Best GEO tools: generative engine optimization tools for every job

The best GEO tools at a glance are below, sorted by job, with what each one measures and its starting price as I found it on October 7, 2026.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) tools is just the long name, so if you came for the best generative engine optimization tools, find your job and pick the top GEO tools in that group.

GEO tools for AI crawler access answer the first question: can the bots that feed AI answers reach your pages at all?

It's the cheapest problem to fix, and it hides well, because a robots.txt line, a firewall rule or a JavaScript-only page can shut out a crawler while the site looks fine in a browser. Google's basics for its AI features include allowing crawling in robots.txt and in any CDN or host in front of the site (read: your firewall counts).

Crawl Record

Crawl Record is our free Common Crawl checker: it tells you whether Common Crawl saved a page or a whole site in the newest 3, 6 or 12 crawls, and if not, why (a named firewall or bot blocker answered CCBot with an error, robots.txt said no, the address redirects, or the crawl never got there). It also shows what your saved robots.txt tells CCBot and eleven other AI bots, and flags saved copies that are nearly empty, which usually means a JavaScript-built page. It can't tell you whether GPTBot visited, only what robots.txt says to it. Check what Common Crawl saved for your site.

Cloudflare AI Crawl Control

Cloudflare AI Crawl Control is the first free thing to open if you're on Cloudflare, since it shows which AI crawlers request your pages, lets you allow or block each one, and flags the ones that ignore robots.txt. Cloudflare's documentation says it's on all plans, with the free plan spotting crawlers by their user agent strings. Check it anyway: since Cloudflare's September 15, 2026 update, a new domain that carries ads starts with training disallowed and Agent bots blocked on its ad pages, and Agent covers the fetchers that grab a page when someone asks an assistant about it.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your site as any bot you name, because its user-agent setting changes both the user agent it sends and the robots.txt rules it follows. It's free up to 500 URLs, and a license is $279 a year.

Prerender.io

Prerender.io is the fix, not the check: it serves crawlers a rendered HTML copy of JavaScript-built pages, and its pricing page names Google and ChatGPT among the crawlers it helps. Starter is free for 30 days, then $59 a month.

GEO tools for AI search index checks answer a different question, because a bot reaching a page doesn't put it in the index an assistant searches, and assistants can only cite what their search returns.

When a page isn't indexed, the cause is usually Authority (too few links, internal or external, for the engine to keep it), not a technical fault.

AI Visibility

AI Visibility is our free AI visibility checker, and it tests one page against the sources behind AI answers (Claude's web search, which reportedly uses Brave Search's index, plus ChatGPT and Common Crawl), checking whether each can fetch the page, whether the page shows up in its search results, and whether robots.txt lets the matching crawler in. It also sends real requests from our server with each bot's user agent, so a firewall that turns away a bot your robots.txt lets in shows up. It's one page at a time, with an optional weekly email. Test one page against each AI source.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is free and still the best index check for Google's AI features, starting with URL Inspection. Since June 2026 it also has a Generative AI performance report counting your pages' impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date (every site had it by August 31, 2026), with no query view. A Search generative AI control under Settings can exclude a property from those features; Google says it isn't a ranking signal for the rest of Search and doesn't govern training, so leave it on Include.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is free as well, with URL Inspection for Bing's index and an AI Performance report, launched in public preview in February 2026, that counts citations of your pages in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partners (Bing's announcement). Read the grounding queries first: they're the phrases the AI used to retrieve the content it cited (a sample, Bing says), and June 2026 added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare. It's the only first-party report I know of that shows fan-out searches for your own pages, and our guide to the Bing AI Performance report explains each part.

GEO tools for query fan-out research show the searches an assistant runs when it answers a prompt, and those searches, not the prompt, are what your page has to rank for.

A prompt like "best CRM for a small law firm" becomes several searches, and the pages ranking for them are the ones the assistant reads, which is Rank = Authority + Relevance applied to queries you can't see. Some paid tools now list fan-out features too (Peec AI, Clearscope and Scrunch), and Otterly.AI's free fan-out page says it simulates how Google expands a query.

Fan-Out

Fan-Out is our free query fan-out tool. It shows the searches ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini actually ran for a prompt (real fan-out queries, not a guess), over one run or three to show which come back every time, and where your site ranks in Google's top 10 for each. The ranking column is the one that matters, because a fan-out list without rankings is just a keyword list. It's NOT Google AI Mode: nobody outside Google can see AI Mode's own searches, and that includes us. See the real searches behind a prompt.

Qforia

Qforia is a free fan-out simulator built by Mike King at iPullRank: give it a query and a Gemini API key (a paid one, per iPullRank's walkthrough, because free keys fail) and it generates the sub-queries Google's AI features would plausibly run. iPullRank is upfront that they're synthetic, and that's how I'd use them, as a brainstorm for AI Mode, where the real searches can't be seen.

GEO tools for content are mostly the content optimizers you know with an AI tracker added, and the only GEO-specific feature I'd pay for ties a page to the fan-out searches it has to rank for.

A page's name (slug, title, headings) is still its strongest Relevance signal and no content score adds Authority, so these tools make a page relevant, not cited.

Clearscope

Clearscope has the most GEO-specific content feature I could verify: every plan includes query fan-out awareness (the web searches AI platforms trigger to build an answer) and query tracking in ChatGPT and Gemini. Essentials is $129 a month, with a 14-day free trial.

Surfer

Surfer is a content editor first, now with prompt tracking from its Standard plan ($99 a month billed yearly, 25 ChatGPT prompts refreshed weekly); Discovery, at $49 a month billed yearly, has none.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO generates and refreshes an llms.txt file in every version, including the free plugin. Switch it on if you like, but Yoast frames the benefit as helping AI tools, not as proof that any AI platform reads the file, and Google says its AI features don't need one. Hygiene, like schema and sitemaps.

GEO tools for AI visibility tracking run a fixed list of prompts through AI assistants on a schedule and record whether your brand is mentioned or cited.

That's a useful trend line once the basics are fixed, but EVERY number in these dashboards is a sample of answers that change between runs, so read them like a weather report, not a rank.

Profound

Profound has a free 7-day trial (50 prompts a day in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews); after that it's Enterprise, price on request, with up to nine engines. Both tiers include Agent Analytics, which tracks AI-sourced traffic through host and CDN integrations.

Peec AI

Peec AI starts at $95 a month (Starter, billed monthly, or €85) for 50 prompts tracked daily in three models you choose, and its feature list includes a robots.txt audit across 40-plus AI bots and a fan-out overview.

Otterly.AI

Otterly.AI is the cheapest way in at $29 a month (Lite: 15 prompts in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot), with Gemini, AI Mode and Claude as add-ons, a GEO audit included and a free trial.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for 25 prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity. It suits teams already in Semrush.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs Brand Radar includes five tracked AI prompts with Ahrefs Lite ($129 a month), sells custom prompt packs from $50 a month, and charges from $199 a month, standalone, for its AI Visibility Index, a database of hundreds of millions of prompts.

SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit

SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit covers Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Core ($129 a month) includes 100 prompts tracked daily, the AI Search add-on starts at $89 a month, and there's a 14-day trial plus five free checks a day.

Scrunch

Scrunch's Core plan is $250 a month for 125 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, with a 7-day trial; Enterprise adds engines and its Agent Experience Platform, an AI-facing version of your site.

Free GEO tools cover access, indexing and fan-out almost completely, because the companies running the engines hand over their own data: Google and Microsoft report index status and AI appearances in their consoles, and Cloudflare shows AI crawler activity on every plan.

Add our three checks, Screaming Frog's free 500 URLs and Yoast's llms.txt, and you can audit a site end to end for nothing; our free AI visibility audit puts those checks in order as seven steps. What free won't give you is a daily line of brand mentions against competitors, and the 7-day trials from Profound and Scrunch will tell you whether you need one.

What most people overlook about GEO tools is that they measure three different kinds of thing, and the dashboards rarely say which.

Observed data is recorded by the engine or your server: Search Console impressions, Bing citations and grounding queries, Cloudflare's crawler log, Common Crawl's archive, a real fetch with a bot's user agent, the searches an assistant actually ran. Sampled data is a tool running prompts and saving the answers, which is every tracker: real, but one run of a system that answers differently each time, asked from the tool's servers rather than by your customers. Simulated data is a model guessing what another model would do, like Qforia's sub-queries or a generated prompt list.

All three have uses, and I'd trust them in that order, because Evidence beats conjecture: an impression happened, a sampled answer happened once to a tool, and a simulated query may never have happened at all. Prompt "volumes" mostly belong in the third group. Peec AI's pricing page calls its prompt volume a relative demand score from 1 to 5, which is honest, and I haven't seen an AI company publish how often a prompt is typed.

How to choose GEO tools, or any GEO optimization tools, comes down to buying in the order the problems happen: access and indexing first, because those checks are cheap, binary and fixable this week, then fan-out and rankings, and only then a prompt tracker, which samples a moving target.

My stock answer to "which GEO tool should I buy?" is "none yet," because the free checks find the problems a tracker can only report. After more than 20 years in SEO, this is the order I'd follow:

1. Check crawler access with Crawl Record and Cloudflare AI Crawl Control (or your firewall's logs). A blocked bot is a yes-or-no problem, usually fixed with one rule.
2. Check indexing with URL Inspection in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, plus AI Visibility for the other sources. If a page isn't indexed, look at its Authority before its code: how many links point at it?
3. Find the fan-out for your main prompts with Fan-Out and Bing's grounding queries, then check where you rank for each search. Pages that don't rank for those searches don't get read, so most of the work is here.
4. Then, if you want a trend line, pay for one tracker that covers your customers' engines, keep the prompts fixed every month, and judge it on direction, never on a single number.

Short answers to the GEO tools questions that come up most.

What is a GEO tool?

A GEO tool is software that checks or measures how a site shows up in AI answers: whether AI crawlers can reach it, whether it's in the indexes assistants search, which searches assistants run, and how often the brand is cited. Since AI answers are built on search results, most GEO tools are SEO tools pointed at new engines.

What is the best GEO tool?

The best GEO tool for most sites is the free pair of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, the only tools with first-party data on how your pages appear in Google's and Microsoft's AI answers. Add a crawler check and a fan-out tool; a paid tracker comes last.

Do you need a paid GEO tool?

You don't need a paid GEO tool to find out why AI answers skip your site, because the free tools cover access, indexing and fan-out. You need one for daily prompt tracking across engines and competitors, which starts at $29 a month (Otterly.AI Lite).

Are GEO tools different from SEO tools?

GEO tools are different from SEO tools in the engines they watch, not in what decides the result: assistants search an index, read what ranks and cite from it, so Authority and Relevance still decide. That's why Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking have all added AI tracking to their SEO suites.

Can any tool show Google AI Mode's fan-out queries?

No tool outside Google can show Google AI Mode's fan-out queries: those searches run inside Google, and Search Console's Generative AI report shows impressions, not queries. Qforia simulates them; for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, Fan-Out shows the real ones.

Why do AI visibility trackers give different numbers?

AI visibility trackers give different numbers because each one samples different prompts, engines, locations and times, and answers change between runs, so two tools are measuring two samples of a moving target. Pick one, keep the prompts fixed and read the trend.