget, Otterly.AI starts at $29/month and LLMrefs gives the widest engine coverage per dollar at $79/month for 500 prompts. If AI visibility is a board-level number, Profound is the enterprise pick. If you want the recommendations to come with the measurements, AIclicks and AthenaHQ lean hardest that way. And the thing worth knowing before you buy any of them: every product on this page measures. None of them changes your site.

Monitoring vs doing — the frame that matters

The GEO market looks crowded until you sort it by which part of the loop each product owns. There are three parts, and the vendors cluster hard in the first two.

• 1 — Measure. Run a fixed panel of prompts against the answer engines on a schedule; record mentions, citations, share of voice, sentiment, competitor movement. This is what every tool in the table does, and the differences between them are mostly engine coverage, prompt volume, and price per prompt.
• 2 — Diagnose. The same data, turned into what to fix: content gaps, competitor briefs, passage-level notes on which sources the models pull from. Profound, AthenaHQ, AIclicks and Semrush all reach into this layer to different depths.
• 3 — Do. Change the site: write the llms.txt, emit the JSON-LD, fix the stale sitemap, ping IndexNow, set a robots policy for AI crawlers, restructure the page, publish the answer. No product in this category finishes this step for you.

The most action-shaped vendor here, AthenaHQ, describes on-page and off-page actions and a content optimization agent — and read closely, that means it tells you precisely what to fix and can draft the fix. Getting the diff into your repository or CMS is still a human, a plugin, or a coding agent with write access. Nothing in this market ships to production on your behalf.

That is not a knock on the tools, and it is worth being fair about why the gap exists: write access to a customer's live site is a permissions and liability problem no vendor takes on lightly, and dashboards are how teams get budget approved in the first place. Measurement is a real job, done well by several of these products. The mistake is the assumption that buying the dashboard is the work. It isn't — the work is a series of small, deterministic changes to your own site, and somebody still has to make them.

The comparison at a glance

Prices are what each vendor listed on its own pricing page on 30 August 2026; several quote annual-billing rates, and prompt volume — not engine count — is usually the real cost driver. Check current pricing before you buy.

Profound — the enterprise instrument

Profound is the most complete measurement product in the category and prices accordingly. Beyond tracking mentions across the major answer engines, it sells the two things enterprises actually buy: Prompt Volumes, an estimate of what people ask AI at scale, and Agent Analytics, which shows how AI bots crawl and interpret your site. Aim surfaces the highest-impact work each week and its Agents produce marketing output. Note where Starter sits — ChatGPT only, at $99/month billed yearly — so the plan most teams need is Growth at $399. Choose it if AI visibility is a number you report to executives and you need depth, benchmarking and prompt-volume data to defend it.

Semrush, SE Ranking, Ahrefs — the module you may already own

The three classic SEO suites all shipped AI visibility modules, and for most teams that is the correct first purchase, because the marginal cost and the marginal learning curve are both near zero. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/month per domain billed annually, tracks 25 custom prompts with daily rankings across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, and charges the same again for each extra domain — costs to check before you buy for a portfolio. SE Ranking folds AI visibility into its platform across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with a 14-day trial and a free public checker capped at five attempts a day, which makes it the cheapest way to take a baseline reading today. Ahrefs Brand Radar includes a limited allowance of custom prompt checks in every paid Ahrefs plan — so if you already pay for Ahrefs, you already have a tracker — with paid custom prompts from $50/month and the AI Visibility Index at $199/month; it also tracks citation sources off the open web, such as YouTube, TikTok and Reddit. Choose one if you are already inside that suite; the integration with your existing keyword and backlink data is worth more than a marginally better standalone dashboard.

Otterly.AI, LLMrefs, AIclicks — the lean trackers

Below the suites sits a tier of focused products that do measurement well for a fraction of the price. Otterly.AI is the cheapest listed entry point at $29/month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, scaling to $189 and $489; Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons rather than included, and API plus MCP access starts at the Standard tier — the one detail on this page that matters if you want an agent reading your visibility data directly. LLMrefs takes the opposite tack: one flat plan at $79/month with 500 prompts and the widest engine list here, eleven of them, including ChatGPT Search, AI Mode, Claude, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek, with CSV export and API access included. AIclicks starts at $59/month for 30 prompts across three models and attaches AEO content briefs to the tracking, with a three-day trial that needs no card. Choose one if you want trend data without an enterprise contract, and pick on prompt count first — that is what you actually run out of.

AthenaHQ — the closest thing to a doing tool

AthenaHQ is worth singling out because it pushes furthest into the diagnosis layer: on-page and off-page actions, a content optimization agent, an "Ask Athena" copilot over your account data, and an Enterprise recommendation engine, with a genuinely usable free tier — five engines and $25 of credit — and a $295/month Starter covering ten models. It is the vendor most likely to hand you a specific, correct thing to change. It still does not commit that change to your site. Choose it if the bottleneck on your team is knowing what to fix rather than measuring whether it worked.

Two more names you will see on shortlists: Peec AI, a mid-market European tracker frequently compared against Otterly and Profound — its pricing page did not display plan prices when we checked, so we have not quoted a number — and the free one-off checkers most vendors now run as lead magnets, which are fine for a baseline and useless for trend.

What the "doing" side actually looks like

Strip the category down and the work a GEO dashboard recommends is mostly a short list of deterministic, repo-shaped changes. None of it is exotic:

• A generated llms.txt — a curated index for agents reading your site. Not a ranking factor, and worth publishing only if it is generated rather than hand-maintained.
• JSON-LD that names the entity — Organization, WebSite, and page-level FAQ, HowTo or ItemList markup, kept 1:1 with what is visible on the page.
• A sitemap that is actually current, plus an IndexNow ping so the Bing-family engines see changes in minutes rather than weeks.
• A robots policy that is deliberate about AI crawlers — decide which ones may read you, then check the logs to see who does.
• Clean semantic HTML and a sane accessibility tree — the agentic-browsing audits in Chrome's Lighthouse read the same structures an agent does.
• One canonical definitional sentence, repeated verbatim across your site, docs and index, so anything summarizing you has a single consistent claim to lift.
• Answers that exist as pages — the specific question, answered directly and early, because a generated answer cites the source that already said the thing.

Every item on that list is a diff. That is why the gap between monitoring and doing is so visible in this market: the measurement half needs a data platform, and the doing half needs write access to a repository — which today belongs to a person, a CMS plugin, or a coding agent working in the codebase.

How to choose in three questions

1) Do you need numbers or changes? Numbers → any tool here. Changes → budget for the person or agent who will make them, and buy less dashboard. 2) Are you already paying for an SEO suite? Yes → use its AI module first; you may already own it. No → the lean trackers beat the suites on price. 3) How many prompts and engines do you genuinely need? Prompt volume is the price lever everywhere, and engine breadth is worth paying for only where your buyers actually ask.

How this comparison was made, and who wrote it

Every capability and price above was read from the vendor's own site on 30 August 2026, not from other comparison posts; where a vendor did not publish a number, we left it out rather than repeat a figure from a third party. Layer labels are our reading of what each product does, and vendors will reasonably argue about them.

Disclosure: we make Clize, which is deliberately not in the table — Clize is a CLI and MCP server that gives AI coding agents real-world actions: domains, email, deploys, payments, and media generation. It does not monitor AI visibility and does not compete with anything on this page. We wrote this because we kept being asked which GEO tool to buy, and the honest answer starts with what none of them do. If you want the same treatment applied to a standard everyone is arguing about, read llms.txt: what it is, what reads it, and how to generate one; for the tool layer beneath all of this, see the best MCP servers, grouped by what your agent does.

[ ] generated llms.txt, regenerated with the sitemap
[ ] Organization + WebSite JSON-LD, one canonical sentence
[ ] FAQ / HowTo markup kept 1:1 with visible copy
[ ] sitemap current + IndexNow ping on publish
[ ] deliberate robots policy for AI crawlers
[ ] the actual question answered, early, on its own page