Generative engine optimization tools: tracking, fixing, or both

What generative engine optimization tools do

Generative engine optimization tools help a brand show up in answers written by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Every one of them tracks. The real choice is what happens after the tracking.

The name comes from research. Wikipedia’s entry defines GEO as "the practice of improving visibility in responses generated by generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems", and says the term was introduced in a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues. That paper, presented at KDD 2024, reports that its methods "can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses" on its own test set, and that what works "varies across domains".

So GEO started as a claim about changing content, not about counting mentions. Many tools sold under the name do the counting and leave the changing to you. That is a fair product choice, but it is worth knowing which one you are buying.

You will also see the same tools sold as answer engine optimization, or AEO, tools. Wikipedia treats GEO and AEO as names for the same practice, and the tools do not split along the name. This guide uses GEO because that is the phrase searched, and the answer engine optimization tools guide sorts the same products by the job each one does.

The criteria, and who wrote this

We make Agentcites, which is one of the tools below. The criteria were fixed before any tool was sorted, and every fact about another tool comes from its own page, read on 10 October 2026 and linked.

GEO tools sorted into trackers, writers and bot servers

Seven tools sort into three groups. Within each group they are ordered by lowest published monthly price, which puts Agentcites second of the three writers.

The trackers: measure, advise, and leave the writing to you

A tracker is the right buy if you already have writers and need to know where to point them. The three here cost the least to start.

• OtterlyAI’s pricing page starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts, tracked daily on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Its help centre says each recommendation gives a reasoning and "A concrete action you can take to address the gap".
• Peec AI’s instructions page lists Starter at $95 a month for 50 prompts on three models of your choice. It says Peec AI "deliberately does not write or publish content itself". Its pricing page lists a crawlability audit across "40+ bots" and ranked recommended actions.
• Semrush’s toolkit page prices the AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month with 25 tracked prompts and no free trial. It reports how brands appear in AI answers and offers AI-generated strategic recommendations.

Where they are ahead of Agentcites: all three cover Google AI Overviews or AI Mode, which Agentcites does not ask, and OtterlyAI and Peec AI track daily where Agentcites scans weekly. OtterlyAI is cheaper to start, and Peec AI’s larger plans track up to 350 prompts.

The writers: track, then draft the page

A writer is the right buy if nobody on your team has time to turn a finding into a page. The three here differ in how much they do on their own.

• AthenaHQ’s pricing page offers a free tier with 300 credits, where one credit is one AI response. Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 credits and includes a "Content optimization agent".
• Agentcites costs $149 a month per website, as the pricing page shows. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and DeepSeek today, says why each question was lost and whether a page could win it, and drafts up to 50 pages a month. You publish the page yourself.
• Profound’s agents page says its agents "identify what topics and formats AI engines are citing, generate optimized drafts, and publish directly to your CMS". Its paid plan is priced on request.

The difference between them is how far the tool goes without a person. Profound’s page describes publishing straight to your content system. Agentcites stops at the draft, on purpose: it leaves a labelled blank where a fact only you know is needed, rather than inventing one. That is slower, and it means a person reads every page before it goes live.

Where the others are ahead of Agentcites: Profound’s Enterprise plan lists nine engines with single sign-on and an API, and AthenaHQ has a free tier and names eleven assistants and models on its paid plan. Agentcites asks four and has neither an API nor single sign-on.

The bot server: change what AI crawlers are given

Scrunch takes a third route. Instead of writing a new page, it serves AI crawlers a compressed, structured version of the pages you already have.

Scrunch’s agent experience page says the platform works at the CDN layer to "auto-detect AI retrieval traffic" and route those visits to an "AI-optimized experience". It says "Humans keep the full experience; AI agents get the facts", and that Google and Bing indexing crawlers "continue to see your normal site". It gives an example of a pricing page cut from about 123,916 tokens to about 1,255. Scrunch’s pricing page starts at $250 a month for 125 prompts across four assistants, read on 11 October 2026.

One question to ask any vendor of this approach is how it sits with search engine rules. Google’s spam policies define cloaking as "presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users". Scrunch’s page says Google’s and Bing’s indexing crawlers still see the normal site. Whether AI assistants treat a separate version the same way is something to ask, because their providers have not published a rule on it that we could find.

Tracking tells you where you lose. Only a change to what the assistants read can win the answer back, so check which kind of change a tool makes before you buy it.

Questions to ask a GEO vendor before you buy

A demo shows a tool at its best. These questions show how it behaves when the answer is awkward, and each one can be checked on a call.

1. Can you open the answer behind this figure? A count you cannot trace back to the words an assistant wrote has to be taken on trust.
2. Do you count questions that name us apart from those that do not? A question with your brand in it is answered with your brand, so a blend flatters the result.
3. How often is each question asked, and how do you handle answers that change between runs? A single run per question gives a single draw.
4. Which assistants do you ask, and through what? Some tools ask an assistant through its public app and some through an API, and the answers can differ.
5. When you write a page, who checks the facts in it before it goes live? A draft that invents a figure about your business is worse than no draft.
6. When you say a change worked, what did you compare it with? A before and after with no sense of the usual swing is not proof.

Agentcites answers the first, second and fifth from its own product today. Every figure opens the answer behind it, branded questions are counted apart, and a draft leaves a labelled blank rather than inventing a fact. On the sixth it is honest about a gap: it does not yet tell you whether a published page changed the answers.

Ask every vendor the same six questions, in the same words, and write the replies down. The tool whose answers you can check is worth more than the one with the longest feature list.

How to choose between GEO tools

Pick the group first, then the tool. The group follows from who on your team will act on what the tool finds.

1. If you have writers and a budget under $100 a month, start with a tracker: OtterlyAI, Peec AI or the Semrush toolkit.
2. If you have no writers, pick a writer, and decide whether you want a person to review every page before it goes live.
3. If your pages are long and heavy and you trust your CDN setup, ask Scrunch how its bot version works on your site.
4. Whichever group you choose, check that the tool asks the assistants your buyers use.
5. Before you trust any change, repeat the same questions more than once, because answers vary from run to run.

On the last point, a SparkToro and Gumshoe study reported by Search Engine Journal found the same brand list came back less than 1 per cent of the time across repeated runs. The method page explains how Agentcites keeps its counts honest under that swing, and the AI visibility tools comparison sets the same tools side by side on price and reach.

What this guide does not cover

It sorts tools by what their own pages say. It does not test whether any of them wins answers.

• No tool here, Agentcites included, has published a before and after measurement for a customer page with its method that we could find.
• It covers seven tools. Others exist, including AI features inside larger SEO suites.
• It does not cover earning citations on other sites, such as review sites and lists, which is a third way to fix a loss.
• Prices change often, so read each page again before you buy.