Which GEO tools actually tell you if AI engines mention you?
Eleven tools reviewed, every published price read off the vendor's own live page and re-read on 30 Aug 2026, plus the three numbers this industry repeats that do not survive a check.
On this page
A GEO tool asks the engines a fixed set of buyer questions on a schedule, then reports how often the answer names you and which URLs it cited. Start on a free checker, budget $20 to $99 a month for tracking, and read the prompt cap before the engine count. One number for every demo: a 2026 survey of 45 GEO studies reports daily source-level Jaccard overlap near 0.34 to 0.42 between repeat runs of one prompt.25
Key takeaways- Free answers the first question, and AthenaHQ's Essential is the only free tier here that keeps tracking: 300 credits, five models.9
- Prompt caps, not engine logos, are the unit of price: 15 at Otterly's $29, 25 at Semrush's $99, 50 at Peec's $95.
- Nearly every tool stops at the dashboard, and the few that act, act on your own pages, not on the Reddit thread the answer is citing.
What does a GEO tool actually measure?
Three things, and the price gaps are mostly gaps in how much of each you get. A prompt panel, capped between 15 and 600 across the plans below. Engine coverage, which of ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude and Grok it queries. And citation attribution, the URLs each answer cited. Entry tiers rarely carry the homepage engine list.
Repeat runs of one prompt on one engine do not return the same answer. Across four engines and 45 days, the 2026 GEO survey reports daily source-level Jaccard near 0.34 to 0.42, and proposes seven to eight repetitions per prompt.25 Ask how many runs sit behind a trend line.
Which GEO tools are free?
Five answer the first question: am I in there at all? Every price below was read off the vendor's own page on 27 Aug 2026 and again three days later.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Free checker, no signup · Brand Radar AI from $199/moThe AI visibility checker has no signup wall.8 Paying is a bigger step than the sticker: Brand Radar AI is an add-on from $199/mo on a plan starting at $129/mo Lite.
Strong at
- A first check with no email gate
Not for you if
- You want tracking without paying for Ahrefs itself
AthenaHQ
Essential free, 300 credits · Starter $295/moAthenaHQ is the only product here with a real free plan rather than a trial: 300 credits across five models, one credit per AI response.9 Starter at $295/mo is a steep step up.
Strong at
- A free account that keeps working
Not for you if
- Your budget sits between free and $295/mo
Three more free entry points. Semrush's checker allows three uses a day without registering.10 Goodie's agent site audit says “Free, unlimited scans, no signup, no account”.11 Profound trades an AEO report for an email.12 None tracks over time.
Which one should a solo founder pay for?
A small panel on two to four engines, checked daily. Pick on engine coverage and seat policy.
Rankscale
Essentials from $20/mo · Pro $99 · Growth $385Rankscale has the lowest published entry price in the category, with a seven-day Pro trial and no free plan. Pro at $99 buys 1,200 credits and up to 4,800 tracked answers on eight engines.13
Strong at
- The lowest barrier to a tracked panel here
Not for you if
- You need published limits: the $20 tier has none
Otterly.ai
Lite $29/mo · Standard $189 · Premium $489Otterly's $29 Lite covers 15 prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with unlimited team members.14 Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons.
Strong at
- Unlimited team members, plus content briefs
Not for you if
- Fifteen prompts will not cover your segments
Writesonic AI Visibility Tracker
Starter $79/mo · Basic $199 · Growth $399Writesonic's $79 Starter covers 50 prompts, three platforms, one seat.15 Read the tier: the Action Center is capped at five off-page and five on-page actions a month on $399 Growth, and the full version is Enterprise.
Strong at
- Generation and tracking on one subscription
Not for you if
- You are buying it for the Action Center
Marcus, a founder of a two-person developer-tools company, bought a $29 tracker to settle one question and got a chart instead. Fifteen prompts covered one of his three segments, and four months on his mention share had not moved, because nobody had changed a page or joined a thread. Illustrative numbers, published caps: a tracker nobody acts on is the usual waste.
Knowatoa sits above the band at $59/mo, but that Starter covers three surfaces; all seven start at $199/mo.16
Which one do you buy for a team that has to report upward?
Bigger panels, most engines, exportable reporting. Pick on whether the number survives a finance question.
Peec AI
Starter $95/mo · Pro $245 · Advanced $495Peec's $95 Starter covers 50 prompts on three models with unlimited users; Pro at $245 raises that to 150.17 A fourth model is a paid add-on, not an upgrade, and that is what moves the real price.
Strong at
- Unlimited users, and reporting a client reads unaided
Not for you if
- You expected more than three models
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
$99/mo per domain, billed annuallyTwenty-five tracked prompts, daily rankings across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, and an AI-readiness site audit.18 You pick it because the AI numbers land in the same account as the organic ones.
Strong at
- One surface for organic and AI visibility
Not for you if
- You track more than one domain
Profound
Starter $99/mo yearly · Growth $399 · Enterprise on requestProfound publishes some of the largest citation datasets in the field.4 Read the tiers: $99 Starter is ChatGPT only with 50 prompts, three engines start at $399 Growth, and the rest are Enterprise.19
Strong at
- Citation analysis at a scale nobody else publishes
Not for you if
- You read “$99” and expected multi-engine coverage
Priya, a marketing lead at a 40-person HR software company, paid $99 a month for a quarter to settle whether the category's AI answers named them. On 19 of 25 prompts they did not. The useful column was the citation one: eleven of those answers quoted the same two Reddit threads and one review-site list, turning a vague problem into three places to be present. Illustrative numbers.
SE Ranking's SE Visible starts at $99/mo for 200 prompts on five engines, ten-day trial.20 AmIOnAI's $100 Pro scans 150 prompts on two.21 BrandRank.AI publishes no pricing, so any listing-site figure is unverified.
Which ones act on what they measure?
A few generate or publish content off what they measure. That is where the price steps up, and it is the honest dividing line here.
Scrunch AI
Starter $300/mo monthly, $250 annual · Growth $500Scrunch's Starter covers 350 custom and 1,000 industry prompts on six engines, seven-day trial, no card.22 It serves content to AI agents rather than only grading yours. Sitecore acquired it in June 2026.22
Strong at
- Agent-facing delivery, not only measurement
Not for you if
- The price rose this year, and the roadmap is now somebody else's
Gauge
Growth $599/mo · Enterprise on requestGauge's $599 Growth buys 600 prompts run daily on six platforms, eighteen articles a month, ten seats.23 If you want a GEO tool because nobody will write the pages, this is the shape that answers it.
Strong at
- Measurement and publishing in one subscription
Not for you if
- You have writers and only need measurement
Bavior
$99/mo billed monthly · $79.17/mo billed annuallyBavior reports how five engines answer your category questions and which sources each cited, then joins those Reddit threads on accounts you control, drafting the comment and posting it only after you approve it. It moves mention share and citation share; no tool, this one included, promises a place in a given answer.
Strong at
- Third-party sources, with an approval and a record on every action
Not for you if
- You need nine-engine share of voice, or a free tier
Choose it when the engines keep quoting threads you are not in and nobody will spend forty minutes writing the comment that belongs there.
Dana, a growth lead at a compliance-software company, went the other way and bought the $599 tier for eighteen articles a month. The traffic was real; the answers for her three head terms still cited a four-year-old Reddit thread and two competitor blogs. Illustrative, but it generalises: your own domain cannot reach a citation that is not on it. That is the whole gap.
Goodie's Explorer is $399/mo for three engines, Rufus on quoted tiers.11 Evertune is the highest published entry price here at $800/mo.24 Assume the good part is behind a demo call.
Bavior's engine panel is narrower than Profound's or Peec's, and there is no permanent free tier the way AthenaHQ has one. If this quarter's job is nine-engine share of voice, buy a measurement tool above; this article ranks none of them below us.
What does each price band actually buy?
Prices as published on 27 Aug 2026 and re-read three days later.
| Band | What you get | Acts on it? |
|---|---|---|
| $0 | A one-off “am I named at all”. AthenaHQ Essential alone tracks over time | No |
| $20 to $100/mo | 15 to 200 prompts, 2 to 4 engines, daily checks, one brand | Mostly no. Bavior is the exception |
| $189 to $500/mo | 100 to 700 prompts, most engines, exportable reporting | Some |
| $599 to $800/mo | High prompt volume, content generation, publishing or paid activation | Yes |
| Contact sales | All engines, agents, API, the features on the homepage | Yes |
What does the research actually say about how AI engines pick sources?
One peer-reviewed paper exists. Almost everything else, the vendors' own studies included, is vendor-measured.
| Tactic tested | Measured effect | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Add direct quotations | Strongest of the nine tactics tested | Peer-reviewed, KDD '24 |
| Add statistics | Second strongest | Peer-reviewed, KDD '24 |
| Improve fluency | Third strongest | Peer-reviewed, KDD '24 |
| Cite your sources | Fourth, and “a substantial 115.1% increase in visibility for websites ranked fifth in SERP” | Peer-reviewed, KDD '24 |
| Keyword stuffing | Below doing nothing: “little to no improvement” | Peer-reviewed, KDD '24 |
| Publishing llms.txt | No measurable effect (p=0.85) | Three vendor studies7 |
| Adding schema markup | −4.6% on AI Overviews | Vendor, 1,885 pages vs 4,000 controls27 |
| Writing longer pages | Spearman 0.04, unrelated | Vendor, 174,048 pages26 |
Those rows come from GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024.1 Its most useful line for a smaller site, verbatim: citing sources produced “a substantial 115.1% increase in visibility for websites ranked fifth in SERP”, while the top-ranked site lost 30.3%.
What the evidence supports
- Quote real people and say where the quote came from
- Put verifiable statistics in the prose and cite them
- Answer the question in the first sentence of each section
What to stop repeating
- “GEO lifts visibility 40%”: the paper says “up to 40%”, varying by domain
- “Reddit is 40.1% of AI citations”: traced to a chart whose values sum to 208%
- Any single AI-Overview-versus-organic overlap number: cross-surface Jaccard runs below 0.2
The GEO paper is from 2024. It predates AI Mode, current ChatGPT Search and most engines these tools query, and it ran on a synthetic benchmark. Every 2026 figure we could find is measured by a company selling something. That does not make them wrong. Read the methodology first.
So which GEO tool should you actually buy?
It turns on one question: what will you do with the answer once you have it?
You just want to know if you are named
Ahrefs' checker, then AthenaHQ's free tier.
You are one founder with one product
Otterly at $29/mo for unlimited team members, or Rankscale at $20/mo, the cheapest tracked panel there is.
You report to a board or a client
Semrush's toolkit if you already pay for it, Peec for several brands, Profound for citation-level depth.
You need the pages written, not graded
Gauge at $599/mo publishes eighteen articles a month; Writesonic is cheaper but caps its Action Center.
The answers cite threads you are not in
Bavior, from $99/mo monthly or $79.17/mo annually, acts on a source on somebody else's domain.
You are not sure the problem is real
Run the free checkers, then our GEO audit, and see who gets quoted.
- Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD '24: arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
- Ahrefs, AI Overview citations vs top-10 rankings: ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-citations-top-10
- Ahrefs, search rankings and AI citations: ahrefs.com/blog/search-rankings-ai-citations
- Profound on Reddit and AI search: tryprofound.com/blog
- Semrush Reddit AI search visibility study: semrush.com/blog
- Semrush 2026 AI Visibility Index: semrush.com/news/463141
- llms.txt effect, 37,894 domains, p=0.85: trakkr.ai; seranking.com/blog/llms-txt; otterly.ai; Google via Search Engine Journal
- ahrefs.com/ai-visibility-checker, ahrefs.com/brand-radar
- athenahq.ai
- Semrush free checker: semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker
- Goodie audit: higoodie.com/agent-site-audit
- Profound AEO report: tryprofound.com/aeo-report
- rankscale.ai
- otterly.ai
- writesonic.com/ai-visibility-tracker
- knowatoa.com
- peec.ai. Its plan table renders client-side, so the figures are cross-read from several dated third-party reviews
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, semrush.com/pricing/ai
- tryprofound.com
- SE Visible: visible.seranking.com
- amionai.com
- scrunch.com; Sitecore acquisition, June 2026
- withgauge.com
- evertune.ai
- “Optimizing Visibility in Generative Engines: A Critical Survey”, 2026-07-15: arxiv.org/abs/2607.14035
- Ahrefs, short vs long content in AI Overviews: ahrefs.com/blog
- Ahrefs, 1,885 pages adding schema: ahrefs.com/blog/schema-ai-citations
Frequently asked questions.
Do I need a GEO tool if I already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs?
Probably not a separate one. Both sell AI visibility inside the product you already have: Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/mo per domain on annual billing, and Ahrefs sells Brand Radar AI as an add-on from $199/mo on top of a plan that starts at $129/mo. A standalone tool mostly buys a wider prompt panel. Check the prompt cap on your existing plan first.
How often should I check my AI visibility?
Monthly is enough for most companies, and weekly is the most this data supports. Repeat runs of the same prompt on the same engine return different answers: the 2026 GEO survey reports daily source-level Jaccard overlap of about 0.34 to 0.42 and suggests seven to eight repetitions per prompt. Checking daily mostly measures that noise.
Does publishing an llms.txt file improve AI visibility?
The evidence says no. A controlled study across 37,894 domains found no measurable difference in citations between sites with and without the file (p=0.85; 6.8 versus 6.7 average citations, identical medians of 3.0), and two other log-level studies reached the same conclusion. Google has publicly said it does not use the file. Publish it if you like, just do not count it as a tactic.
Which engines matter most to track?
Start with the ones your buyers actually use, then check what each engine costs you in prompt budget. Coverage differs sharply by tier: Profound's $99 entry covers ChatGPT only, Knowatoa's $59 covers three surfaces, AmIOnAI's $100 covers two. Engines also cite very differently, so the same absence means different things on different engines.
Is there a free GEO tool that tracks changes over time?
One: AthenaHQ's Essential plan gives 300 credits across five models, where one credit is one AI response, and it keeps working rather than expiring after a week. Everything else free here is a one-off check. Ahrefs' checker needs no signup but does not track, Semrush allows three checks a day, and Goodie's audit is an audit rather than a tracker.
Should I trust a vendor's own study about AI search?
Read the methodology, then decide. Almost every 2026 statistic in this field is measured by a company selling a product, including the largest and most-quoted datasets. That does not make them wrong, several are far larger than anything academia has run, but the sampling, the prompt set and the definition of a citation were all chosen by an interested party.
The team that researches and maintains Bavior’s writing on Reddit marketing and AI search visibility. Every figure here is attributed to a named source with the date it was checked, and none of our links are affiliate links.
Found a number that looks wrong? Tell us and we will re-check it: support@bavior.com