Best GEO Tools 2026: How to Track Your AI Search Visibility

“GEO” — Generative Engine Optimization — is the 2026 rebrand of a question SEOs have been asking since ChatGPT search and Google’s AI Overviews went mainstream: when someone asks an AI assistant a buying question, does it mention you?

That’s a genuinely different problem from ranking on Google. AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT search, and Copilot don’t return ten blue links — they synthesise one answer from a handful of sources, and you either get cited in that answer or you’re invisible. Traditional rank trackers can’t see any of this. That’s the gap this category of tool exists to close.

This isn’t a “we tested every tool for a month” review — GEO tooling is moving fast enough that a lot of it is still early, and the honest thing to do is tell you what each platform actually measures, what it costs, and who it’s actually built for, based on current vendor documentation and pricing pages.

Quick Answer

• Already on Semrush: Add the AI Visibility Toolkit — $99/month per domain, tracks 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity
• Starting from zero, budget-conscious: Otterly.ai — from $29/month, the cheapest entry point that still covers four AI engines
• Want tracking + content production together: Writesonic — now marketed as an “AI Search Visibility Platform,” from $79/month, bundles prompt tracking with AI-optimised content briefs
• Enterprise / need a dedicated GEO strategist: Profound — custom pricing, not published, sales-led
• Skip if: you’re a small local business with no realistic chance of being cited by name in an AI answer yet — put the budget into fundamentals (structured data, clear factual pages, real reviews) before paying for tracking

What GEO Tools Actually Measure

Before comparing platforms, it’s worth being clear about what you’re buying, because the category gets oversold. Most GEO tools do two things:

Monitoring — running a set of prompts against AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode/Overviews, Copilot, Gemini) on a schedule and logging whether, and how, your brand gets mentioned or cited.

Optimisation guidance — surfacing which sources the AI pulled from instead of you, and recommending content or structural changes to improve the odds next time.

None of them can force an LLM to cite you — the underlying models are black boxes and citation behaviour changes as they’re updated. What you’re really paying for is visibility into a channel that was previously invisible, plus a prioritised to-do list. Treat the “optimisation score” features with the same scepticism you’d apply to any SEO tool’s proprietary score.

The Comparison

Pricing checked August 2026 from vendor pricing pages. Several of these tools bill in USD and adjust tiers frequently — confirm current pricing before you commit, and expect this table to age faster than most on this site.

1. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

If your team already has a Semrush subscription for traditional SEO, this is the lowest-friction way into GEO tracking — it’s an add-on, not a new platform to learn. For $99/month per domain, it tracks 25 prompts and reports on visibility overview, prompt-level research, competitor comparison, brand performance, and an AI-search-specific site audit, covering ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity. Extra prompts and extra domains are billed separately (roughly $60/mo for 50 more prompts, $99/mo per additional domain), so costs climb quickly if you’re tracking more than a handful of queries or multiple sites. There’s a bundled Starter plan that combines Semrush Pro with the AI toolkit for a modest saving over buying both separately, worth checking if you’re a new Semrush customer rather than an existing one.

Best for: agencies and in-house SEO teams who already live in Semrush and want AI visibility as one more report, not a second subscription to manage.

2. Otterly.ai

The most consistently cited “affordable” entry point in this category. Otterly.ai starts at $29/month for 15 tracked prompts across four AI engines — a genuinely low bar to test whether GEO tracking is worth your time before committing to a pricier platform. It won’t give you Semrush’s breadth of competitor and audit data, but for a solo consultant or small agency who wants a monthly answer to “are we showing up in ChatGPT yet,” it’s the sensible starting point.

3. Writesonic — repositioned as an AI Search Visibility Platform

Worth flagging on its own: Writesonic has rebuilt its positioning in 2026 away from “AI writing tool” toward what its own pricing page now calls an AI Search Visibility Platform. The Starter plan at $79/month includes AI-generated articles, site audits, and AI-search-visibility tracking (50 prompts/day), scaling up through Basic ($199/mo) and Growth ($399/mo, which adds sentiment analysis and an “Action Center”), with a sales-led Enterprise tier that includes unlimited prompt tracking and a dedicated GEO strategist.

If you’re already using Writesonic for content, this is the tool that lets you close the loop — track a citation gap, then generate content aimed at closing it, without leaving the platform. If you only want tracking, it’s more than you need; Otterly or Semrush’s add-on will be cheaper.

4. Profound

Profound comes up repeatedly in enterprise GEO comparisons as the platform built for teams that want actionable recommendations rather than just a dashboard of mentions — translating visibility gaps into specific publishing tasks. Pricing isn’t published; it’s a sales-led, custom-quoted product, which tells you who it’s for. Unless AI-referred traffic is already a metric your leadership reports on, this tier is premature.

5. Surfer SEO — the adjacent tool, not a direct substitute

Surfer already appears elsewhere on this site as a content-optimisation tool, and it’s tempting to lump it into “GEO tools” because it uses AI to grade content. It isn’t the same category: Surfer doesn’t monitor what ChatGPT or Perplexity say about your brand. It helps you write content structured well enough to have a better chance of being a source those engines pull from. If you’re deciding between Surfer and a dedicated GEO tracker, they’re not competing for the same job — Surfer optimises the input, the tools above measure the output.

FAQ

Is GEO the same as SEO? No, though they overlap. SEO optimises for ranking in a list of links; GEO optimises for being the source an AI assistant pulls from when it synthesises a single answer. Good SEO fundamentals (clear factual content, structured data, credible sources) tend to help with both, but ranking #1 on Google doesn’t guarantee an AI Overview or ChatGPT citation, and vice versa.

Do I need a dedicated GEO tool, or can I just ask ChatGPT myself? Manually asking ChatGPT or Perplexity your own buying-intent questions is a genuinely free way to start and tells you a lot in an afternoon. The tools in this piece earn their subscription by doing that at scale, on a schedule, across multiple engines, and logging the results so you can see trends rather than a single snapshot.

Which AI engines actually matter to track? As of August 2026, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews/AI Mode, and Copilot are the ones most GEO tools prioritise, because they carry the most non-Google-organic AI-search volume. Coverage varies by platform, so check exactly which engines a tool tracks before buying — some marketed as “AI search visibility” tools only cover two or three.

Is this worth it for a small UK business? Only if you’re realistically in the running to be cited — meaning you already have some organic visibility and credible content. If you’re a small local business with a thin website, the higher-leverage move is fixing the fundamentals (clear “what we do,” structured data, genuine reviews) before paying £25–80/month to monitor a gap that content work will close anyway.

This piece is research-based, compiled from vendor pricing pages and product documentation current as of August 2026. Sieva doesn’t have hands-on testing access to every platform listed here — where we haven’t used a tool directly, we’ve said so.