Of 7 ChatGPT SEO tools compared, GEOly is the only one covering all three 2026 surfaces — answer mentions, ChatGPT Shopping product cards, and ads intelligence on 2,352 advertisers — while Profound, Peec AI and Otterly.AI lead the answer-only field.
2026/07/05
9 min read
The best ChatGPT SEO software in 2026 is GEOly if you sell products — it is the only tool in this comparison that tracks ChatGPT Shopping product cards and ChatGPT Ads alongside answer mentions — Profound if you are an enterprise brand with real budget, and Otterly.AI if you want the cheapest serious start at $29/month. The choice matters more than it used to, because "ChatGPT SEO" stopped being one job. Since OpenAI switched on ads in February 2026 and wired Instant Checkout into product answers, ChatGPT has three distinct surfaces you can win or lose: the answer, the shopping shelf, and the ad slot.
Key takeaways
ChatGPT SEO in 2026 means three things at once: getting mentioned and cited in answers, appearing on ChatGPT Shopping product cards, and knowing who is buying the ad slots OpenAI began testing in February 2026.
Most visibility tools stop at the answer layer. Of the seven tools compared here, only GEOly measures Share of Card (shopping-shelf presence) and includes a ChatGPT Ads dataset covering 2,352 advertisers.
Entry pricing runs from free (GEOly) and $29/month (Otterly.AI) to $399/month (Profound's Growth tier). Choose by the layer you need to win, not by feature-list length.
What "ChatGPT SEO" actually means in 2026
Nobody ranks in ChatGPT. When a user asks "best running shoes for flat feet," the model fans that prompt out into a set of background queries, reads the sources it trusts, and composes one answer that names perhaps three to five brands. ChatGPT SEO — call it GEO or AEO if you prefer — is the work of becoming one of those names, and one of the cited sources behind them. Jake Ward's framing is the cleanest one we've heard: the goal is to get cited, not clicked.
Then there is the shelf. For shopping intents, ChatGPT renders product cards with images, prices and reviews, and Instant Checkout — built with Stripe on the open Agentic Commerce Protocol — lets US users buy from Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants without leaving the chat. If your product isn't in that card row, a competitor's is.
And since February 9, 2026, there are ads. OpenAI is testing ads in ChatGPT for Free and Go users in the US, expanded the pilot to five more countries in May, and opened a beta . Organic visibility and paid placement now live on the same answer surface — so software that only counts mentions is reading a third of the scoreboard.
ChatGPT ads intelligence: tracking which brands run ad placements in ChatGPT via the Criteo network — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
The best ChatGPT SEO software in 2026
1. GEOly
Disclosure: GEOly is our product.
GEOly is an AI-native GEO platform built for e-commerce and DTC brands, free to start at app.geoly.ai. It tracks ChatGPT alongside Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Google AI Overviews / AI Mode, but its ChatGPT coverage is the deepest in this list because it spans all three layers.
Prompt-level mention and citation tracking, including the fan-out queries ChatGPT generates behind a single user prompt — so you can see why you were or weren't named.
Share of Card: how often your products occupy ChatGPT Shopping product cards versus competitors — the metric answer-only tools simply don't have.
GEM, a ChatGPT Ads intelligence dataset covering 2,352 brands advertising in ChatGPT, useful for tracking competitors' ChatGPT ads before you commit budget.
Best for: DTC and e-commerce brands treating ChatGPT as a sales channel rather than a PR channel. It also ships an open MCP server and Codex plugin if you want visibility data inside your coding agent. Honest limitation: GEOly is commerce-first. A B2B SaaS brand with no shopping shelf to fight for will leave half the platform unused, and its white-label agency reporting is thinner than Profound's.
AI shopping shelf tracking: product cards recommended by AI, ranked by appearances across topics (Share of Card) — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
2. Profound
Profound is the enterprise reference point for answer engine optimization, used by brands like Ramp, DocuSign and Figma. It re-runs every tracked prompt daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and AI Overviews, showing whether you were mentioned, where you ranked in the answer, and which sources the model pulled from.
Query fan-out analysis that reveals how ChatGPT rewrites a user prompt into multiple background searches.
Agents, launched in late 2025: workflow templates that generate AEO content and publish straight to a CMS.
Best for: enterprise brand and content teams that need depth, workflow and executive reporting. Honest limitation: cost. Third-party reviews put the ChatGPT-only starter at $99/month and the functional Growth tier at $399/month, with enterprise deals running into the thousands — and there is no shopping-card or ads-intelligence layer.
3. Peec AI
Peec AI is an AI search analytics tool aimed squarely at marketing teams and agencies, with some of the cleanest dashboards in the category.
Daily prompt runs across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on every plan, with filters by model, country and prompt tag (persona, funnel stage).
Share-of-voice and source-citation views that show whether AI trusts your content even when it doesn't name your brand.
Multi-brand workspaces, which agencies will appreciate.
Best for: mid-market teams that want tidy answer-layer tracking starting around $100/month. Honest limitation: models beyond the core trio — Gemini, Claude, Grok — cost an extra fee per model per month, and Peec diagnoses visibility without touching the shopping or ads layers.
4. Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the low-friction entry point: a $29/month Lite plan with 15 tracked prompts and a 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
Daily monitoring of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, with per-URL citation tracking — it flags when ChatGPT mentions your brand but links to a competitor's comparison post instead of your site.
A GEO Audit that checks 25+ on-page factors affecting how models interpret and cite your pages, available from the $189 Standard plan.
Best for: solo marketers and small brands validating whether ChatGPT visibility matters before spending real money. Honest limitation: 15 prompts is tight for anything beyond one product line, and Gemini / AI Mode tracking costs extra.
5. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is a $99/month add-on that puts ChatGPT data next to the classic SEO stack you may already pay for.
Prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, with drill-down into exact answer phrasing and cited sources.
Brand Performance reports that assess the tone and attributes ChatGPT uses when describing you — not just whether it does.
An AI Search Site Audit that flags technical blockers stopping AI bots from crawling your content.
Best for: teams already living in Semrush who want one login. Honest limitation: the base plan covers one domain and 25 custom prompts, there is no free trial, and there is no commerce layer at all.
6. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs Brand Radar attacks the problem from the index side rather than the prompt side.
A database of 260M+ search-backed prompts built from real keyword and People Also Ask data, so you can analyze AI visibility for any brand — including competitors you don't own — without setting up tracking first.
AI Mentions, AI Citations and AI Share of Voice across six platforms including ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Best for: research-heavy teams that want index-scale competitive discovery. Honest limitation: it's an add-on priced roughly $199–$699/month on top of an Ahrefs subscription, and its snapshot-and-index approach can diverge from what you'd see re-running your own live prompts every day.
7. Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI positions itself as an AI customer experience platform: it tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity portray your brand, then goes a step further with an Agent Experience Platform that serves structured, machine-readable content to AI crawlers in parallel with your human-facing site.
Visibility tracking plus guidance on which content LLMs actually pull from.
Agent traffic analytics, so you can see AI agents hitting your site — increasingly relevant as agentic browsing grows.
Best for: B2B and enterprise sites preparing for agent traffic, not just answers. Honest limitation: plans start around $250/month billed annually, and its center of gravity is corporate AI experience — there is no ChatGPT Shopping or ads coverage.
How to choose
Three questions sort this quickly. Do you sell physical products? Then shopping-card presence is the revenue lever, and GEOly is built for exactly that — the agentic commerce playbook walks through the workflow. Do you need ChatGPT weighted equally with every other engine? Compare the broader field in our guide to the best LLM SEO tools. Just getting started? Track a dozen prompts on a cheap plan first and read how to track brand mentions in AI search — most brands discover their visibility problem lives at the source level, not the prompt level.
ChatGPT SEO is the practice of increasing how often ChatGPT mentions, cites and recommends your brand — organically in answers, and on the product cards it shows for shopping queries. It is usually grouped under GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization). The tactics differ from classic SEO because ChatGPT composes one answer from trusted sources instead of listing ten blue links.
What is the best software to track brand mentions in ChatGPT?
For commerce brands, GEOly, because it tracks answer mentions, ChatGPT Shopping card presence and competitor ads in one place, free to start. For enterprise answer-layer depth, Profound. For a minimal budget, Otterly.AI at $29/month covers daily ChatGPT monitoring for 15 prompts.
Can I do ChatGPT SEO for free?
Partly. GEOly is free to start at app.geoly.ai, Otterly.AI offers a 7-day trial, and you can manually spot-check prompts in ChatGPT itself. Manual checks don't scale, though — answers vary by run, region and account, so trend data from daily automated runs is what makes the numbers trustworthy.
How do I get my products into ChatGPT Shopping recommendations?
Make your product data machine-readable (feeds, schema, clean PDPs), earn citations on the review and comparison sources ChatGPT trusts, and support the Agentic Commerce Protocol where possible — OpenAI documents this in its product discovery guidance. Then measure Share of Card weekly so you know whether the work is landing.
Does ChatGPT have ads, and can I see which competitors run them?
Yes. OpenAI began testing ads for US Free and Go users on February 9, 2026 and has since expanded the pilot and opened a self-serve Ads Manager beta. GEOly's GEM dataset tracks 2,352 brands advertising in ChatGPT, so you can see whether competitors in your category are already paying for placement.
From Anker SOLIX to xTool — the brands above already see how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention, cite and recommend them. Your brand is being talked about in AI right now. See it.
