This is not a ranking. We have not run these tools side by side on the same brand for six months, and anyone who claims to have done so at this point in the category's life is selling something. What we have done is establish, from primary sources, what each one costs, what each one pays a site like this to recommend it, and how we know.
16 tools · checked 2026-07-10 · our commercial interest in each
1 of these tools do not publish a price.
Profound, the category leader at a $1 billion valuation, shows no pricing ladder. Peec's numbers exist only on third-party review sites. Writesonic's own pages contradict each other. Every "GEO tool pricing" article you have read filled those gaps with figures it could not source. We leave them empty and say so, because an empty cell is information and an invented one is not.
Tools whose main job is telling you whether AI assistants mention your brand. Read the evidence on answer volatility before you buy any of them: a single blended "AI visibility" percentage is averaging three engines that agree with each other only 2.37% of the time. If you are shortlisting, start with every tool compared, the Otterly, Peec and Scrunch three-way, or Peec AI alternatives.
The best affiliate economics of any tool in this category, and on-theme: it ships Citation Intelligence for AI mentions. Stated plainly so you can weigh it: if we ever enrol, this is the tool with the strongest financial pull on our judgement. That is exactly why it sits at the top of this table rather than buried in it.
The cheapest credible entry point in the category, and the only GEO-native tracker we found with a real, published referral programme. We separately confirmed that otterly.ai/affiliate and otterly.ai/partners both return 404; the live path is /referral.
Third-party sites claim '15% lifetime'. The vendor's own page says 10% for up to 12 months. Where a vendor page and an aggregator disagree, we publish the vendor page and flag the conflict.
We could not read a price ladder off peec.ai itself; the figures circulating come from third-party review sites. We confirmed peec.ai/affiliate returns 404. Raised roughly $29M as of November 2025.
The category leader: $155M raised, a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026, and a genuinely large citation dataset. Its own pricing page shows no ladder. It also publishes a 'best generative engine optimisation tools' article in which it ranks itself. Both facts belong in the same sentence.
Established SEO and content platforms, most of which have added AI visibility features. Note which of them can pay us, and which cannot.
| Tool | What it is | Pays us | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | SEO suite with Brand Radar (AI visibility) | NOTHING | Ahrefs closed its affiliate programme in 2019 and has said it has no plans to relaunch. It also publishes some of the largest and most methodologically transparent citation research in this field. It can never pay us a penny. Notice how rarely it tops a 'best AI visibility tools' listicle. |
| Screaming Frog | technical crawler | NOTHING | Their FAQ confirms no affiliate programme and no reseller discounts. Another tool no commission-funded listicle has any reason to recommend. |
| Clearscope | content optimisation | NOTHING | No partner page found. Absence of a programme is not proof one does not exist, so we record it as 'none found' rather than 'none'. |
| Semrush | SEO suite with AI Visibility Toolkit | about $200 per sale, $10 per trial | We confirmed the affiliate landing page resolves (HTTP 200) while several GEO-native vendors' equivalents 404. A large one-time bounty rewards a burst of traffic rather than a good long-term recommendation. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for about $1.9 billion, expected to close in the first half of 2026. |
| Surfer SEO | content optimisation | 75% to 125% of the first payment | A very large first-payment bounty. Structurally, this pays most for getting someone to sign up once, and nothing at all for whether the tool serves them a year later. |
| Frase | content optimisation with AI visibility features | 30%, rising to 40% | Frase also publishes a 'best AI visibility tools' listicle that features Frase. |
| Scalenut | AI content platform | 30%, rising to 40% | Lifetime recurring commission. Among the strongest financial incentives in this table, which is precisely why we are telling you about it rather than letting it quietly shape a ranking. |
| NeuronWriter | content optimisation | 30% | Terms partly corroborated by aggregators rather than read cleanly off the vendor's own page. Treat the 'lifetime' qualifier as unconfirmed. |
| Mangools | SEO suite | 30%, up to 35% | A short 30-day cookie against a lifetime commission. |
| SE Ranking | SEO suite with an AI Search add-on | 30% | A genuine conflict between the vendor's own legal text and every aggregator. We publish the conflict rather than pick the more flattering number. |
| Writesonic | AI writer repositioned around AI search | 20% | Aggregators widely claim '30% lifetime'. The vendor's own affiliate page says 20% for 12 months. Writesonic's own pricing pages also contradict each other on tier prices. |
Honestly: probably not yet, and not because they are bad. Because of what the evidence says they can measure. A tracker samples a handful of prompts on a schedule. Real users type millions of variants, and the same prompt returns a different list of brands more than 99 times out of 100. A number built on that foundation moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your marketing.
Benjamin Houy built one of these tools, ran it for seven months, and shut it down. His conclusion, which cost him a company to reach:
Customers were churning because the product didn't change what they needed to do. There's no secret GEO strategy. AI models reward the same fundamentals that already drive SEO and PR.
If you need a number to report upward, buy the cheapest one that names its methodology and treat it as a weather vane, not a speedometer. If you want to be cited more, the evidence points at the unglamorous things: be genuinely worth citing, get mentioned in places that already are, and make your pages easy to quote. None of that requires a subscription.
If your organisation has decided that a top-line number is non-negotiable (because it reports upward, or because it helps calibrate attention against competitors), then choosing between them matters. Here is what to ask before you sign a contract:
Tools are most useful not as a marketing number but as a research instrument. If you are deciding whether to redirect resources toward AI visibility, a baseline measurement helps you set expectations. If you are testing a hypothesis ("if we get featured in TechCrunch, our Perplexity citations will rise"), tracking across the experiment period is cheaper than waiting six months to guess. If you are in a category where AI assistants are the majority search method (technical documentation, research, open-source projects), then knowing which queries trigger your competitors' citations and whether you appear for them is legitimate intelligence.
What is not useful: buying a tool to track a "GEO score" every month and reporting it as a KPI. The measurement is too noisy, the signal too weak, and the cost unjustified by the return. The fundamental levers do not change. Be genuinely worth citing. Get mentioned in places that already drive AI citations (Reddit, Stack Overflow, industry publications, Wikipedia, licensed data partnerships). Make your answers quotable. And measure outcomes you can act on: traffic, conversions, branded search volume. A tool that does those things better is a better tool.
Every claim in this section is graded and sourced in the evidence ledger. Our commercial interest in each tool named here is published on who pays us.