Google answers more queries now without sending a click, and a growing share of product research starts inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Mode. The discipline that tracks whether those engines mention you has a name: GEO, also called Generative Engine Optimization, AEO or AI visibility. The premise is blunt. If the models do not cite you, you are not in the consideration set.
We looked at 13 tools, from $0 to enterprise, and pulled what practitioners actually say in r/SEO, r/DigitalMarketing and r/b2bmarketing. Every quote below links to its thread so you can read the context yourself.
The 13 tools at a glance
| Tool | Price | Best for | Engines | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cloro | Free 500 credits, then $30/mo | Developer-first API, build your own view | 8 | Try cloro |
| Google Search Console | Free | AI Overviews and AI Mode, official data | Open | |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Free | Copilot citations | Bing, Copilot | Open |
| GA4 custom channel | Free | Referral traffic after the click | Any | Open |
| Otterly.AI | From $29/mo | Cheapest paid entry point | 4 | Visit |
| Peec AI | From $95/mo | Marketing teams, unlimited seats | 3 | Visit |
| Semrush | From $99/mo | Teams already living in Semrush | Multi | Try Semrush |
| Similarweb | From $99/mo | Traffic data plus AI visibility | Multi | Visit |
| Scrunch AI | From $250/mo | Prompt volume at agency scale | All major | Visit |
| AthenaHQ | From $295/mo | Self-serve mid-market | Multi | Visit |
| Goodie AI | Around $495/mo, demo gated | Managed GEO service | Multi | Visit |
| Profound | From $499/mo, enterprise $2k to $5k+ | Enterprise, the category default | Multi | Visit |
| ZipTie.dev | Contact for pricing | Screenshots for client reporting | Multi | Visit |
Our own angle: how visible are the visibility vendors?
Here is a check only StartupHub can run. We score companies on Agent Readiness: how well an AI agent can actually read and act on a site, covering structured data, clean markup, crawlable answers and machine readable pricing. That is precisely the capability these vendors sell, so we scored them on it.
- cloro: Agent Readiness 70
- Similarweb: 58
- Profound: 50
- Semrush: 50
- Goodie AI: 39
Treat it as a sanity check, not a product ranking. A GEO vendor sitting in the 30s or 40s on machine readability is worth one question during the demo, because it is the thing they are charging you to fix.
Free tier: start here before you spend anything
Two of the three major engines now publish citation data for free. Most teams should exhaust these before paying for a dashboard.
1. Google Search Console AI performance report
Google now reports impressions and clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode in a combined view inside Search Console.
Price: free.
Strength: the only first party Google data that exists for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Limitation: Google only, and no breakdown of which link inside an AI Overview did the work.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance dashboard
Microsoft added a dashboard showing how often your content is cited across Copilot and the AI answers inside Bing.
Price: free.
Strength: the only free window into Copilot citations, and the Bing index feeds ChatGPT Search.
Limitation: Bing and Copilot only.
3. GA4 custom channel for AI referrals
Build a custom channel group matching chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com.
Limitation: it only sees traffic after a click. A brand mention inside an answer nobody clicks is invisible, and that is most of them.
“If you want to play in GEO without paying for yet another platform, the simplest free tier is a spreadsheet plus access to a few LLMs. Collect real prompts from your buyers (sales calls, support tickets, internal search). Once a month, run that same prompt list through ChatGPT / Claude.”
View on RedditPaid tools
1. cloro, the developer-first API
cloro is infrastructure rather than a dashboard. One API covers Google Search plus ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, AI Overview and AI Mode, returning AI answers as parsed markdown with their sources and citations.
Pricing: a free tier of 500 credits per month, then Lite at $30/mo for 37,500 credits, Hobby at $100/mo for 250,000, Starter at $250/mo, and Growth at $500/mo for 1,350,000. Google Search costs 3 credits per call.
What users like most: the breadth behind one contract. Eight engines, 250+ countries, async batches of 500, Python and Node SDKs and an n8n node, so a team can build exactly the view it wants instead of renting someone else's.
Value for money: the strongest here on raw cost per query, roughly $0.0012 effective with AI Overview parsing at base rate, and seats are unlimited. It replaces the kind of DIY scraping infrastructure that usually runs into the thousands per month.
Rating: cloro shows 4.8 from 45 G2 reviews on its own homepage, visible in the screenshot above.
Trade-off: there is no dashboard. You are buying an API and someone on your side has to build the reporting layer. No engineer, no cloro.
2. Peec AI
Pricing: from $95/mo on Starter, covering 50 prompts across 3 models.
What users like most: unlimited seats and daily tracking. For a marketing team that wants everyone looking at the same numbers without per seat billing, that is the differentiator.
Value for money: reasonable at team size, weaker if you only need one login. Extra models and prompt packs add roughly 20 to 30 euro per month each, so the real bill lands above the headline.
Trade-off: three engines at the entry tier.
3. Profound
Pricing: from $499/mo, with enterprise deployments commonly quoted between $2,000 and $5,000+ per month.
What users like most: it is the category default. It shows up in far more comparison threads than any competitor, so your agency or client has probably already seen it.
Value for money: the hardest to justify on price alone, and the most scrutinised on where its data comes from. Profound replied in the same thread, so both sides are here:
“I have 3 instances and done 3 reviews with Profound. They get their data from Clickstream and spent most of their Series A on acquiring that data. They only get the first prompt string.”
View on Reddit
“Nick from Profound here. Our prompt volume dataset is made up of multiple providers, not just one source.”
View on Reddit
“SEMrush, owners of Datos, published that Datos provides the data to Profound.”
View on Reddit4. Otterly.AI
Pricing: from $29/mo, which buys 15 tracked prompts across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot.
What users like most: price. It is the only route into paid multi engine tracking under $50, which makes it the obvious first purchase after the free tools.
Rating: Otterly shows 4.8 out of 5 on G2 plus a Gartner Cool Vendor mention in AI for Marketing, both visible in the screenshot above.
Value for money: good at the entry point, though 15 prompts is genuinely few, and practitioners warn about reading too much into small samples:
“Likelihood to buy from 15 prompts is quite likely a synthetic number dressed as data, there is no methodology yet that turns brand mentions into purchase probability.”
View on Reddit5. Scrunch AI
Pricing: from $250/mo on annual billing, covering 350 prompts across all major AI platforms.
What users like most: prompt volume. At 350 prompts it is built for agencies tracking several clients rather than one brand.
Value for money: competitive per prompt at agency scale, poor value for a single brand with a short prompt list.
6. AthenaHQ
Pricing: self serve from $295/mo including 3,600 credits, rising to roughly $499/mo.
What users like most: self serve onboarding at a tier where most competitors force a sales call.
Value for money: hard to assess independently. It has a small public review footprint, so you are buying with less third party evidence than the alternatives here.
7. Goodie AI
Pricing: reported around $495/mo. Every tier on the pricing page is demo gated.
What users like most: the managed service framing, for teams that want GEO done rather than measured.
Value for money: hard to pin down, because the pricing page shows a demo request on every tier rather than a number.
8. Similarweb
Pricing: $99/mo standalone for AI traffic and AI brand visibility, $399/mo for the full suite.
What users like most: AI visibility sits next to traffic data teams already trust, so it is one login instead of two.
Value for money: strong if you already want the core Similarweb product, thin if AI visibility is all you need.
9. Semrush
Pricing: the AI SEO Toolkit at $99/mo covering 10 prompts per LLM. Semrush One bundles core SEO with AI visibility from $199/mo.
What users like most: convenience. If your team already lives in Semrush, adding AI visibility avoids another vendor, another login and another invoice.
Value for money: the accuracy question comes up repeatedly, and it is the most consistent criticism of any tool here:
“While it can give a general sense, it often struggles with the nuance of how LLMs actually surface content. It is more of a proxy than a direct measurement of being cited in an AI answer.”
View on Reddit
“Semrush AI tracking is pretty limited honestly. The core issue is that their approach was built for traditional search, massive crawler networks monitoring internet traffic. That works great for Google rankings but AI search is fundamentally different.”
View on Reddit
“Semrush AI tracking feels laggy and incomplete compared to what we are actually seeing in live queries.”
View on Reddit10. ZipTie.dev
Pricing: contact for pricing.
What users like most: screenshots of the actual AI answers, which is the most requested reporting feature after tracking itself. Proof beats a percentage in a client deck.
What Reddit actually thinks about this category
Read enough threads and one criticism dominates, aimed at the category rather than any single vendor: the headline visibility score is not the useful part.
What practitioners say about the category
Threads from r/SEO, r/DigitalMarketing and r/b2bmarketing, each linked to its source.
“My issue with most AI visibility dashboards is that the score looks precise, but the underlying answers are anything but. I care much more about which pages keep getting cited, where competitors consistently show up instead, and whether the data tells me what to fix.”
View on Reddit
“I agree re that whole percentage score. Semrush does that too and it always feels like a vanity metric.”
View on Reddit
“They are all approaching AIO/GEO from a keyword centric rank tracking perspective, because that is their pedigree. But these new LLM solutions are hyper personalized.”
View on Reddit
“The only queries worth tracking are the ones that convert cold. I run test prompts with zero brand familiarity and see which answers naturally lead to curiosity or action. Then I reverse engineer the exact phrasing that triggered it.”
View on Reddit
“The biggest mistake people make is assuming an LLM reads a page like a human. It does not. It looks for retrieval ready segments. That ultimate guide stuff fails because it is too broad for a RAG process to digest efficiently.”
View on RedditHow to choose
- Spending nothing yet: Search Console plus Bing Webmaster Tools plus a GA4 channel, with a monthly prompt spreadsheet. This covers more than most teams expect.
- First paid tool, small budget: Otterly at $29/mo, accepting that 15 prompts is a sample rather than a measurement.
- Marketing team wanting a shared dashboard: Peec AI for unlimited seats, or Semrush if your team already works inside it.
- Agency tracking many clients: Scrunch for prompt volume, ZipTie if screenshot reporting matters to your clients.
- You have an engineer: cloro. One API, eight engines, and you build the exact view you want rather than renting a dashboard.
How we put this together
Pricing reflects vendor pages and third party reviews at the time of writing and changes often, so confirm the current number before you buy. Agent Readiness scores are ours, produced by the same scanner behind our public agent readiness tool. Reddit quotes come from the subreddits named above and each links to its source thread. Where a vendor replied to criticism, we included the reply. The two G2 ratings mentioned are the ones each vendor displays on its own site.
