AI SEO tools are two different kinds of software sold under one name. The first kind uses AI to do ordinary SEO work faster: drafting pages, grouping keywords, scoring content and auditing a site. The second kind is built for AEO and GEO, the work of getting named inside AI answers: it checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews can read your site and whether they mention you when buyers ask. Know which kind you are looking at before you compare prices, because they answer different questions and fail in different ways.
Most search results blur the two, and most product pages do too. A content scorer with an AI label and a tracker that asks ChatGPT 200 questions a week can both call themselves an AI SEO tool. One works on your pages. The other watches what assistants say about you. Neither does the other's job.
This page sorts the market into those two halves, then into the handful of kinds inside each, and gives you the questions to ask before you pay. It names no products and ranks none. The category is young enough that most products are under two years old, and the useful skill is knowing what to ask any vendor.
AI for SEO tools help you produce and check pages. Tools for AEO and GEO help you see whether assistants can read you and whether they name you. Start with the free checks, run your own questions by hand before buying a tracker, and budget for the work the tools point at, because no tool does that work for you.
The split: AI for SEO, and SEO for AI
The simplest way to sort the category is by what the tool works on and what it reports.
| AI for SEO tools | Tools for AEO and GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| The job | Use AI to do SEO work: drafts, keyword groups, briefs, content scores, site audits | Get your business read, cited and named by AI assistants |
| What it works on | Your pages and your keyword list | The answers assistants give, and whether their crawlers reach you |
| What it reports | Rankings, gaps, a score against competing pages | Whether you were named, how often, beside whom, and which sources were cited |
| Where it fails | Writes pages that sound like everyone else's, because it does not know your business | Reports a confident number from too few questions or a single run |
| Free version | An assistant you already have, used carefully | Your robots.txt, Bing Webmaster Tools and a list of questions asked by hand |
The two halves share groundwork. A page that ranks well on Google is more likely to be found by an assistant that searches the web, and a page that opens with a plain answer helps both. But a high ranking does not guarantee a mention, and a content score says nothing about whether any assistant has ever read the page. That is why the measurements differ even when the work overlaps.
The labels add confusion. AI visibility, LLM SEO, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization and AI search monitoring are largely the same product sold under five names. If you want the vocabulary straight, our explainers on answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization cover what each term means. For tool buying, the name on the homepage matters much less than what the product actually does.
Tools that use AI for SEO work
This half is the older one. Most of it is SEO software that added AI features, plus general assistants used for SEO tasks. The jobs it does well are real.
Drafting and rewriting
AI is fast at first drafts, rewrites of existing pages and variations on a template. The quality depends on two things the tool cannot supply by itself: the facts about your business it was given, and whether a person reviews the output. A tool that drafts pages does not know your return policy, your service area or what made your last 20 customers choose you. Without those facts it writes pages that sound like everyone else's, and those are not the pages assistants pick.
Keyword grouping and briefs
Sorting a long keyword export into groups, spotting near-duplicates and drafting a brief for each group is tedious work that AI handles well. Treat the output as a first pass. Check that each group reflects one real buyer question, not three questions that happen to share a word.
Content scoring
Content tools were built for Google, and many now carry an AI label. They score a page against the pages that rank for a keyword and tell you what is missing. That has value, because assistants that search the web often start from pages that rank. But the score measures resemblance to other pages. It is not a measure of whether an assistant can lift a clean answer out of yours. Two pages can score the same and differ completely in that respect. One opens with a direct statement. The other builds up to it over four paragraphs.
The better use for a scorer is a second pair of eyes after the basics are done. Write the first paragraph so it answers the question in one or two sentences. Put the details below it. Use headings that match how a buyer would phrase the question. Then run the tool and see what it spots. Do not let it push you into stuffing a page with phrases to raise a number.
Page and site audits
Some tools read a page and say whether the main point sits in the first paragraph, whether headings match real questions and whether sections are thin. Others crawl a whole site for broken links, missing titles and structured data errors. Both are repeatable and mechanical, which suits software.
If you mostly want a general assistant to help with SEO tasks, our guide to using ChatGPT for SEO covers what it does well and where it gets facts wrong. The short version: it is a good drafting partner and a poor source of numbers, so never take a search volume or a ranking from it without checking.
Tools for AEO and GEO: the four kinds
The newer half is the one most people mean when they search for AI SEO tools today. Sort every product you see into one of these four, and the market gets simple.
1. Access checks
These answer: can the AI crawlers reach and read my pages? OpenAI runs more than one crawler, and they do different jobs. One collects pages for training. One builds the search index behind ChatGPT's web answers. One fetches a page when a user pastes a link or asks it to look something up. A site can allow one and block another without anyone meaning to. An access check reads your robots.txt, tests whether your host or firewall turns bots away, and confirms the page renders without needing JavaScript to show its main text. It is often free and it has the highest payoff per minute, because a blocked site cannot be cited no matter what else you do.
2. Indexing helpers
These answer: is this page in the index the answer draws from? ChatGPT's search leans on an outside search index for a large share of what it finds, so being listed there matters. Helpers here include Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow, a protocol that lets your site tell participating search engines the moment a page is added or changed.
3. Answer tracking
These answer: when someone asks a question my buyers ask, does the assistant name me? The tool sends your list of questions to one or more assistants on a schedule, records the replies, and shows which businesses were named. This is the biggest group, and the one with the widest quality gap. We go deep on how to judge trackers and platforms in our guide to AI visibility tools.
4. Content tools for answers
These answer: how should this page be written so an assistant can use it? They overlap with the content scorers above, with a different target. They check that the opening answers the question, that headings match real questions and that facts are stated plainly enough to quote. They work on the page. They do not know whether any assistant has ever read it.
Start with the free kinds: access and indexing
You can do the first two kinds without paying anyone, and you should, because they remove the most common reason a good business is invisible.
Open your robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to the end of your web address. Look for lines that name a bot and then say Disallow. If you see one that names an OpenAI crawler and blocks the whole site, ChatGPT's search cannot read you. Sometimes a store app or a security plugin added that line years ago. If you run WordPress, a security plugin is the usual cause. If you run Shopify, the file is generated by the platform, and changes go through a template.
Next, check your host. Some content delivery networks and firewalls challenge any visitor that is not a normal browser. A bot that meets a challenge page reads the challenge, not your page. Your host's logs show whether crawler requests get a normal response or an error.
Then check that Bing knows about you. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and look at how many of your pages it lists. If your newest pages are missing, that gap is a real finding.
None of this needs a paid product. What a paid product adds is repetition: it checks again next month and tells you if a plugin update undid your fix. If you want these checks run as part of a fuller review, an AI visibility audit covers access, indexing and page structure in one pass.
What an answer tracker can and cannot tell you
A tracker is a sampling machine. It asks a fixed list of questions, over and over, and counts what comes back. Almost every product in the group does the same core loop. The differences are in how carefully it does it.
It can tell you whether you are named. Across a set of questions and several runs, it can show how often your business appears, which competitors appear beside you and what the sentence around your name says. Some also show which websites the assistant cited for your category, which is one of the most useful things a tool can give you, because it points at where mentions are earned.
It cannot tell you why. The tool sees the answer, not the reasoning behind it. When you disappear for a question you used to win, the dashboard shows the drop and nothing about the cause. Working that out means reading which sources the assistant drew on and what they say about you. Our research on how LLMs choose their sources is a better guide to the cause than any chart.
It cannot see what your real customers see. The answer changes with the wording of the question, the location, whether the person is logged in and what they asked earlier in the same conversation. A tool runs clean, neutral versions. Your buyers do not ask clean, neutral questions.
It cannot tie a mention to a sale. A person who is recommended by an assistant often arrives later by typing your name into a search box or going straight to your site. Nothing in that visit says an assistant sent them.
One fact matters more than any feature: the same question asked twice can return two different lists of businesses. A tool that asks once and reports a result has measured one roll of the dice. A tool that asks many times and reports the share of runs in which you appeared has measured a tendency. Two tools on the same business in the same week will often disagree, because they ask different questions, cover different assistants, reach them in different ways and count a non-answer differently. A score is comparable to itself over time, not across vendors.
The jobs no tool can do
This is the list vendors skip, and it decides how much a tool can change for you.
Make other people say good things about you. Assistants draw heavily on what independent sources say: reviews, directories, local news, forum threads, trade publications. A tool can tell you those sources matter. It cannot get your name into them. That work is relationships and reputation, and it is slow.
Guarantee a mention. An assistant composes each answer fresh. No software sits between your site and its output.
Know your business. A drafting tool does not know what makes you the right pick for one buyer and the wrong pick for another. The honest answer to a buyer's question may include saying who you are not right for. That is a judgment, and a template does not make it.
Tell a crawler problem from a quotability problem. A tracker can tell you that you are absent. Separating a blocked crawler from a page that buries its answer from a business nobody outside your site writes about is still manual work, and it is the part that decides what you do next.
Prove the mentions made money. The path from an answer to a sale mostly runs through a later search or a direct visit. Any revenue figure from a visibility tool is a model, not a measurement.
None of this makes tools useless. It means a tool covers a slice, and you should know which slice before you buy.
Three kinds of vendor wearing one label
Products in the AEO and GEO half look alike from the outside and behave very differently once you use them. Three groups are worth telling apart before you compare prices.
Purpose-built trackers. Built for this job from the start. Usually the widest assistant coverage, the most thought given to sampling, and the most honest about what a non-answer means. Also the newest, so the shortest track record.
SEO suites with a panel added. An established platform that added an AI section. Typically checks one assistant shallowly and treats the subject as a feature rather than the product. Fine if you already pay for the platform and want a rough signal. Misleading if you read it as the full picture.
Agencies with a dashboard. Thin software wrapped around people doing the work by hand. That can be exactly right for a small team with nobody to run a tool, as long as everyone is clear that is what is being bought, because the price reflects the people.
The quickest way to tell them apart is to ask how many questions the product runs, against how many assistants, how often. All three answer differently, and a vague answer is vague for a reason.
Questions to put to any tool before you pay
These work for both halves of the market, and they are easy to ask on a trial.
- Can I check one result by hand? Take a single question the tool reports on, ask the assistant yourself and compare. Not identical, but the same kind of answer. If there is no way to verify anything, the tool is asking for faith.
- Can I write my own questions, and see the whole set? Generated questions usually come from your own website, so they reflect your marketing language rather than your buyer's uncertainty. A tool that only runs its own questions is measuring its idea of your business.
- How many times does it run each question? Once is an anecdote. Ask whether the report shows a rate across runs.
- Does it show the actual words and the cited sources? Being named as the best option and being named as the cheap one both count as one mention. The wording is where the difference lives.
- Which assistants, and can I see them separately? A blended number hides the case where you do well in one and not at all in another, which is often the most useful finding.
- What happens when I stop paying? Ask whether you can export the raw question and answer history. A record of how you were named over months is worth more than any single month.
Use the free trial as a test, not a tour
Most tools offer a trial. In the first two weeks, enter your own 15 to 20 buyer questions and replace any suggested question no real customer would ask. Verify one result by hand. Click through to the quoted answers. If you are a local business, set a location, and if you cannot, the results may not apply to you. Find the recommendations and check that they are specific, because a line like improve your content is not a recommendation. Pull your data out through the export. Read the cancellation terms, since monthly with no lock-in is safest while the category moves this fast.
Then write down what you would do differently because of the tool. If you cannot name one action it prompted, you are buying a chart. A tool earns its fee when it changes what you do next week.
Compare two tools on your own business, not their demos
Take 20 real questions your buyers ask and run them by hand once in the assistant you care about most. Write down who is named. That hour or two is your reference. Then run the same list through each tool's trial and compare. A good tool will not match you exactly, but it should tell the same story about who tends to appear, and it should show its working: quoted answers, run counts and cited sources.
How these tools are priced, and what that tells you
Prices in this category change quickly, so this page gives no figures. What lasts is the shape of the pricing, because the shape tells you what the vendor expects you to do.
By number of questions. Suits small businesses and rewards a tight list. Watch for a plan that caps below a sensible question set.
By locations or brands. Common for agencies and multi-site businesses. Check that each location gets its own place setting.
By users. Fine for a team. A solo owner pays for seats they do not need.
By assistants covered. Ask which are included and which cost extra, and compare that to where your buyers ask.
For trackers, what really drives the bill is questions times assistants times frequency. Twenty questions across four assistants once a week is about three hundred and twenty answers a month. Two hundred questions across four assistants daily is around twenty-four thousand. Those are different products at the same nominal subscription, so ask how the number is calculated before you agree to a tier. Be careful with annual contracts too: a product that is the best choice now may not be in a year.
Then add the cost of the work around the tool. A subscription gives you a report. Acting on it takes writing, editing, publishing and outreach, and that is where most of the money and time really go. A tracker that reports forty gaps a month is generating a content backlog. If nobody is writing against it, the subscription buys a recurring reminder of a problem you are not addressing.
Claims to doubt on a sales page
Because the category is new, sales pages make promises that would not survive a close look. Treat these as a signal to slow down.
Rank number one in ChatGPT. There is no ranked list to be number one in. The assistant writes an answer, and the businesses it names can differ from one asking to the next. A product that claims to rank you is describing something that does not exist.
Optimized in 24 hours. A crawler fix can take effect in a day. Getting named as a trusted source for your category does not. If a tool promises the second on the timeline of the first, the claim is hollow.
Our proprietary score. A single number with no explanation of how it is built cannot be checked. Ask what goes into it. If the answer is vague, the number is decoration.
Works for every assistant. Each assistant retrieves differently. A tool that blends them into one figure hides the case where you do well in one and not in another.
An industry benchmark. There is no industry baseline, because almost every tool measures one business for one customer and nobody publishes across a market. A vendor quoting an industry average is quoting their own customers on their own questions.
Connects mentions to revenue. This would be wonderful if true. In practice, a person who hears your name from an assistant usually arrives by typing it into a search box later, or by calling. Treat any revenue figure as a model, and ask how it was built.
What to buy, and in what order
For most small businesses the order is simple.
First, spend an afternoon on the free access and indexing checks. If something is blocked, fix it before anything else. Nothing you buy later works until this is clean.
Second, build a list of 15 to 25 real questions a buyer would ask before choosing a business like yours, and ask them by hand. Mix broad questions, specific ones, comparisons and problem questions that describe a symptom without naming a solution. Leave your own name out, because a question with your name in it only measures what the assistant knows once it has been told who you are. Write down who gets named. Do it again in a month. This costs nothing and teaches you more than a dashboard in the first quarter, because you read every answer.
Third, buy tracking only when the manual routine becomes a chore, usually past 30 questions, several locations or several assistants, or when somebody else needs the chart. At that point a tool saves hours.
Fourth, treat AI drafting and scoring tools as optional. They help most on a site with a lot of pages and several writers, and they help least when nobody gives them the facts about your business.
The right size of purchase depends on how many places you need to watch. A single-location business with one service needs the free checks and a hand-run list, and a paid dashboard adds cost and little else, because you can read 20 answers in an hour. A business with several services or a few locations will find the hand routine taking a day a month, and tracking starts to pay for itself, especially if it can set a place for each location. An online store with many products has a question set that grows quickly, so tracking is worth having, and a content tool helps with volume as long as it does not push you into many thin pages. Our guide to getting your business on ChatGPT covers the work that comes after the measuring.
Before any of it, name the person who will run the tool. The most common reason a tool goes unused is that nobody owns it. It is bought in a burst of interest, logged into twice and left to renew. A simple monthly rhythm works: open the report on the same day each month, compare to last month, pick one gap, change one thing, log it. If nobody has that hour, a tool is the wrong purchase and a service is the right one. Our overview of AI SEO services explains what a done-for-you engagement includes that a tool does not. A tool tells you something. A service changes something.
Set yourself an exit test as well. After three months, you should be able to point to at least two decisions the tool informed, such as a page you rewrote or a listing you pursued. If you cannot, cancel. The cost of a tool you do not act on is not only the fee. It is the false comfort of feeling that the problem is being handled.
How RunOctopus handles this
Tools show you the gap. They do not write the pages that close it, and that is the work RunOctopus does.
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix.
There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. You do not approve each page. Pages go live on their own. In the first week you get 50+ pieces, including long-form articles, pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. You also get reports on where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.
There is a 90-day promise: more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. Paste your address into the free site read and Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.