The best LLM SEO tools in 2026 are GEOly, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Scrunch AI and Rankscale. Which one is right for you depends on the job: tracking your brand daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, checking where you stand today with a one-off audit, or analyzing why competitors get cited while you don't. This comparison covers all eight on engine coverage, pricing, standout capabilities and the honest limitation of each.
Key takeaways
ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026 — AI answers are now a distribution channel most brands still don't measure.
LLM SEO, GEO and AEO are the same discipline under different names: earning mentions and citations inside AI-generated answers rather than blue links.
Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found web and YouTube mentions correlate with AI visibility far more strongly than backlinks or site size — a good tool tracks mentions and citations, not rankings.
Entry pricing spans free (GEOly) and $29/month (Otterly.AI) up to custom enterprise contracts (Profound, Scrunch AI).
Text-answer tracking alone misses the AI shopping shelf. Brands that sell products also need Share of Card: presence on product cards in ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode.
LLM SEO, GEO, AEO: one discipline, three names
LLM SEO means optimizing so large language models — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity — mention, cite and recommend your brand in their answers. You'll see the same practice called GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization); the LLM SEO tag on this blog collects our work under all three labels. The mechanics differ from classic SEO in one fundamental way: the unit of success is no longer a click, it's a citation. Jake Ward's framing — get cited, not clicked — remains the cleanest one-line summary of the shift.
That shift changes what tracking software has to do. A rank tracker samples one results page per keyword. An LLM SEO tracker has to run prompts against multiple non-deterministic engines, catch the fan-out queries an engine silently generates behind a single question, log which brands and domains each answer cites, and repeat daily to smooth out variance. Judge every tool below on five things: engine coverage, prompt-level depth (including fan-out), citation source data, competitor benchmarking, and whether it can see the shopping shelf.
Disclosure: GEOly is our product. GEOly is an AI-native GEO platform built specifically for e-commerce and DTC brands, tracking mentions, citations and recommendations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Google AI Overviews / AI Mode. It's free to start at app.geoly.ai.
Three things separate it from generalist trackers. First, it measures two layers: Share of Model — your share of AI text answers versus competitors — and Share of Card, your presence on product cards in ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode, where actual purchase decisions land. Second, prompt-level tracking includes fan-out queries, backed by citation source analysis that shows which domains each engine pulls from. Third, its GEM dataset covers 2,352 brands advertising in ChatGPT, so you can monitor competitors' ChatGPT ads alongside organic visibility. There's also an open MCP server and Codex plugin at geoly.ai/open, so agents and coding assistants can query your visibility data directly.
AI search visibility dashboard tracking mention rate, AIGVR and Share of Model across ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI engines — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Best for: e-commerce and DTC brands that need answer-layer and shopping-shelf visibility in one place. Honest limitation: the commerce depth is the point — a B2B SaaS team that only needs text-answer tracking won't use half of it, and pure enterprise trimmings like SSO and procurement workflows are younger than Profound's.
2. Profound
Profound is the enterprise heavyweight, tracking eight engines including Claude, Meta AI and DeepSeek. Its most distinctive asset is Prompt Volumes: panel data from opted-in consumers showing what people actually ask AI platforms, broken down by region, age and income — keyword research rebuilt for the AI era. Agent Analytics adds visibility into how AI crawlers hit your site, and a shopping module tracks conversational commerce for retail brands.
Best for: enterprises that want demand-side data, not just answer sampling. Honest limitation: pricing is custom and enterprise-led — reviewers in early 2026 regularly put real deployments in the low thousands of dollars per month, which prices out most mid-market teams.
3. Peec AI
Peec AI is the mid-market favorite, especially in Europe. Plans start just under $100/month with 50 prompts, daily tracking and unlimited user seats — rare at this price. It distinguishes "used" (your content shaped the answer) from "cited" (your URL appears), covers 14+ languages with country-level breakdowns, and its sentiment scoring is frequently called best-in-class by reviewers.
Best for: marketing teams and agencies tracking multiple markets and languages. Honest limitation: every self-serve plan caps you at three engines from a list of seven, each extra model is a paid add-on, and there's no shopping-shelf layer.
4. Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the affordable entry point: the Lite plan is $29/month, with a 7-day trial and no credit card required. It reruns your prompts daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, keeps the history, and rolls it into visibility, citation and share-of-voice reports. Its GEO Audit scores individual pages on factors that correlate with AI citation, and it ships an official MCP server so you can pull reports into agents and workflows.
Best for: solo marketers and small brands starting LLM SEO tracking on a budget. Honest limitation: Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons on core plans, so full engine coverage costs meaningfully more than the sticker price.
5. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is a $99/month layer on the platform your SEO team probably already uses. It tracks prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude, estimates share of voice against up to 50 competitors, splits brand sentiment into positive and negative topics, and runs an AI-focused site audit.
Best for: SEO teams on Semrush who want LLM visibility inside their existing workflow and reporting. Honest limitation: prompt allowances are tight — extra blocks of 50 prompts cost $60/month, each additional user needs another $99 license, and the toolkit has no standalone free trial.
6. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar takes the opposite approach to live prompt trackers: it mines a database of 199+ million prompts derived from real Google search behavior and shows mention share across six engines — AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Because it's index-based you can analyze any brand retroactively, which makes it a strong market-research and pitch tool, and it cross-references AI citations with Ahrefs' backlink index.
Best for: market-level analysis and agencies benchmarking prospects. Honest limitation: it's a paid add-on on top of an Ahrefs subscription starting at $199/month, you can't define arbitrary custom prompts, and independent tests have flagged undercounting versus live checks on some engines.
7. Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI positions itself as an AI customer-experience platform rather than a pure tracker. Monitoring covers prompt visibility, citation analysis and thematic insights, and its AXP (Agent Experience Platform) goes further than anything else on this list: it sits between your site and AI crawlers, serving compressed, structured content optimized for LLM consumption. The Core plan starts at $250/month with 125 prompts; enterprise tiers add nine engines, SSO and API access.
Best for: enterprises that want monitoring plus infrastructure that actively serves AI agents. Honest limitation: the $250 floor and enterprise orientation make it heavy for small teams, and there are no commerce metrics like shopping-shelf presence.
8. Rankscale
Rankscale is the widest-coverage budget option: 20 models including DeepSeek, Mistral and Copilot, with an entry plan from €20/month on a credit system (one prompt on one engine costs 0.25 credits). It adds AI-readiness site audits, sentiment tracking, unlimited team seats and a Looker Studio integration for custom reporting.
Best for: teams that want many engines cheaply and prefer building their own BI dashboards. Honest limitation: the credit math takes getting used to and costs scale with prompts times engines; as a younger product, its enterprise features trail Profound and Scrunch.
Tracking, checking, analysis: match the software to the job
Tracking is continuous measurement: scheduled prompt runs, trend lines, alerting. GEOly, Peec AI and Otterly.AI are built around this loop. Daily reruns matter because LLM answers vary run to run — a single-shot sample will mislead you.
Share of Voice and Visibility Score benchmarking a brand against competitors in AI answers — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Checking is a point-in-time audit: where do we stand today? GEOly's free tier answers this for commerce brands, Ahrefs offers a free AI visibility checker, and Peec AI and Otterly.AI both run genuine free trials. A check tells you whether you have a problem. It won't tell you why.
Analysis is the why and the what-next: which domains engines cite, how your Share of Model trends against named competitors, which prompts you keep losing. This is where citation source analysis and competitor benchmarking earn their keep — and where you should define KPIs before buying anything. Our guide to AI search visibility metrics and KPIs covers what belongs on that dashboard.
FAQ
What is the best LLM SEO tracking tool in 2026?
For e-commerce and DTC brands, GEOly — it's the only tracker on this list that measures the AI shopping shelf (Share of Card) alongside text answers, and it's free to start. For enterprises with demand-research budgets, Profound. For small teams, Otterly.AI at $29/month is the cheapest credible starting point.
What's the difference between LLM SEO checking tools and LLM SEO analysis software?
Checking tools answer "where do I stand right now" — a point-in-time audit of mentions and citations. Analysis software answers "why, and what next": citation source breakdowns, competitor Share of Model, sentiment, and prompt-level wins and losses over time. Most serious platforms do both, but free checkers stop at the first question.
Is there a free LLM SEO tool?
Yes. GEOly is free to start at app.geoly.ai, Ahrefs runs a free AI visibility checker, and Peec AI and Otterly.AI both offer 7-day trials. Free tiers are fine for a one-off check; sustained tracking with daily reruns and history is where paid plans become necessary.
Which AI engines should an LLM SEO tracker cover?
ChatGPT first — 900 million weekly active users make it the volume leader — then Google AI Overviews and AI Mode for search-native visibility, plus Gemini and Perplexity. Beyond those five, coverage hits diminishing returns for most brands. If Gemini matters for your audience, see our dedicated guide to tracking brand mentions in Gemini.
Do LLM SEO tools replace traditional SEO software?
No. Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study shows AI visibility correlates with brand mentions across the web and YouTube, not with backlinks or page counts — a different signal set from classic rankings, which still drive real traffic. Run both: traditional SEO software for the crawl-and-rank layer, an LLM SEO tracker for the answer-and-shelf layer.
About the author: Riven Gao covers GEO and AI search measurement on the GEOly blog.
