What generative engine optimization is, and what a tool is for
Generative engine optimization, usually called GEO, is the practice of shaping what AI tools say about your business. A generative engine is any product that writes an answer instead of listing links. The software behind most of them is called a large language model, or LLM. GEO and answer engine optimization, AEO, describe nearly the same work from slightly different angles, and the tools for the two overlap almost completely. If you want the comparison, our page on SEO versus GEO versus AEO sorts out the terms.
A GEO tool is software that helps with part of that practice. The first thing to settle is which part. People buy these tools hoping for a result, such as getting named more often, and then find the tool only gives a view of the result. That mismatch is behind most disappointment in the category.
If you are still deciding whether you need software at all or want the whole job handled, start with our guide to hands-on AI search help, which describes what the engagement covers. The rest of this page assumes you are looking at tools and want to know what they can honestly do.
Tools are good at watching and at helping you write. They are weak at the part that changes your standing most, which is being vouched for by sources you do not control.
The jobs a GEO tool can do well
There are five jobs where software genuinely helps. Match any product you are considering to one or more of them.
Watch the answers
Ask a fixed list of questions on a schedule and record who is named. A computer does this better than a person, because it does not get bored and can run each question many times. This is the biggest group of tools. To judge the quality of the sampling, see our guide to answer engine optimization tools.
Check the technical basics
Confirm the AI crawlers can read your site, that pages load without relying on scripts and that your structured data is valid. It is repeatable and mechanical, which suits software.
Audit your pages against an answer
Read a page and tell you whether the main point sits in the first paragraph, whether headings match real questions and whether sections are thin. This is useful as a second opinion on writing.
Draft and edit at volume
Produce first drafts of pages, rewrites of existing ones and variations. Software is fast here. Quality depends heavily on how well the tool was given facts about your business, and on whether a person reviews the output.
Find the sources assistants lean on
Some tools show which websites an engine cited for your category. That list is one of the most useful things a tool can give you, because it points at where mentions are earned. Our overview of what AI engines cite shows the usual suspects.
The jobs a tool cannot do
This list is the one vendors skip, so read it twice.
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 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 pages are not the ones assistants pick.
Decide what to say about you. The honest answer to a buyer's question may include saying who you are not right for. That is a judgment, and a tool with a template does not make it.
Prove that the mentions made money. The path from an answer to a sale mostly runs through a later search or a direct visit. No tool can see across that gap with certainty.
None of this makes tools useless. It means a tool covers a slice, and you should know which slice before you buy. For a plain picture of what assistants lean on, see how large language models choose their sources.
A checklist to run on any free trial
Most tools offer a trial. Use it as a test, not a tour. Here is what to do in the first two weeks.
- Enter your own 15 to 20 questions. Do not accept a suggested set without reading it. Replace any question no real customer would ask.
- Pick one question and verify it by hand. Ask the assistant yourself and compare. If the tool and your own check tell completely different stories, ask the vendor why.
- Find the quoted answers. Click through to the actual text. If the tool only shows scores, note that.
- Ask how many runs per question. If the answer is once, expect noise.
- Check which assistants are covered. Compare the list to where your buyers ask.
- Set a location, if you are a local business. If you cannot, results may not apply to you.
- Find the recommendations. Does the tool tell you what to change, and is it specific? A line like improve your content is not a recommendation.
- Try the export. Pull your data out. If it is difficult now, it will be worse after a year.
- Read the cancellation terms. Monthly with no lock-in is safest while the category is moving.
- Write down what you would do differently because of the tool. If you cannot name an action it prompted, you are buying a chart.
That last item is the real test. A tool earns its fee when it changes what you do next week.
What to do with the result
Suppose the tool shows you are rarely named for the questions that matter. The tool has done its job. What now?
Start with your own pages. For each question where you are absent, check that you have a page that answers it, and that the first paragraph answers it directly. If the page does not exist, that is a content gap. If it exists but buries the answer, rewrite the opening.
Then look outside your site. Search for your category and see which pages the assistant cited. If every cited page is a review roundup or a directory, your task is to be listed and reviewed there. If they are community threads, the task is different, and it needs care, because assistants and readers both spot a business posting about itself.
Then be patient. Pages take weeks to be picked up, and presence in outside sources takes months. If you want a view of the full path rather than the tool slice, our page on the AI visibility checklist lays out the steps in order.
This is also where owners stall. A report with 40 recommended actions is not a plan, and a small team rarely has hours to carry it out. If that sounds familiar, the question is no longer which tool to buy but who will do the work.
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.
Priced by number of questions. You pay for how many questions are checked. This suits small businesses, and it rewards you for keeping the list tight. The risk is a plan that caps below the size of a sensible question set.
Priced by number of locations or brands. Common for agencies and multi-site businesses. Check that each location can have its own place setting.
Priced by number of users. Fine for a team, but a solo owner pays for seats they do not need.
Priced by how many assistants are covered. Ask which are included and which cost extra, and compare to where your buyers ask.
Annual contracts. Be careful. The category is moving fast, and a product that is the best choice now may not be in a year. Monthly terms with an export are safer.
Also look at 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 goes. When you compare costs, include the people hours. For a sense of what a full-service version looks like next to a tool, our page on choosing an AEO agency sets out the questions to ask.
Who will actually 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.
Before buying, name the person. Decide how much time they have each week, what they will look at and what they are allowed to change. If the answer is nobody, then the tool is the wrong purchase and a service is the right one.
Consider what that person needs to be able to do. Read a report skeptically. Edit a page. Ask a developer to change a robots.txt line. Contact a local publication or ask a happy customer for a review. A tool covers the first. The rest is on the person, and for a small business it often falls to the owner.
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. That takes an hour or two, and it is far better than a daily habit that fades.
If you cannot spare that, pass on the tool for now and run the free manual routine every quarter. A thin routine you keep is worth more than a rich tool you do not use.
Mistakes people make when buying
A few errors come up again and again.
Buying before checking access. A tool measures a site that crawlers cannot read, and the owner sees low numbers and blames the tool or the assistant. Fix the basics first.
Trusting a default question set. The tool's suggested questions come from your website, not from your buyers.
Chasing the score. A number that moves feels like progress. If it moves because the question list changed, or because of ordinary variation, you have learned nothing.
Tracking and not acting. A report with 40 recommended actions that nobody carries out does not change a single answer.
Using it to argue with an assistant. Some owners respond to a poor result by trying to rephrase prompts until the assistant names them. That tells you what a person with your name in mind gets, not what a stranger gets.
Ignoring the outside sources. The most useful output of many tools is the list of sites an assistant leaned on. Owners who read it as trivia miss that those sites are where the work is.
A last check before you pay
Write down, in one sentence, what you expect the tool to change. For example: I want to know every month whether assistants name us for our five main services, and which sites they cite when they do not. If the vendor's own description of the product matches your sentence, good. If it promises something wider, such as growing your leads, ask which part is software and which part is somebody else's work.
Then set an exit test for yourself. 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.
Ask a colleague or a friendly customer to try the same questions in their own account. If their answers differ a lot from what the tool reports, you have learned how much of your visibility is personal and how much is shared, which is worth knowing before you set expectations.
How RunOctopus handles this
Software can watch the answers. RunOctopus does the part that comes after: writing and publishing the pages the watching points to.
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 8 long-form articles, 6 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.