Generative engine optimization tools: 8 compared, plus the free ones

By Rishabh Gupta, founder of ROAS Expert. Last updated 27 October 2026.

Generative engine optimization tools do one job: they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI features a fixed set of questions every day and record whether you are named, cited or linked, and who is named instead. Prices in October 2026 run from $29 a month to several hundred, and the differences come down to how many prompts you can track, which assistants are covered, and whether the tool only reports or also tells you what to change. Below are eight compared from their own pricing pages, then the free setup that most small teams should run first.

What these tools actually measure

Every tool on this list works the same way underneath. You give it prompts a buyer might type, it runs them on a schedule against each assistant, and it parses the answers for brand mentions, citations and links. The outputs are a share of voice (how often you appear against competitors), a citation list (which pages were used as sources) and a trend line.

Three limits apply to all of them. The prompts are a guess at your market, so the number is only as good as the list. Assistant answers vary between runs and between users, so a single day's reading is noise. And none of the engines publishes a ranking factor list, so the tool can show you what happened but not why. Treat the output as a monthly direction, the way you would treat brand search volume, not as a daily scorecard.

Eight tools compared

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Two products. Custom Prompts tracks the prompts you define, refreshed daily, from €47 a month, and Ahrefs lists it as free with any paid Ahrefs Lite plan and above. The AI Visibility Index starts at €179 a month for 83 prompts a day and 2,500 checks, with overage at €0.0187 per check. Coverage is AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, with Claude available on Custom Prompts. The strength is the data next door: the same account has the backlink, keyword and traffic data, so you can see whether a cited competitor page also ranks. The weakness is that the index works from Ahrefs' prompt set until you add your own.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

$99 a month per domain billed annually, sold standalone. It includes 25 custom prompts tracked daily, 300 reports a day, Brand Performance for one domain, competitor analysis, prompt research and an AI readiness site audit. Coverage listed is ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity. Good if you already live in Semrush and want one more tab. Thin on prompt count for the price.

Profound

The enterprise name in the category, with self-serve Starter and Growth plans added in October 2025 that start at $99 a month. Profound's own announcement says Starter tracks what ChatGPT says about your brand, with broader model coverage on Growth. The platform's depth is in conversation-level data, agent analytics and crawler logs, which is why large brands and agencies pay for it. For a small team the entry plan is narrow.

Peec AI

Prompt-first and popular with agencies. The public pricing page lists Starter at 50 prompts, Pro at 150 and Advanced at 350, each across three models with unlimited users, and an Enterprise tier that covers up to 13 models. Peec does not print prices on that page, so you see the number when you pick a plan, and third-party write-ups disagree about it. The dashboard is the clearest of the set for a weekly review, and it ships recommended actions next to the data.

Otterly.AI

The cheapest paid entry point. Lite is $29 a month for 15 search prompts, Standard $189 for 100, Premium $489 for 400, with ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot included and Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons. Otterly is a fit for a founder who wants to watch 15 prompts and get an alert when a mention changes, and nothing more.

Scrunch AI

Starter is $250 a month billed annually or $300 monthly for 350 custom prompts and 1,000 industry prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta, with three seats. Growth is $417 or $500 for 700 and 2,500 prompts and five seats. Scrunch also sells an Agent Experience Platform that serves an AI-friendly version of your site to bots, a different bet from the rest of the list. Seven-day trial, no card.

HubSpot AEO

$50 a month, or $45 billed annually, for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with more prompts purchasable and the tool included in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise. HubSpot also offers a free, one-time AEO Grader. If your CRM is HubSpot this is the lowest-friction option and the data sits next to your contacts. If it isn't, the three-engine coverage is the limit.

Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance

Free, and the only one of the eight that is first-party data rather than sampled prompts. Since February 2026 the report shows total citations in Copilot and Bing's AI answers, the average number of your pages cited per day, citation counts by URL and a sample of the grounding queries the AI used when it retrieved your content. It only covers Microsoft's surfaces, but it is the one place you can see real citations instead of a simulation.

What none of them replaces

Ranking. An Ahrefs study of 1.9 million AI Overview citations found 76.1% of cited pages ranked in the top 10 for the query. If you don't rank, a visibility tool will mostly confirm that you aren't cited. The tools are for teams that already rank for the questions and want to know whether the answer engines use them.

The free setup to run first

Before paying for any of the above, three things that cost time only.

A GA4 channel group for assistant referrals. Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com arrive as referral traffic. A custom channel group on a source regex such as bard|chatgpt|openai|claude|copilot|gemini|perplexity|grok pulls them out. Some assistant clicks carry no referrer, so treat it as a floor. Our post on AI assistant traffic in GA4 has the steps.

Bing Webmaster Tools. Verify the site, open AI Performance, and read the grounding queries. They are the closest thing to a keyword report for AI answers that any engine gives away.

A manual prompt set. Write 20 to 30 prompts a real buyer would type, run them monthly in ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode and Copilot, and record who is named, who is linked and whether what is said about you is right. It takes an hour a month and it is the signal the paid tools are simulating.

If after two months the manual set shows competitors named and you absent, the paid tools earn their place: they tell you which pages are cited for which prompts, which is what you need to decide what to write. The GEO guide covers what to write once you know.

How to choose

Start from your prompt count. Under 25 buyer questions, take Otterly Lite, HubSpot AEO if you are a HubSpot customer, or Ahrefs Custom Prompts if you already pay for Ahrefs. Between 50 and 350, Peec, Scrunch or the Ahrefs Index, picked on which assistants matter to your buyers. Above that, or if you need agent and crawler analytics across a large site, Profound. Whatever you pick, keep the Bing report and the manual set running. They are the only two sources that are not a model of a model.

Where ROAS Expert fits

We run the manual prompt set, the GA4 channel and the Bing report as part of every agentic SEO engagement, and add a paid tool only when a client's prompt list outgrows the hour a month. The audit starts with a 30-prompt baseline for your market so you know whether you have a visibility problem before you buy software to measure it.

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