Best AEO and GEO tools: answer and generative engine optimization software

AlsoAsked maps Google's "People Also Ask" questions around a topic. As of October 2026, plans start at $12/month (Basic, 100 credits a month), with Lite at $23/month (300 credits) and Pro at $47/month (1,000 credits), excluding tax; paying yearly saves 20%. Every plan includes unlimited users, CSV export, bulk searches, API access and an MCP server. Non-registered users get some free monthly searches. Best for cheap, focused question research.

AnswerThePublic calls itself "the search listening and keyword research platform." As of October 2026, its US pricing starts at $20/month (Starter), with Growth at $99/month and Business at $199/month; yearly billing is cheaper, and it serves localized pricing by region. Each plan has a monthly search limit, which the pricing page doesn't quantify. Best for broad, visual brainstorming.

Frase combines article writing and page audits with an "AI Visibility" feature that tracks prompts. As of October 2026, Starter is $49/month billed monthly ($39/month billed yearly) with 10 articles, 50 audit pages and 50 tracked prompts on ChatGPT and Google AI. Professional ($129/month) adds Perplexity; Scale ($299/month) adds Claude and Gemini. A free 7-day trial needs no credit card. Best for small teams that want writing and basic citation checks in one place.

Clearscope gives content recommendations and tracks specific queries across ChatGPT and Gemini, including "query fan-out" awareness: the web searches AI platforms trigger to build their answers. As of October 2026, Essentials is $129/month (50 tracked queries, 50 pages, 20 drafts a month) and Business is $399/month (300 tracked queries), with unlimited users and a 14-day free trial. Best for content teams with budget.

Google Rich Results Test is free and tests a public page to show which Google rich results its structured data can generate. It covers Google's own search features only.

Schema Markup Validator is run by Schema.org and checks JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata against Schema.org in general. Schema.org says it "does not try to check your content against the information needs of specific services, tools or products" (Schema.org blog), so use it alongside the Rich Results Test.

OpenAI's crawler documentation explains the split you need to get right. OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and sites that opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (they can still appear as navigational links). Disallowing GPTBot signals that your content shouldn't be used to train OpenAI's foundation models. ChatGPT-User fetches pages when a user asks, and robots.txt rules may not apply to it. Each setting is independent, so you can allow search and block training.

Google's AI features documentation says "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." Google doesn't mention llms.txt there, so treat llms.txt as an optional convenience for other systems, not a Google requirement. The controls Google documents for Search are robots.txt rules for Googlebot and snippet controls such as nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. Google-Extended is separate: it governs use in Google's AI training and Gemini grounding, and Google says it "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search" (Google).

Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your site the way a search engine would, so you can find blocked, noindexed or orphaned pages. As of October 2026, the free version crawls up to 500 URLs; a licence costs £199 per user per year and lifts the cap (the maximum then depends on your memory and storage). Best for auditing access on any site larger than a few hundred pages.

Google Search Console is free. URL Inspection shows Google's indexed version of a page and lets owners and full users request indexing for single URLs, within a quota Google doesn't publish. Google notes that crawling "can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks" and that requesting a crawl "does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all" (Google). Start here for your own site.

IndexNow is a free, open protocol for notifying participating engines when a URL is added, updated or deleted, and Bing Webmaster Tools supports it. As of October 2026, indexnow.org lists Microsoft Bing, Amazon, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as participants, and submitted URLs are shared with all participating engines. Google isn't a participant. If Copilot and Bing's AI answers matter to you, set it up on your own site; see our Bing and IndexNow guide.

FreshlyCited (that's us) helps Google discover and index the pages, posts and backlinks you publish or update sooner, so they become eligible for Google Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode, then re-checks and shows you what Google has indexed. It checks which pages and links Google has seen, pushes only the ones it can't see, re-checks the pushed links on days 1, 3 and 7, and produces a revocable report link (your logo on Agency plans; fully white-label on Agency Pro and Scale). It works on any public URL, including backlinks and mentions on sites you don't control, which Search Console can't touch. For sites you verify by hosting an IndexNow key file, it can also submit URLs to IndexNow alongside the Google push. Each pushed link reserves one index credit, which is used only if the link is indexed and comes back automatically if it still isn't after the day-7 re-check; index checks use separate check credits. Pay-as-you-go packs work out from $0.16 per indexed link, index checks from $0.004, and a free tier gives you 10 free links to try, then 100 free checks a month (pricing). Index checking is Google only, it doesn't submit to ChatGPT or Perplexity, and it doesn't track AI citations. See FreshlyCited smart push for how it works.

Otterly.AI tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons. As of October 2026, Lite is $29/month billed monthly with 15 prompts; annual billing is listed at 15% off. Best as a low-cost entry point.

Peec AI tracks prompts on the AI models you pick. As of October 2026, its Starter, Pro and Advanced monthly plans each let you choose three models from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI (50 to 350 prompts), and a custom Enterprise plan tracks up to 13 models. Plan prices didn't appear in the page content we could retrieve, so check its pricing page. Best for teams that want to choose which engines to track.

Profound is aimed at larger brands and agencies. As of October 2026, it offers a free 7-day trial (50 prompts a day on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews); its custom Enterprise plan tracks up to nine engines, including Perplexity, AI Mode, Copilot and Claude. Paid prices are not published.