Best AI tools for search engine optimization, checked October 2026

Which AI SEO tool fits your job

AI tools for search engine optimization now do four separate jobs. Trackers record what assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI features say when a buyer asks a question. Content tools help you write and refresh pages.

Technical checks tell you whether AI crawlers can read your site. Google and Bing also give free reports on how your own pages appear in their AI answers. Decide which job you need before you compare prices, because a tracker and a content editor charge for different things.

Every price and feature below comes from the vendor's own pricing or product page, read on 20 October 2026. Prices are in US dollars, except Peec AI, which prices in euros. Prices and limits change, so open the page before you buy.

AIGROW publishes this guide and sells AI visibility work, so it is described separately below, from its own pages, as one option.

AI visibility trackers compared

A tracker asks a fixed set of questions, which vendors call prompts, on a schedule and records whether your brand is named or your pages are cited. The table lists what each entry plan covers. Tools are in alphabetical order, which is not a ranking.

What each official page adds:

• Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks two ways. Custom Prompts run your own buyer questions daily, weekly or monthly; one check is one prompt on one platform, in one location, for one update, and Claude uses 8 checks per update. The AI Visibility Index needs no setup and keeps history back to 2025, but Ahrefs says it may have limited coverage for brands with little search demand. It starts at $199 a month, or $699 a month for all models. Lite includes 150 checks a month, Standard ($249) 300 and Advanced ($449) 600.
• AthenaHQ counts one credit per AI response. Annual billing is 17% less.
• BrightLocal is built around locations: a 0 to 100 score per location, a comparison with competitors, a leaderboard of the sources AI answers use, and gaps passed to its Citation Builder.
• Otterly.AI includes citation source tracking. Standard is $189 a month for 100 prompts and Premium $489 for 400.
• Peec AI prices in euros and includes country and language settings at no extra cost. Pro is €205 a month for 150 prompts and 2 projects, Advanced €425 for 350 prompts and 5 projects. An extra model starts at €25 a month on annual billing, and annual billing is 15% less.
• Profound is aimed at large companies. Trial prompts are a recommended set you cannot edit; Enterprise adds your own prompts, single sign-on, SOC 2, exports and an API.
• Scrunch Core includes 5 site audits a month. Enterprise covers 9 models.
• Semrush sells the AI Visibility Toolkit on its own, with Brand Performance for 1 domain (updated weekly) and AI search checks in Site Audit for up to 100 pages; 50 more prompts cost $60 a month. Semrush One bundles SEO and AI: Starter is $165.17 a month billed annually or $199 monthly with 50 daily prompts, Pro+ $248.17 with 100, and Advanced adds API access.
• Surfer also includes AI tracking in its content plans: Standard ($99 a month billed yearly) has 25 prompts on ChatGPT only, checked weekly, and Pro ($182) has 50 daily prompts across all its models.

For a closer look at trackers alone, AIGROW's guide to choosing an AI visibility tool sets out what to compare.

Content and workflow tools with AI search features

Content tools help you write, brief and refresh pages. Several now add AI tracking, which matters if you want one subscription for both jobs.

Frase Professional is $103 a month billed yearly ($129 monthly) and Scale $239 ($299 monthly). Clearscope Business is $399 a month for 300 tracked queries, with unlimited users on every plan.

A content tool can tell you what a page is missing compared with the pages that rank or get cited. It cannot make an assistant name you. Pages earn citations when they answer the buyer's question with facts a reader can check; the GEO guide shows how to write one, and the AI search engine optimization guide covers crawler access for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and the other AI bots.

Free reports to check first

Before paying for a tracker, read what Google and Bing already report about your own site. These numbers come from Google and Bing themselves.

Google says its Generative AI performance report reached all sites as of 31 August 2026. Google also says no special markup or AI text file is needed to appear in its AI features: the page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet.

How to judge a tracker’s numbers before you pay

AI answers change from one run to the next, and assistants disagree with each other. The October 2026 AIGROW AI Visibility Report put buyer questions for 44 kinds of business in 108 places, 2,580 ranking pages in all, to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok without web search, and collected 80,059 answers. Three findings matter when you buy a tracker.

• An assistant asked the same question again repeated 56% of its names. One answer a day is a sample, so read shares over several weeks and ask how many times each prompt runs.
• Any two assistants shared 21% of the names they gave, and 61% of the businesses on a ranked page were named by only one assistant. Track the assistants your buyers use.
• Asked for a local business, Grok named no one in 76% of its answers and Claude in 58%. Ask whether a tool counts those empty answers, because leaving them out makes every rate look higher.

These figures come from the models without web search, through the routes the Index method describes. A tracker that uses the apps with web search will see different numbers, and the same questions still apply:

1. Which assistants does it cover on the plan you will buy, and does it ask the app a person uses or the model through an API?
2. How many times does each prompt run, and does the report show how many answers sit behind each figure?
3. Are empty answers and failed calls counted, and how?
4. Can you set the country and language for each prompt?
5. Can you export the full answers with their dates, to check a number yourself?
6. Does it separate a mention (your name in the answer) from a citation (a link to your page)?
7. Can you write your own buyer questions? A small business with little search demand needs them.

The AI Recommendation Rate page shows how to compute a rate and its interval yourself, and the AI visibility metrics guide explains which numbers to report.

Worked example: what 30 questions a day costs

Say a dental practice wants to track 30 buyer questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, once a day. That is 30 × 3 × 30 = 2,700 answers in a 30-day month. Each vendor counts that need in its own unit:

Then check what the numbers will tell you. Daily runs on one assistant give 900 answers a month across the 30 questions. If 90 of them name the practice, the rate is 10%, with a 95% interval of about 8.2% to 12.1%.

For a single question, 30 answers a month is a much wider range: 6 of 30 is 20%, with an interval of about 9.5% to 37.3%. Report the rate across all questions, and treat a change in one question as a hint to look at the answers.

Want to know where your business stands? The free checker shows whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok name it.

Where AIGROW fits

AIGROW publishes this guide, so it is described here only from its own pages.

• The free AI visibility scan reads your homepage, writes five questions a customer might ask, and puts them to the models behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok through their APIs, without web search. Under the current limits it asks each question once per assistant, and the result shows your AI Recommendation Rate with its 95% interval. It needs no account and no card.
• The AI visibility audit runs 20 to 40 of your own questions across four assistants and delivers the full answers, dated and re-runnable, a 0 to 100 score per assistant, the competitors named in your place, and a fix list ordered by impact, on working day 5.
• AIGROW for agencies offers client seats and white-label services done under the agency's brand.
• The public AI Visibility Index shows which businesses the assistants named for a kind of business and place, with its method and data published under CC BY 4.0.

The Index is a dated research sample. A free scan is a first reading and cannot guarantee an AI mention.

Which tools the assistants themselves name

AIGROW asked the same models 30 questions an owner asks when looking for help with AI visibility, in 11 languages, three times each, and published every answer in Do AI assistants recommend AIGROW? Of 358 answers measured in October 2026, AIGROW was named in 4, a rate of 1.1%. The names the answers gave most often:

This is a count of what the models said without web search, not a quality rating. It shows which names a buyer is likely to hear when they ask an assistant for help, which is worth knowing when you compare tools or sell the service yourself.

How to choose in five steps

1. Write down 20 to 30 questions your buyers ask before they choose a business like yours, in their words and their language.
2. Read the free Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools reports for a month, so you know where you already appear.
3. List the assistants your buyers use, and shortlist tools that cover them on the entry plan rather than as paid add-ons.
4. Multiply questions by assistants by runs per month, and compare that number with each plan's unit.
5. Run two shortlisted tools on the same questions for the same month, then compare the rate each reports for you and for one competitor you know well.

Then decide what to change. A tracker shows where you stand; the work that moves it is on your pages, your listings and the sites that mention you. The GEO vs SEO guide sets out that work for a small business.

Sources, read on 20 October 2026

• Semrush pricing and Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit help page
• Ahrefs pricing, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Ahrefs Custom Prompts
• AthenaHQ pricing
• BrightLocal Local AI Visibility and BrightLocal pricing
• Otterly.AI pricing
• Peec AI pricing
• Profound pricing
• Scrunch pricing
• Surfer pricing
• Clearscope pricing
• Frase pricing
• AirOps pricing
• HubSpot AI Search Grader
• Google Search Console Generative AI performance report and Google AI features and your website
• Bing AI Performance announcement, February 2026 and Bing AI visibility insights, June 2026