Before you can get serious about generative engine optimization (GEO), you need a way to monitor your performance. Much like with SEO, you’ll need a baseline to see where you are today, along with ongoing measurement to judge the success of your efforts.

Before choosing the tools you’ll use to measure performance, you’ll want to understand the difference between AI search monitoring and LLM monitoring.

What is AI search monitoring?

AI search monitoring tracks how your brand and content appear in AI-powered search responses, like those from Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. At the most basic level, it tells you whether your brand is even mentioned at all. (Hopefully it is. If not, at least you know it’s worth pursuing some GEO strategies.)

Based on the feature set of the tool you’re using, you may also be able to measure brand sentiment, share of voice, topic associations, link analysis, and more. This helps you identify gaps—for example, if your product offers a unique capability related to widget manufacturing, but widget manufacturing is not ranking as an associated topic, it’s time for a blog series on the manufacturing industry’s challenges in making widgets.

What is LLM monitoring?

LLM monitoring tracks the performance of large language models (LLMs) in production. LLMs are the magic behind AI-powered search engines, so what they know impacts the search results presented to your target audiences. The good news is that accurate information about your brand in an LLM can lead to the right kind of visibility in searches. The bad news? If something is wrong, it can propagate across search services.

Because LLM monitoring can get pretty technical, marketers and digital strategists should focus on using AI search monitoring tools with or without integrated LLM monitoring.

What are the best tools for AI search monitoring?

GEO is so new that it’s hard to say which AI search monitoring tools will eventually rise to the top. Rankscale, Otterly.ai, and Profound are all designed specifically for AI search monitoring and GEO. I like these options because they’re GEO-native, rather than add-ons to SEO monitoring tools. Plus, I’ve seen them mentioned a lot recently on Reddit and LinkedIn, so it seems like digital strategists and webmasters are actually using them. Let’s take a quick look at each one and its pricing, starting with the free option.

Rankscale, free (and up)

You can’t argue with free. Rankscale gets you in the door with a simple tool that shows you the AI search visibility for any website. (It doesn’t even have to be yours!) Rankscale is an LLM monitoring tool that measures visibility across Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Deepseek, and Claude. You’ll get scores for content quality, authority, technical quality, and engagement. For the detailed report, you’ll need to enter an email address.

After receiving your report, you can choose a plan at $20 (essentials), $99 (pro), or $780 (enterprise) per month. The bigger the plan, the more web audits, brand dashboards, and AI responses you get. You can manage multiple brands from one place, which works well for marketing and digital services agencies. This seems like a good option if you want a low commitment to get started with the ability to scale up.

Otterly.ai, $29/month (and up)

Otterly does AI search monitoring without coverage for LLMs. That means it focuses on the search platform itself (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity) instead of the underlying LLM. Right away, Otterly feels very user-friendly, which is great for marketing teams that are just starting to explore GEO. It has a simple dashboard that shows top prompts, brand position and coverage, and share of voice.

Otterly offers a free trial for 14 days, and pricing starts at $29 a month. Given the user friendliness and low cost, it seems like a great way for marketing teams (or individual webmasters) to get started with GEO evaluation.

Profound, $499 (and up)

Profound measures visibility across LLM platforms, filling in some gaps that Otterly and Rankscale leave open by measuring for Microsoft Copilot (the AI engine built into Windows) and Grok in addition to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Its dashboard shows a visibility score over time, along with the rankings of other brands.

Compared to Otterly, Profound is quite a bit more expensive at $499 a month for its “lite” option. Enterprises will get custom pricing after seeing a demo. While it may not be best for marketers who simply want to dip their toes in the GEO waters, it could be worth it for more serious teams to go ahead and sign up for that demo.

Be flexible to take advantage of the best features

Because AI search and GEO are so new, things are changing every day. If you want to start measuring your AI search rankings and testing some GEO strategies, go ahead and sign up for one or more of the tools above. It’s not worth waiting to see which product gains favor among marketers and digital strategists, because you could be improving your GEO strategy in the meantime. Just don’t get too committed. New features and products could change the game at any time.