Generative Engine Optimization Tools, Sorted by the Job They Do

The generative engine optimization tools worth paying for each do one of four jobs: open the site to AI crawlers and retrieval bots, make the site machine-readable as an entity, improve the drafts engines quote, or audit all three. Pick by the first job your site fails, in that order. For access, Cloudflare AI Crawl Control (free on every plan) or Known Agents (free tier, then $29 a month). For structure, Yoast SEO on WordPress (free) or Schema App for large sites (quote only). For content, Frase, Surfer, Clearscope, MarketMuse or Writesonic. For the audit, Screaming Frog. A content optimiser bought before the access check passes is money spent on pages no engine can fetch.

Which tool does which job?

Prices and plan limits are from each vendor's own pricing page, read on 2026-10-07. Where a vendor shows only an annual-billed monthly figure, the table says so.

What is generative engine optimization, in one paragraph?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making a site something an AI answer engine can fetch, understand and quote when it composes an answer, as opposed to ranking it in a list of links. Most of it overlaps with good technical SEO: crawlable pages, accurate structured data, a clear entity, content that states facts plainly. The differences are which bots do the fetching, and the fact that an answer quotes a passage rather than sending a click. We wrote the comparison up at GEO vs SEO.

Why do the vendors selling GEO score barely above average?

Our INITE Atlas measures how well a tool's own website can be found, resolved and quoted by a retrieval engine. The score, Atlas Readiness, runs from 0 to 100 and has four parts: entity (25 points: is there a Wikidata item and a Wikipedia article to resolve the name against), machine-readable (35: how much of the site describes itself to a machine), retrieval access (20: can the retrieval bots fetch the content) and footprint (20: evidence that anybody uses the thing). A part that was never measured is excluded and the total rescaled, rather than counted as zero.

Some of the content vendors in the table above do better: Writesonic scores 75, MarketMuse 74, Surfer 63 and Clearscope 59. Cloudflare scores 100.

Readiness describes a vendor's website, not its product, so a low score does not mean the software is bad. It does show where the easy points are. The entity and machine-readable parts together are worth 60 of the 100, and most sites leave them on the table, including sites that sell the fix. That is the case for working through the jobs in order: the first two are cheap and most sites have not done them.

Can AI crawlers fetch your site at all?

This is the first job because everything after it depends on it. A site can have perfect schema and excellent pages and still be invisible to an answer engine if its firewall returns a challenge page to the retrieval bot. Two causes come up often: a robots.txt copied from a 2023 “block all AI” template, and a bot-protection setting that treats every non-browser client as hostile. Which bots to let in and which to block is a separate decision we covered in the AI crawler allowlist for 2026; the tools below are how you enforce it.

Cloudflare AI Crawl Control

For: any site whose DNS already runs through Cloudflare. Cloudflare documents it as available on all plans, and it covers crawler management, traffic analysis by crawler, and tracking which crawlers follow your robots.txt directives. Pay per crawl is listed as a private beta.

Not for: sites that are not on Cloudflare; moving DNS only to get this is a bigger change than the problem.

Price: included, from the Free plan.

The honest weakness: the defaults. A single “block AI bots” switch takes the citing retrieval bots down along with the training scrapers, and the dashboard makes that the easy choice. Allow per crawler, not per category.

Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors)

For: sites not behind Cloudflare, and teams that want to see agent traffic next to human traffic. It generates a robots.txt that updates as new agents appear, tracks visits from AI chat referrals, and has a WordPress plugin that enforces rules against agents that ignore robots.txt.

Not for: anyone expecting it to raise citations by itself. It controls and reports access; it does not change what an engine thinks of the page.

Price: free for one project and 100K events a month; Startup is $29 a month for three projects and 1M events.

The honest weakness: the headline feature is a robots.txt that blocks all known agents. That is the opposite of what a site that wants to be cited needs, so edit what it generates rather than accepting it.

Can an engine tell what your business is?

The second job is resolving the name. When an engine reads “Acme” on a page, it needs to know which Acme, what it does and where it is. Structured data (schema.org markup) states that for a machine, and the Atlas weights it heavily for that reason. The llms.txt file is the other thing sold under this heading, and the evidence for it is thin: we went through the 300,000-domain study on llms.txt, which found no measurable link between publishing the file and being cited. Add it if your CMS generates it for free; do not buy a tool for it.

Yoast SEO

For: WordPress sites. The plugin generates structured data automatically, and Yoast describes Premium as aggregating the site's schema into one deduplicated graph so an agent gets the whole picture in one request. llms.txt generation is in the free plugin, which Yoast states as “built into Yoast, free for everyone”.

Not for: sites on other platforms, or teams with custom schema needs the plugin's templates do not cover.

Price: free; Premium is $118.80 a year per site, excluding VAT.

The honest weakness: generated schema is only as accurate as the settings behind it. An organisation name, logo and social profiles that disagree with the rest of the web give the engine a confident wrong answer.

Schema App

For: enterprises with many page templates, locations or products, where hand-written schema drifts. It deploys markup across the site, has an Entity Hub for defining how the business is represented, and exposes the knowledge graph to AI tools through an MCP server.

Not for: small sites. There is no published price, no trial, a one-time setup fee and a 12-month minimum term.

Price: custom quote only.

The honest weakness: you cannot compare it to anything before a sales call, which makes it a procurement project rather than a tool you try.

Are your pages the kind engines quote?

The third job is the one most lists call GEO, and the one most vendors sell. Content optimisers score a draft while you write it and suggest terms, questions and structure, now with an AI layer on top: tracked prompts, AI-answer guidelines, visibility reports. Two things to know before buying. The score is a proxy: no vendor can show that a higher grade causes a citation, and none of the pricing pages we read claims to. And the guidance comes from pages that already rank or get cited, which helps a page catch up with the consensus and does little for a page that has to say something new. Original data and plain statements of fact are what the evidence-based AEO guide points to, and no editor writes those for you.

Frase

For: solo writers and small teams on one site. Starter covers 10 articles and 50 audit pages a month, with AI visibility for ChatGPT and Google AI; Scale adds Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.

Not for: agencies with many client domains on a budget; domains are capped per plan (one on Starter, five on Professional).

Price: $49 a month on monthly billing, $39 billed yearly. A 7-day trial with Professional features needs no card.

The honest weakness: the low tier tracks only two engines, so the visibility numbers it shows are partial.

Surfer

For: teams producing a lot of articles. Discovery includes 120 documents; Standard ($99 a month billed yearly) adds tracking of 25 AI prompts weekly; Pro and above refresh daily. A separate AI Search Analytics plan ($82 a month billed yearly) tracks 50 prompts without the editor.

Not for: anyone who wants to pay month to month, since the pricing page shows yearly billing only.

Price: from $49 a month, billed yearly.

The honest weakness: the pricing page offers a free start but does not state the trial length or a refund policy, so read the terms at signup.

Clearscope

For: teams that write fewer, more valuable pages and want an editor that a non-specialist can use. Essentials includes 50 tracked queries, 50 pages and 20 drafts a month, and query tracking is pitched at following how AI answers change.

Not for: high-volume publishing; 20 drafts a month is the cap on both paid tiers, with extra drafts sold separately.

Price: $129 a month for Essentials, $399 for Business. 14-day trial.

The honest weakness: the most expensive entry tier in this group for the fewest drafts.

MarketMuse

For: content strategists deciding what to cover across a topic, rather than grading one draft at a time. Paid tiers are built around tracked topics, briefs and strategy documents.

Not for: anyone who needs a price before a call; paid prices are not published.

Price: free plan with 10 queries a month; paid plans by demo.

The honest weakness: we found no AI-answer feature named on the pricing page, so treat it as a topic-coverage tool that helps GEO indirectly.

Writesonic

For: teams that want writing, site audits and AI visibility tracking from one vendor. Starter includes 50 tracked prompts, 15 articles and 10 site audits a month across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

Not for: buyers who want the optimisation recommendations at the entry price. The Action Center, which turns tracking into on-page and off-page tasks, appears in limited form on Growth ($399 a month) and in full only on Enterprise.

Price: $79 a month billed yearly; the page does not show a monthly-billing figure. Free trial with no card.

The honest weakness: the feature that makes it a GEO tool rather than a writer plus tracker sits several tiers up.

How do you audit the first two jobs yourself?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

For: anyone who wants to check access and structure before paying for content tools. The crawler can switch its user-agent, which also changes which robots.txt directives it follows, so you can crawl as a given bot and see what it is refused. It validates structured data in the free and paid versions.

Not for: people who will not read a crawl report; it finds problems and fixes none of them.

Price: $279 per licence per year; free up to 500 URLs.

The honest weakness: switching the user-agent tests your robots.txt and server rules, but a firewall that fingerprints traffic may still treat a desktop crawler differently from the real bot, so confirm with the bot's own requests in your logs or in Cloudflare's analytics.

How will you know if any of it worked?

You need a measurement before the first change and the same measurement after the last, from an AI visibility tool that asks the engines a fixed set of prompts on a schedule. Without the before, an improvement cannot be told apart from noise or from an engine update. Our free AI visibility check gives a baseline on readiness and on whether engines mention you; run it before you change anything. Expect the two numbers to diverge: our own site scores 90 on readiness and 25 on visibility, which is the gap between being readable and being recommended.

How should you choose?

Work down the four jobs and stop at the first one that fails. If a retrieval bot cannot fetch your pages, fix access with the tool your hosting already supports, which on Cloudflare costs nothing. If the bots can fetch the site but the business is not described consistently in schema, fix structure: Yoast on WordPress, hand-written JSON-LD elsewhere, Schema App only when the site is too large to maintain by hand. Only when both pass does a content optimiser earn its subscription, and then the choice is volume: Frase or Surfer for many articles at $39 to $49 a month, Clearscope for a few important pages, Writesonic if writing and tracking from one vendor matters more than price.