Best GEO and AEO tools: what each one actually checks

The best GEO and AEO tools depend on which of three jobs you need done: checking that AI crawlers can reach and read your site, tracking whether AI engines name you for buyer questions, or monitoring mentions of your brand. LaunchScaler, Otterly.AI, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound and Peec AI split those jobs differently, and Google and Bing now give some of the data away free.

This list is ranked for a small team that wants to fix access and rendering first and track prompts second. Engines, prompt limits and prices were read on each tool's own pages in September 2026; where a page did not show a figure, the entry says so.

How do GEO and AEO tools compare?

They differ in what they measure, which engines they cover, how many prompts they track and what they cost. Readiness tools inspect your site. Prompt trackers put questions to AI engines and record the answers. Mention monitors count where your brand name appears. Most paid trackers price by the number of prompts they run for you each day.

Which are the best GEO and AEO tools in 2026?

For a small team the order is LaunchScaler, Otterly.AI, Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound and Peec AI, with Google's and Bing's free reports alongside all of them. LaunchScaler leads because it is the only tool here that checks, for free and without an account, whether AI crawlers can reach and read your site, and it also reads real answers from seven engines for $19.

1. LaunchScaler: a free readiness scan, then 70 answers read

LaunchScaler scans any URL, with no account, against 156 checks across 6 of its 7 categories: search, AI visibility, security, compliance, speed and visual, and whether the site works. The AI visibility checks read the causes of invisibility that trackers cannot see: robots.txt rules or firewall challenges that block OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, main content missing from the HTML that non-rendering crawlers read, JSON-LD that does not parse, soft 404s and a sitemap without lastmod.

The full audit costs $19 once for your domain and never expires. It opens every check to its evidence and exact fix and adds 40 checks: twenty backlink checks from a live link index, two branded signals, and the answer-engine panel, which puts 10 buyer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot and reads all 70 answers. It reports which competitors each answer names, your citation share, whether engines describe you accurately, and your presence on Reddit, YouTube and review sites.

It is a point-in-time audit rather than a daily tracker. It suits a founder who wants to know what to fix before paying for monitoring.

2. Otterly.AI: daily prompt tracking from a low starting price

Otterly.AI tracks prompts daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini available as add-ons. Its Lite plan is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard is $189 a month for 100 prompts and Premium is $489 a month for 400, billed monthly, with lower monthly rates on annual billing.

Every plan includes unlimited team members, brand reports, link citation analysis and a "Generative Engine Optimization Audit," with 1,000 GEO URL audits a month on Lite, 5,000 on Standard and 10,000 on Premium. Standard and above add API access and agent analytics. Extra prompts cost $99 per 100 on Standard and Premium. It suits a small team that wants daily numbers on a few questions without an enterprise contract.

3. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: AI tracking inside an SEO suite

Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month and has no free trial. It includes 25 prompts for daily Prompt Tracking, 300 daily queries in its AI analysis reports, 1,000 daily queries in Prompt Research, brand performance reports on one domain, and AI search checks in Site Audit for up to 100 pages. Semrush names Google AI Mode and ChatGPT as Prompt Tracking platforms.

Its reports cover an AI Visibility Score, competitor research, share of voice and sentiment. Semrush One bundles the SEO and AI toolkits with 50, 100 or 200 prompts depending on the plan. It suits a team already paying for Semrush that wants AI visibility beside its keyword data.

4. Ahrefs Brand Radar: brand mentions at index scale

Ahrefs Brand Radar measures how often a brand is mentioned or cited across an index of 449M+ prompts modelled from real searches, covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Its AI Visibility Index starts at $199 a month. Custom Prompts, for tracking your own questions, start at $50 a month and are included free on paid Ahrefs Lite plans and above.

Custom prompts are billed in checks: each prompt uses one check per platform, location and update, so 5 prompts on one platform checked daily is 150 checks a month, and Claude "consumes 8 checks per update." Brand Radar also tracks the off-site sources behind AI answers: YouTube videos and transcripts, TikTok, and Reddit results in Google. It suits a team that cares most about mentions and competitor benchmarks.

5. Profound: enterprise tracking with a free trial

Profound's free trial runs 50 unique prompts daily for 7 days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Its Enterprise plan is priced on request and can track up to 9 answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search.

Enterprise adds ChatGPT Shopping tracking, full history, CSV and JSON exports, an API and SSO. Both plans include agent analytics, which connects to hosts and CDNs such as Cloudflare, Vercel and Netlify to track AI-sourced traffic. It suits larger marketing teams; the trial is a useful one-week benchmark for anyone.

6. Peec AI: prompt tracking priced by prompts and models

Peec AI's plans for brands track 50, 150 or 350 prompts daily, each with a choice of 3 AI models and unlimited users, across 1, 2 or 5 projects. Its Enterprise plan tracks up to 13 models with custom prompt setup, API access and SSO, and extra models can be added to any plan. The pricing page read in September 2026 did not expose its prices in a form we could verify, so check them there.

7. Google Search Console: free data for AI Overviews and AI Mode

Search Console's generative AI performance report counts impressions of links to your site in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. Google rolled it out to all sites on August 31, 2026. It is the only first-party measure of Google's AI features, and it costs nothing. It does not show the queries or cover any engine outside Google.

8. Bing Webmaster Tools: free data for Microsoft Copilot

Bing's AI Performance report, a public preview since February 2026, shows total citations, average cited pages, the grounding queries Copilot used and, in preview, Citation Share per grounding query. Microsoft notes a citation "does not represent traffic, clicks, or user engagement." It is free once your site is verified.

Which type of GEO tool do you need?

Match the tool to the question you cannot answer yet. If you do not know whether engines can read your site, you need a readiness check. If you know they can and want to see who they recommend, you need prompt tracking. If you want to know where your name appears across the web, you need a mention monitor.

How should you choose a GEO or AEO tool?

Fix access and rendering first, then track prompts. A tracker can tell you ChatGPT never names you, but not that robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot or that your pages render empty to crawlers that do not run JavaScript, which Vercel found is true of OpenAI's, Anthropic's and Perplexity's crawlers. Readiness problems are cheaper to find and fix.

When you do pick a tracker, check three things against your buyers:

1. Engine coverage. Several tools charge extra for Claude, Gemini or AI Mode. Pay for the engines your buyers use.
2. Prompts and frequency. Answers vary a lot between runs: SparkToro found less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gives the same brand list twice in 100 runs, while how often a brand appears across many runs was far steadier. Daily tracking of 15 prompts smooths that noise better than a single monthly run.
3. What happens after the number. A share-of-voice chart is only useful if the tool shows which sources were cited, so you know where to get mentioned.

The manual version of this measurement, with the formulas, is in how to measure AI visibility. The fixes themselves are in how to optimize for AI search, and ongoing tracking is covered in AI visibility monitoring. If the terms are new, start with AEO vs SEO vs GEO.

Start with the free scan, then read the answers

Run the free scan first, then open the full audit. The scan checks whether AI crawlers can reach and read your site, free and with no account. The full audit, $19 once for your domain, adds the answer-engine panel: 10 buyer questions, 7 engines, 70 answers read, with the competitors named and the sources cited.