The best GEO tools in 2026

A disclosure before anything else: we make MentionBeat, one of the nine tools below. You should read this the way you'd read any vendor's roundup — with one eyebrow up. To make that skepticism easy, every claim about a competitor here comes from that competitor's own public pages, checked in August 2026, with a numbered source you can click. Where we couldn't verify something, we say so instead of guessing.

The category itself is young and the names haven't settled — GEO, AEO and LLMO describe the same work. Whatever you call it, the job is the one covered across this blog: measure how often AI assistants mention and recommend you, find out who's winning your category's answers, and change what you publish until the numbers move.

The comparison table

Prices are the entry point shown on each vendor's public pricing page as of August 2026. Most tools also have bigger tiers; several have enterprise plans without published numbers.

The enterprise platforms

Profound

Profound is the biggest name in the category, aimed squarely at enterprise brands and agencies. It tracks answers across eight platforms — Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews — and pairs that with two things smaller tools don't have: prompt-volume data about what people actually ask AI assistants, and agent analytics that watch how AI crawlers hit your site.² As of August 2026 it publishes self-serve tiers: Starter at $99/month billed yearly covers ChatGPT only with 50 prompts; Growth at $399/month billed yearly covers three answer engines and 100 prompts; the full platform — up to nine engines, SSO/SAML, SOC 2 — is enterprise-priced via sales.¹ We compare ourselves to it directly in MentionBeat vs Profound, and list its rivals in Profound alternatives.

Scrunch AI

Scrunch monitors ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, and adds something structurally different: an "Agent Experience Platform" that serves lightweight, machine-readable versions of your site to AI agents while humans see the normal design.³ That makes it as much an optimization layer as a measurement tool. Customers named on its site include Lenovo, Skims and Penn State. Pricing is not published — there's a 7-day trial, then a sales conversation (checked August 2026).³

The suite add-ons

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

If your team already lives in Semrush, this is the shortest path: $99/month per domain (billed annually) buys 25 custom prompts tracked daily, brand mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, AI visibility reports and an AI-readiness site audit, with a 7-day free trial.⁴ The trade-off is depth: 25 prompts on one domain is a starting sample, and the toolkit is scoped to the Semrush ecosystem.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs took the opposite approach to everyone else: instead of only running your custom prompt list, Brand Radar mines a database it states at 475M+ monthly prompts across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Grok — plus YouTube, TikTok and Reddit visibility in beta.⁵ That's a genuinely different lens: demand-side data at index scale. It's sold as an add-on to Ahrefs plans at $398/month for select platforms or $699/month for all platforms including 2,500 custom prompt checks (checked August 2026).⁵

The independent self-serve tools

Peec AI

Peec is the European favorite: prompt tracking with visibility, position and sentiment, source identification, competitor benchmarking, and exports to CSV, Looker Studio and API.⁶ Self-serve plans run €85/month (Starter: 50 prompts, choose 3 models from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini), €205 (Pro) and €425 (Advanced), with a free trial and a 15% annual discount; Claude and other models are enterprise-only.⁶ Peec states it's used by 3,000+ brands and agencies.

Otterly.AI

Otterly has the lowest published entry price in the category: $29/month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, rising to $189 (100 prompts) and $489 (400 prompts); Gemini, Claude and AI Mode are paid add-ons.⁷ It bundles prompt research, share-of-voice and sentiment tracking, citation tracking and GEO URL audits, and states it's trusted by 30,000+ marketing pros.^7,10 Head-to-head details in MentionBeat vs Otterly.

MentionBeat

Ours — same register, judge accordingly. MentionBeat samples real buyer prompts across six surfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Grok) and reports mention rate, recommendation rate, share of voice, sentiment and accuracy. The differences we'd point a skeptical buyer at: every headline number carries a 95% confidence interval, overlapping ranks are marked as ties rather than invented order, every result is labelled live, modeled or estimated, and the methodology is public — limitations included. Findings become a fix queue that closes only on a passing re-check, so "did it work?" gets a measured answer. Pricing is credits, not seats: a free tier with 1,500 credits, then Pro at $99/month — and no engine is locked to a plan; credits are the only limit. If you want the case against the rest of the category, it's on why us — including what we deliberately don't do.

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ covers the widest self-serve model list we found: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok, with citation analysis, sentiment, and GA4/Search Console/Shopify integrations.⁸ There's a free entry tier and a Starter plan at $295/month (checked August 2026).⁸

Knowatoa

Knowatoa checks visibility across seven engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Meta AI — and adds scheduled research and content-drafting agents on top.⁹ Starter is $59/month (three Google/OpenAI surfaces); Growth at $199/month unlocks all seven engines. There's a free 60-second audit with no card.⁹

Free GEO tools

You don't need a budget to get a first read. Genuinely free, as of August 2026:

• MentionBeat checker — audits any page for AI-answer readiness and scores it. No account.
• AI Overview checker — is a page actually cited in Google's AI Overview for its target query?
• AI crawler access check — per-crawler verdicts on whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot and friends can reach your site.
• Schema builder and llms.txt generator — build the machine-readable layer by hand, free.
• HubSpot AI Search Grader — a free one-time brand check across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, scored out of 100, no account required.¹¹
• Knowatoa's free audit — a 60-second visibility check, no card.⁹
• AthenaHQ Essential — a free tier with a small usage credit.⁸

The honest caveat about every free tool, ours included: a one-time check is a snapshot, and AI answers are stochastic. One run tells you where you stood for one sample on one day — not a measurement. Free tools answer "is something wrong?"; the paid products exist to answer "is it fixed, and did it move the number?"

How to choose

Match the tool to the team, not the feature list:

• Solo marketer or first budget. Start free (above). If you want ongoing tracking under $100, Otterly at $29 and Knowatoa at $59 are the published floor; Peec (€85) and MentionBeat ($99, with a free tier to test first) sit just above with more depth.
• SMB / mid-market team that reports to someone. The moment a number goes in a deck, you need to defend it. Prioritize sample sizes, confidence intervals and a published methodology — this is where MentionBeat competes hardest, and you should hold every vendor here (us included) to that bar.
• Already paying for Semrush or Ahrefs. Try the add-on first — $99/month inside Semrush or Brand Radar inside Ahrefs. Move to a dedicated tool when you hit the prompt caps or need engines they don't cover.
• Enterprise. Profound and Scrunch are built for your procurement process: SSO, SOC 2, dedicated support, multi-brand rollouts. Expect a sales cycle rather than a checkout page.
• Agency. Look for workspace pooling and white-label reporting: Profound and Peec both have agency offerings, and MentionBeat's Agency plan pools credits across client workspaces at $599/month.

Whatever you pick, the tool is the smaller half of the work. The pages that win citations — comparison and alternatives pages above all — still have to be written, and the loop of measure, fix, re-measure still has to be run.

Frequently asked questions

Daniel Okafor

GEO Strategy Lead at MentionBeat. Daniel helps B2B and considered-purchase brands rebuild their funnel playbooks for the answer era — from prompt-suite design to fixing how assistants describe their products.