What are the 14 best GEO platforms for generative engine optimization?

Quick answer: Every platform here reports what AI engines say about you. Almost all of them stop at the report, which leaves one or two people turning a dashboard into work nobody has the hours for. Most of the citations that build an AI answer also sit on pages you don't own: review sites, editorial, Reddit, retailer product pages. Brandlight arrives as a platform and a partner. A dedicated AI strategist, an analyst and a customer success lead turn the findings into a ranked plan and work it with you, across publishers, social, retail, ads and agentic commerce on one data layer. Profound is the self-serve option for a team that wants to run everything itself. Peec AI has the best agency economics. Otterly.ai is the cheapest honest read, about $29 a month.

How this list is ordered: By how much of the AI visibility problem each platform reaches, stated and measured in the methodology below.

Contents

1. What is generative engine optimization?
2. How were these platforms evaluated?
3. Which platform fits which team, at a glance?
4. What are the 14 platforms?
5. What should you check before you buy?
6. What do GEO platforms cost?
7. Which one fits your team?
8. Where does most of this list stop?
9. FAQ

What is generative engine optimization?

GEO is the practice of improving how often and how favorably your brand shows up inside AI-generated answers: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek.

SEO targets a ranked list of links. GEO targets a synthesized answer where you're named, cited with a link, described accurately, or missing. There's no position 4.

A GEO platform runs a set of buyer questions through those engines on a schedule and reports what came back: whether you appeared, where in the answer, which competitors appeared beside you, which sources the engine used to build the answer, and what tone it took about you.

GEO, AEO and AI visibility get used interchangeably by most of the market. The emphases differ slightly, GEO on generative engines, AEO on answer quality, AI visibility on measurement, and the platforms are the same platforms. Search whichever term your team already says.

How were these platforms evaluated?

Brandlight's Source Collapse study measured roughly 661,000 unbranded category prompts across seven industries in the United States and Canada, over two weekly snapshots in August 2026. In a single week two engines lost more than four fifths of their citations while three moved less than 5%. Any platform that blends your engines into one score would have shown you a bad week instead of two vendors changing how answers are grounded, so per-engine reporting is a requirement here rather than a nice-to-have.

5 standards. The first 3 were required to appear at all.

1. Multi-engine coverage. It has to report on more than one of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Your buyers aren't all in one place.
2. Data below the headline number. A share-of-voice percentage alone gives you nothing to act on, so the bar here was prompt-level detail, sentiment, and citation or source attribution.
3. Published, checkable facts. Pricing, engine lists, compliance posture, available publicly or on request.
4. Something after the dashboard. Recommendations, content generation, workflows, or people. Noted per platform, because the spread here is wide.
5. It fits your stack. An API, a native integration, or a clean export.

Ordering: By reach: how much of the problem each platform can see and act on. Most of what decides an AI answer about you doesn't sit on your own domain, so a platform covering AI search alone is working a narrow slice. Platforms reaching publishers, retail, social and commerce rank higher. The measurement is in Where does most of this list stop?, and you can check it against your own citation mix.

Which platform fits which team, at a glance?

PlatformBest forEntry priceChoose ifSkip ifBrandlightEnterprise orgs that want a deep platform and an execution partnerPaid 3-month pilotThe work has to get done, not only reported, and nobody internally has the hoursYou want to poke at a dashboard tonight by yourselfOtterly.aiSolo marketers and small teams on a budget~$29/moYou need a real number this month and one product line is the whole scopeYou need more than the core engines, or anything past the dashboardWritesonic GEOVisibility tracking with content output attachedFrom $79/mo, billed annuallyYour bottleneck is producing content, not knowing what to produceYou want page-level source attribution and a reporting layer you can defendPeec AIAgencies and mid-market teams running several brandsFrom $80/mo brands, $205/mo agenciesYou run several brands or markets and per-seat pricing would hurtYou need full engine coverage on the plan you actually buySemrush AI Visibility ToolkitTeams already inside SemrushFrom $99/mo per domainThe AI numbers have to land beside search reporting your team already readsYou need page-level source detail in your own categoryOpenLensAgencies wanting multi-client tracking from a free tierFree, $39.99, $299.99/moYou need per-client separation at no cost before anyone commits budgetYou need a support commitment or a roadmap you can plan againstAhrefs Brand RadarTeams already inside AhrefsFrom $199/moAhrefs is already open on your team's screens every dayYou expect the platform to tell you what to publish nextAthenaHQTesting GEO before committing budgetFree tier, paid from $245/moYou need a usable number to build an internal case, for nothingProcurement will ask for a published compliance postureGeostarEcommerce brands wanting software or a managed serviceFrom $249/moYou have no content capacity and want execution handed offYou need an independent review signal before you signScrunch AIMaking your site legible to AI agentsFrom $250/mo brands, $500/mo agenciesYou suspect crawlers cannot read your pages properlyYour problem sits on third-party and retailer pages rather than your own siteGoodie AIAttribution-focused teamsFrom $399/moThe argument you keep losing internally is about value, not presenceThis is a first purchase and $399 has to prove itselfProfoundSelf-serve teams with time to learn the toolTrial, then custom pricingYou have the hours to get fluent in a broad self-serve toolYou need the surfaces past AI search, or a team that does the workConductorConsolidating AEO into an existing Conductor deploymentContactConductor already runs your SEO reporting and governanceYou are buying for AI visibility aloneBrightEdgeLarge SEO organizations extending into AIContactBrightEdge is installed and the AI numbers must land in the same reviewYou could buy a specialist this quarter instead of starting a cycle

What are the 14 platforms?

1. Brandlight: the enterprise platform that comes with the partner who does the work

Your visibility score drops 4 points and a competitor is now named first on 6 of your highest-intent buyer questions. The platform shows you the drop, the questions, and the sources the engine used. 3 are review sites, 2 are Reddit threads, 1 is a retailer product page for your own SKU.

Who fixes those 6 pages, and by when?

Brandlight is the only option here that arrives as a platform and a partner, with a named crew who turn what the platform finds into a ranked plan and then work it with you. It also covers publishers, social, retail and PDPs, AI ads and agentic commerce on the same data layer as AI search, which is where most of that work turns out to sit.

Best for: enterprise and multi-brand organizations where governance, market rollout and getting work shipped across departments matter as much as the number.

Pros

• A platform and a partner, not a login. Every account gets a dedicated AI strategist, an analyst and a customer success lead. The work splits 3 ways, agreed in writing at the start: some the crew does, some the platform automates, some your teams own. Forward-deployed engineers take what nobody internally owns
• Every finding arrives with the next step attached, ranked urgent to low, explained, and split by team, so the person who owns AI visibility stops being the translator between a dashboard and the rest of the organization
• Brandlight builds the query set from licensed AI-panel data plus your own search signals, intent-clustered and funnel-tagged, refreshed weekly, audited quarterly, no caps. Nobody on your side writes a prompt list, and nobody owns it when it turns out to be unrepresentative
• 13 engines, adapted per market, so a paywalled engine in one country doesn't leave a hole in the sample
• Coverage past AI search on one data layer: which publishers are gaining citation share, where YouTube and Reddit drive citations, how to win retailer PDPs and merchant feeds, SKU-level visibility for shopping queries
• Impact tracking per URL, down to the query: this specific article on a third-party site is contributing 1% of your visibility score
• SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant, globally deployed across regions and languages
• Closed-network content generation with brand and legal rules enforced deterministically. In a regulated category that decides whether the tool removes review work or creates it

The operating layer above the platform, which is what makes Brandlight a program rather than a licence

• Governance and access control. An executive sponsor, a named owner per workstream, controlled distribution. Enterprise buyers raise this unprompted: no brand organization wants everyone in the tool doing as they like with a direct line to the brand president
• Global rollout. One playbook cascaded across markets and brand families, market-specific engine selection (Naver and Kakao in Korea, Claude where Copilot is paywalled), contractual data separation where a joint venture needs it
• A working clock. Bi-weekly check-in, monthly readout, quarterly deep-dive, notes after every meeting, and a shared channel answered the same day

The dashboard is the part every platform here has. Brandlight includes it. The operating layer is what a multi-brand, multi-market organization cannot buy anywhere else on this list.

Results: 12 of 12 Kimberly-Clark brands reached the top 3 across all major LLMs.

Cons

• No free trial and no self-serve tier. Entry is a paid 3-month pilot, so if your next step is poking at a dashboard tonight, start with Otterly.ai or AthenaHQ's free tier
• No published entry price. Pricing is scoped per engagement rather than listed
• Enterprise only. Startups, SMBs and agencies serving small clients are a poor fit, and Brandlight says so on the first call
• Onboarding is a real setup rather than a signup, because the query set and the governance model are built with your team

Pricing: paid 3-month pilot, then annual platform plus service, scoped by dashboards, markets and lines of business.

2. Otterly.ai: best for solo marketers and small teams on a budget

Best for: a founder or a 1-person marketing team who needs a real number this month.

Otterly.ai is the cheapest credible entry point in this category and it does not pretend to be more. You load a set of prompts, it runs them across the core engines on a schedule, and it reports mentions, average position, sentiment, citations and share of voice against named competitors. There is a content audit module that scores your pages and drafts briefs before you publish, which is unusual at this price.

Pros

• About $29 a month covers roughly 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot
• Shows which URLs get cited, so you catch an engine mentioning you while linking to a competitor's comparison page
• Content audit module produces briefs a writer can work from
• Fast to set up. Most teams have a first read the same day

Cons

• Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude have been sold as paid additions, so the headline price is not the coverage price
• Seat and volume limits arrive fast. 15 prompts is one product line, not a category
• No published enterprise compliance posture, which will stop you in procurement
• Reporting is a dashboard. Acting on it is entirely your team

Run the arithmetic before you commit. 15 prompts on the Lite tier covers one product line. If your category has 3 lines and 2 markets you are on the $189 tier by month two, and at that point several specialists are in range. In practice one person owns it, usually whoever raised AI search internally, and the first month is spent finding out whether the category is in play at all. That is a reasonable job for $29 and a poor foundation for a program, which is the gap Brandlight is priced against.

Pricing: about $29/mo Lite, $189/mo Standard, $489/mo Premium with agency workspaces.

3. Writesonic GEO: best for visibility tracking with content output attached

Best for: a content team that wants tracking and drafting in the same tool and will accept a general-purpose AI writing suite around it.

Writesonic added GEO tracking to an established AI writing product. It crawls AI answers across roughly 10 platforms, tracks query fan-outs (the sub-questions an engine spins out of a single prompt), and routes what it finds into a prioritized action centre wired directly to content generation. The distance from "you are losing this question" to "here is a draft" is shorter than almost anything else on this list.

Pros

• Query fan-out tracking, which few platforms at this price expose
• One of the largest G2 review bases in the category, so the product risk is low
• Action centre connects findings to drafting without an export step
• Entry pricing is among the lowest of the platforms with real content tooling

Cons

• The GEO module sits inside a broad writing suite. Work out which product you are actually buying and whether you will use the rest
• Source attribution is lighter than the specialist platforms. You get the domain more often than the page
• Content quality still needs an editor. The drafting speed is the value, not the finished copy

The question worth settling in a trial is how much of the writing suite your team will actually open. Teams using the drafting alongside the tracking get a lot for $79. Teams that only want the numbers are paying for a product nobody logs into. The people who get value from it are writers and content leads rather than analysts, which is worth knowing before the budget conversation. If the person championing the purchase is an SEO manager who wants defensible reporting, the fit is weaker than the price suggests.

Pricing: from $79/mo, billed annually.

4. Peec AI: best for agencies and mid-market teams running several brands

Best for: an agency or in-house team covering multiple brands or markets, where per-seat pricing would multiply painfully.

Peec AI raised $29 million and reached $4 million ARR inside 10 months, which reflects a clear fit with a specific buyer. Peec sells to mid-market teams and prices for them. Its defining decision is unlimited seats on every plan, including the entry tier. For a 10-person team that single choice changes the economics more than any feature on this page.

Pros

• Unlimited team seats on every tier. At 10 people this is the difference between a line item and a rounding error
• Visibility tracked across 100+ languages with country-level breakdowns, rare below enterprise pricing
• Optimization recommendations, data export and prompt suggestions sit on the entry plan instead of being gated upward
• Public documentation and an MCP server for querying your data in natural language
• Unlimited free pitch projects on all plans, kept outside your project quota

Cons

• Base plans cover 3 of 7 engines, with the rest sold as per-model additions, so full coverage costs meaningfully more than the sticker
• Claude has been enterprise-only
• Monitoring depth is strong and the action layer is thinner than the platforms built around execution

At 10 people the seat maths decides it. A platform charging $50 a seat costs $500 a month before a single prompt runs, while Peec's entry tier covers the whole team. Add the per-model fees for the 4 engines the base plan excludes, then compare totals. Setup is quick and the first useful read lands within a week or two. The ongoing question is who acts on it: Peec reports across brands and markets well, and the plan for what to publish next still comes from your team or your agency. Brandlight is the option on this list where that plan arrives built. Read the full Brandlight vs Peec AI comparison for the side-by-side.

Pricing: from about $80/mo for brands and $205/mo for agencies, billed annually.

5. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: best for teams already inside Semrush

Best for: an SEO team with an existing Semrush contract that wants AI visibility beside its keyword and backlink reporting.

Semrush added AI visibility to a mature SEO suite: multi-engine prompt tracking, sentiment, share of voice, and analysis of which media outlets get cited in AI answers. The argument for it is consolidation rather than depth. The numbers land next to reporting your team already reviews weekly, which shortens the path from finding to internal agreement.

Pros

• The AI numbers sit beside the search numbers your team already reads, in an interface nobody needs training on
• Largest review base of any platform on this list
• Per-domain pricing is simple to forecast and easy to get through procurement
• AI-cited media analysis, which a PR team will use

Cons

• Depth of prompt-level and source-level analysis is lighter than a dedicated platform. Ask what you get at page level, not domain level
• Per-domain pricing scales linearly with a portfolio, which gets expensive across brands

Price it per domain against your actual portfolio. At 5 brands the $99 basis is $495 a month, and a dedicated platform covering all 5 in one workspace starts to look cheaper as well as deeper. At a single domain the consolidation argument wins comfortably. Adoption is the easy part, since the team is already in the tool and nobody needs training. What tends to stall is the follow-through, because an AI finding lands in a weekly SEO review alongside 20 other items and competes for the same attention. Nothing here assigns the work, which is the line Brandlight is drawn on. There is a full Brandlight vs Semrush comparison if consolidation is the question you are weighing.

Pricing: from $99/mo per domain, billed annually.

6. OpenLens: best for agencies wanting multi-client tracking from a free tier

Best for: a small agency or consultant that needs per-client separation without a platform commitment.

OpenLens is built multi-tenant from the free tier up, which is rare. Each client gets an isolated workspace, clients get their own logins at no cost, and reports export under your branding rather than the vendor's. Pricing keys to seats and project credits instead of per client, so a growing roster does not multiply the bill.

Pros

• 3 engines free (ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity), rising to 7 on the agency tier
• Multi-tenant workspaces with genuine per-client isolation
• Free client logins, which changes the client relationship
• Branded PDF reports included from the paid tier
• REST API and MCP on every tier, including free

Cons

• Young product with no published SOC 2 or ISO, which will block you in enterprise procurement
• Figures come from live prompt runs rather than panel data, so treat them as estimates rather than a market read
• Thin action layer. It tells you where you stand and leaves the work with you

Free is doing a lot of work in this recommendation, so be clear about what it buys. There is no support commitment and no roadmap you can build a retainer on. It belongs on accounts where reporting is a courtesy, and the $299.99 tier is where it becomes something you can sell. Expect to spend the first month proving the numbers are real, because a free tier invites that question from clients and executives alike. Once past it, the multi-tenant structure holds up well at this price.

Pricing: free, $39.99/mo, $299.99/mo.

7. Ahrefs Brand Radar: best for teams already inside Ahrefs

Best for: an existing Ahrefs customer adding an AI visibility read without starting a new vendor process.

Brand Radar reports an AI Visibility Index across 6 surfaces, shows which of your pages get cited, and connects to Looker Studio for reporting. It is an addition to an SEO suite rather than a dedicated GEO product, and it is priced and scoped accordingly.

Pros

• Sits inside a tool your team already opens daily, so adoption is close to free
• Cited-pages reporting, which shows where answers come from
• Looker Studio connector makes client and executive reporting straightforward
• No new procurement cycle

Cons

• Per-workspace pricing across a portfolio adds up
• No meaningful action layer beyond the report

Worth a month of the $199 tier before deciding anything, since the cost of finding out is low and the data is your own. What it will not do is tell your team what to publish next, so budget that work separately or expect the report to sit unread. Nobody has to be convinced to open it, which removes the usual adoption problem entirely. The risk is the opposite one: it becomes a chart someone screenshots monthly, with no owner and no work attached to it. Brandlight attaches the owner and the work.

Pricing: from $199/mo for the AI Visibility Index.

8. AthenaHQ: best for testing GEO before committing budget

Best for: a team that needs to find out whether AI visibility matters in its category before asking anyone for money.

AthenaHQ has a free tier that produces a real read rather than a teaser, plus source-level citation attribution, prompt and demand intelligence, and brand integrity and crawlability checks. Pricing is credit-based, so it scales with usage rather than gating features behind tiers.

Pros

• Free tier produces a usable number, which is enough to build an internal case
• Source-level citation attribution rather than domain-level, so findings are actionable
• 11 models on the paid entry tier, wider than most at this price
• Credit model means you are not paying for capability you do not use

Cons

• Credit burn is the real capacity limit, not the sticker price. Model a normal month before signing
• Smaller review base than the established platforms, so ask for references in your category
• No published compliance posture

Use the free tier as a sequencing tool. One month of your own data, taken to whoever controls the budget, is a stronger argument than any vendor deck. The $245 tier only makes sense once that conversation has already gone your way. Treat the free month as a diagnostic rather than a trial. Pull the citation mix, see how much of it you control, and take that to the person holding the budget. That single number moves an internal conversation further than a feature comparison does.

Pricing: free tier, paid from $245/mo billed annually.

9. Geostar: best for ecommerce brands wanting software or a managed service

Best for: a brand that wants the option of handing execution to someone else rather than staffing it.

Geostar tracks citation sources and AI bot analytics with an ecommerce orientation, and sells a managed execution tier. A managed option at this price point is rare, and for a team with no content capacity it can be the difference between buying a tool and buying an outcome.

Pros

• Managed execution tier available, which almost nothing else at this price offers
• AI bot analytics included rather than gated to a higher plan
• Ecommerce orientation in the product and the positioning
• Citation source tracking at page level

Cons

• Not rated on G2 or Clutch when checked, so there is no independent review signal to lean on
• Brand-level tracking. It will not tell you which SKU appeared
• Smaller company, so ask directly about roadmap and support commitments

With no independent review signal available, lean harder on references than you normally would. Ask for 2 customers in your category, on the managed tier, and ask them what the service layer actually delivers each month. The managed tier is the reason to look, so scope that conversation first and the software second. Ask who writes the content, who approves it, and what arrives in month 2 as opposed to month 1.

Pricing: from $249/mo, billed annually.

10. Scrunch AI: best for making your site legible to AI agents

Best for: a technical team that suspects the problem is infrastructure rather than content.

Scrunch built its reputation on wide engine coverage without gating the less common engines behind a top plan, and on an agent experience layer aimed at how AI crawlers actually read a site. Sitecore acquired the company in June 2026, so it now sits inside a larger digital experience platform.

Pros

• Monitoring across 8 surfaces, with Claude and Meta's assistant ungated rather than reserved for enterprise
• Agent experience layer addressing crawlability, rendering and structure, which is a real and under-served problem
• Page audits, personas, citations and referral tracking in one product
• Automated or manual page optimization

Cons

• The Sitecore acquisition ties the roadmap to a DXP strategy. Good if you use Sitecore, a genuine consideration if you wanted a standalone product
• Focused on your own site, so third-party and retailer surfaces are reported rather than worked
• $250 entry is high if you only need monitoring

Test the agent experience layer on your own templates, not a sample site. Product pages that render price and stock client-side are the case Scrunch is built for, and they are also the case where a generic demo tells you nothing. This is bought by a technical owner rather than a marketing one, which changes the internal path. Get your developers in the demo, because the questions that matter are about rendering and crawler access, not dashboards.

Pricing: from $250/mo for brands, $500/mo for agencies, billed annually.

11. Goodie AI: best for attribution-focused teams

Best for: a team whose hardest recurring question is what AI visibility is actually worth.

Goodie AI leads with multi-model visibility tracking, prompt and demand research, and prioritized optimization actions, with attribution as the organising idea rather than an afterthought. If the conversation you keep losing internally is about value rather than presence, that framing is worth evaluating.

Pros

• Attribution framing rather than a pure monitoring frame, which matches how finance asks the question
• Prioritized actions rather than a ranked list of problems
• Demand research alongside visibility, so you can size a gap before working it

Cons

• Small review base. Ask for references in your category and talk to them
• $399 entry is steep for a first purchase, particularly as a test
• Younger platform, so confirm engine coverage and export in writing

At $399 this is not a first purchase, and the attribution framing is the reason to consider it anyway. If your recurring internal problem is proving value rather than finding gaps, that is worth more than a cheaper platform answering a question you have already answered. The buyer here is usually someone who has already run a cheaper tool for a quarter and hit the value question. Coming to it cold at $399 is a harder internal sell than the product deserves. Buyers who get that far usually end up comparing it to Brandlight on what happens after the attribution number.

Pricing: from $399/mo.

12. Profound: best for self-serve teams with time to learn the tool

Best for: a technical or mid-market team that wants to run everything itself and has the hours to get fluent in a broad product.

Profound is a solid self-serve platform with a broad feature set and a set of agents that do more than report. It suits a team that is comfortable configuring its own tooling and has time to learn a product with a lot of surface area.

Pros

• Prompt Volumes for demand research alongside visibility tracking
• Agent Analytics runs on server logs at CDN level instead of a JavaScript tag, so crawlers that never execute scripts still register
• Citations arrive pre-sorted by type: your pages, rivals, earned coverage, wires, social, institutions, which turns a raw list into a work queue
• AI Marketer and Agents draft content and publish into WordPress, Sanity and Contentful
• SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA published

Cons

• Their public pricing page showed only Trial and Enterprise when checked, while third-party reviews from earlier in 2026 describe self-serve Starter and Growth tiers. Confirm the current structure before budgeting
• Getting value assumes a team with the hours to work the data, which is a staffing cost on your side
• G2 reviewers name a learning curve around the platform's breadth as the recurring criticism, and note the volume of data can overwhelm a team new to AI search
• Coverage stops at AI search. Publishers, retailer pages and social appear as cited sources rather than tracked and worked surfaces
• The Trial is 10 prompts, run once, on ChatGPT only

The learning curve is the part to take seriously. This is a broad self-serve product, and a team without the time to get fluent in it will pay for surface area it never reaches. Ask in the demo what the first 30 days look like for a team of 2. The Brandlight vs Profound comparison goes through this matchup in detail.

Pricing: Trial, then custom pricing.

13. Conductor: best for consolidating AEO into an existing SEO deployment

Best for: an organization already running Conductor for SEO and content governance that wants AI visibility in the same place.

Conductor added prompt-level sentiment and citation attribution to an established SEO platform, with an MCP server and a data API for piping results into your own stack. The case is consolidation and existing workflow, not depth of AI-native analysis.

Pros

• One platform for SEO and AI visibility reporting, with governance already built
• MCP server and Data API for pulling results into your own BI
• Existing enterprise relationships and procurement path, which removes months
• Content workflow tooling your team may already use

Cons

• The depth question applies. Ask what you get at prompt and source level in your own category, with real data, during the demo
• Only relevant where Conductor is already in place. As a new purchase for AI visibility alone it is hard to justify

If Conductor is not already installed, this row is informational. If it is, the demo question is narrow: show me prompt-level and source-level detail for my category, on my data, so I can hold it against what a specialist shows for the same queries. The decision rarely sits with the person researching AI visibility. It sits with whoever owns the Conductor relationship, so the internal path runs through them and the timeline follows their renewal cycle rather than your urgency. Buyers who cannot wait for it usually shortlist a specialist or Brandlight instead. See the Brandlight vs Conductor comparison for the depth question in full.

Pricing: contact.

14. BrightEdge: best for large SEO organizations extending into AI

Best for: a large SEO team with an existing BrightEdge deployment and an established reporting relationship.

BrightEdge added AI search reporting to a long-established SEO platform. The foundations are deep and the AI layer is newer than the specialists on this list.

Pros

• Deep enterprise SEO foundations and mature reporting
• Existing relationships inside large organizations, which shortens internal approval
• Broad data history, useful for teams that want AI trends beside years of search data

Cons

• The AI layer is an extension of an SEO product, so evaluate prompt-level and source-level depth carefully
• Enterprise pricing and cycle for a capability you may be able to buy faster elsewhere

The same test applies and the bar is higher, because an enterprise cycle costs months you could spend publishing. Ask what the AI layer shows at page level today, ask what is scheduled, and weigh both against buying a specialist this quarter. Same dynamic, with a longer cycle. If the AI visibility mandate arrived this quarter and needs to show something this quarter, an enterprise conversation about an existing contract is not the fastest route to it. The Brandlight vs BrightEdge comparison covers what the AI layer reaches today.

Pricing: contact.

What should you check before you buy?

1. How engine coverage is gated by plan tier

Headline coverage and plan coverage are frequently different numbers here. Get the engine list for the specific tier you'd buy, in writing. Then ask which of those engines your buyers actually use.

2. Where the prompt data comes from

A visibility score measures performance against a set of questions. An unrepresentative set produces a number that's precise and wrong. Ask who builds the set, where the prompts come from, how often they refresh, and who's accountable when the set turns out to be wrong.

3. Citation and source attribution

Domain level tells you Reddit cited you. Page level tells you which thread. One of those is a task.

4. Whether the platform executes or only recommends

Every platform here recommends. What happens next varies enormously. Walk the chain out loud on the demo: first draft, legal review, CMS publish, publisher pitch, retailer PDP rewrite, CMO report. Count the steps that land on your team.

5. Multi-brand, region and language coverage

Ask whether pricing keys to brands, prompts, markets or workspaces, whether each product line needs its own workspace, and whether historical data survives a scope change.

What do GEO platforms cost?

Entry pricing runs from about $29 a month to roughly $400, with custom pricing above that.

3 patterns to understand before comparing stickers.

Per-engine additions. Several platforms price a base plan with 3 engines and sell the rest monthly. Full coverage can run 2 to 3 times the headline figure.

Ask whether the numbers come from the interface or the API. Answers served in a chat interface and answers returned by an API diverge more than most buyers expect, so establish which one you are being shown.

Credits instead of seats. Credit-based platforms look cheap until you model real query volume. Ask what a normal month consumes.

Annual billing on self-serve. Several vendors quote a monthly price and bill it yearly, so the smallest real commitment is 12 months.

Enterprise pricing is custom everywhere, Brandlight's included. Compare named tiers against named tiers.

Which one fits your team?

Enterprise, multi-brand, multi-market, or anywhere governance and rollout matter as much as the number. Brandlight, for the coverage past AI search and for the partner layer above the platform. The deciding factor is usually not the dashboard but the named crew who turn findings into a ranked plan and work it with you.

Solo marketer, or a team of 1 to 2. Otterly.ai for the cheapest real read. AthenaHQ's free tier to test whether the category matters for you before spending.

Agency with 5 to 30 client brands. Peec AI for unlimited seats, OpenLens for multi-tenant workspaces from free.

Mid-market brand with a content team. Writesonic if you want drafting attached. Scrunch if the problem looks technical. Goodie if attribution is the question you keep getting asked.

You already own an established SEO platform and want consolidation. Semrush, Conductor or BrightEdge, with the depth question asked directly. For an enterprise AI visibility program rather than a reporting layer inside an SEO suite, Brandlight.

Your team wants to run everything itself and has time to learn a broad tool. Profound.

Where does most of this list stop?

11 of these 14 platforms report on AI search and stop. That boundary matters more than any feature difference above it, for a measurable reason.

The large majority of citations come from third-party sites and competitor-owned pages. Your own domain accounts for a small minority. So most of what builds an AI answer about you sits on pages you don't control: review sites, editorial, Reddit threads, YouTube videos, retailer product pages.

A platform that measures AI search and audits your own site is working on a minority of the problem. What moves the number is publisher outreach, retailer PDP rewrites, review-profile management and community participation. Most of this list doesn't reach any of it.

2 exceptions deserve naming. Scrunch handles the agent-readability layer. Brandlight covers publishers, social, retail, ads and agentic commerce on one data layer. For an enterprise running several brands across several markets, that coverage plus the governance layer is the whole argument.

Why this decides the order of the list

Reach is the axis of this list. Pull your own citation mix and see whether it holds. If most of what builds your answers is your own content, buy on features and pick whichever platform above fits your team. If most of it sits on other people's pages, which is the common case, the deciding question is which vendor reaches those pages, and how much of that work arrives with the contract. Brandlight is the one on this list built around that second half.

FAQ

What is the best GEO platform?

It depends on your team size and what's stopping you. For an enterprise or multi-brand program, where governance, market rollout and getting work shipped across departments matter as much as the dashboard, Brandlight. Solo marketers and small teams: Otterly.ai at around $29 a month. Agencies: Peec AI for unlimited seats, OpenLens for a free multi-tenant tier. Self-serve, for a team that wants to run everything itself: Profound.

What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO?

GEO and AEO both describe the same work: getting your brand named inside AI-generated answers. GEO leans on generative engines, AEO leans on answer quality, and most platforms serve both. SEO targets position in a ranked list of links. In an AI answer there's no position 4.

How much do GEO tools cost?

Entry plans run from about $29 a month (Otterly.ai) to $399 (Goodie AI), with custom pricing above that. Watch 3 things: engines sold as monthly additions on top of the base plan, credit-based pricing where usage is the real limit, and self-serve plans quoted monthly but billed annually.

Do free GEO tools give usable data?

For a first read, yes. AthenaHQ and OpenLens both offer free tiers producing a real number across 3 engines. A free tier won't give you a representative prompt set, multi-market coverage, or historical trend data, which is what you need to report a direction instead of a snapshot.

How long does it take to see results from GEO?

Citations move in days to weeks. One brand Brandlight tracks doubled its citations in 2 weeks. Visibility trendlines take a quarter or more, because they average across engines and question sets. Be skeptical of anyone promising visibility lift in weeks, and ask them for a published null result.

Which GEO platform covers the most AI engines?

Counts run from 3 on free tiers to 13 on Brandlight, which adapts the engine set per market, and roughly 10 on Profound's top plan. Ask instead how many engines come with the specific plan you'd buy, since coverage is the most commonly gated feature here.

Which GEO platform does the work, rather than reporting it?

Brandlight, which is why it opens this list. Every account gets a dedicated AI strategist, an analyst and a customer success lead, and the split between what the crew does, what the platform automates and what your team owns is agreed in writing before anything starts. Most platforms here stop at the dashboard, which is fine when the hours exist internally and expensive when they don't.

Can I use a GEO platform alongside my SEO tool?

Yes, and most enterprises do. The SEO platform covers keyword rankings, backlinks, technical health and search traffic. The GEO platform covers prompt-level visibility, citations, sentiment and competitive position inside AI answers. Semrush, Conductor and BrightEdge attempt both in one product.

Do GEO platforms write content for me?

Several draft it: Profound's Agents, Writesonic, AirOps and Brandlight. Brandlight is the only one where people, rather than only software, take the draft the rest of the way. None publishes to your live site without a human approving, which is the category norm. Review, publication and everything off your own domain stay with your team, unless you buy a program rather than a licence. Brandlight's content generation adds deterministic brand and legal rules and closed-network processing, which matters most in regulated categories.

What should I ask a GEO vendor on the first call?

4 questions. Who builds and maintains the prompt set, and who owns it when it's wrong. Who writes, publishes and pitches the content, step by step. What can you attribute and what can't you. And: name a customer this didn't work for, and what you changed.