GEO Tools vs Doing the Work: What 31 Products Measure and None Fix

A market of dedicated tools has grown around getting brands into AI answers. We catalogued 31 of them against a five-point capability scale and priced the band. They are more capable than the sceptical take allows: most now audit and optimise rather than only report. They also share one boundary, and it is the boundary that decides whether software solves your problem or just describes it.

The short version

We catalogued 31 generative-engine-optimization products and priced the band: roughly $95 a month at entry, $595 for self-serve enterprise. On a five-point scale of monitor, audit, optimise, generate and deliver, the leaders now reach four of five; only a minority stop at monitoring. What none of them does is close the loop from a citation to a lead. That is the gap our own AI Search Visibility work exists to fill, and it is why we built a probe panel rather than renting a tracker. Every product in the set reports share of answer. None reports pipeline. That gap is not a flaw in any one tool; it is the shape of the category.

The capability scale

Capability	What it means	Where the category sits
Monitor	Reports whether you appear	Universal
Audit	Diagnoses why, page by page	Common
Optimise	Recommends or ships fixes	Leaders only
Generate	Produces the content itself	Leaders only
Deliver	Serves optimised content to engines directly	Rare

What we found software does well

A baseline in hours

The fastest honest deliverable in this discipline. Knowing which of your buyer questions return you is the input every other decision needs, and a tool produces it before lunch.

Breadth we cannot match by hand

Our own panel runs 62 queries. A tool at the mid band tracks hundreds. If breadth matters to your category, that is real value.

Movement a quarterly check misses

Position in this category churns hard. Our own two-date comparison found a 100% turnover among agency leaders inside 52 days, and continuous tracking sees that faster than a quarterly manual check.

Where every one of them stops

1. They report share of answer, not revenue. A rising visibility score with flat pipeline is the most common outcome in this category and the least discussed.
2. They cannot reach off-domain answers. On our 62-query panel (16-18 September 2026), 27 of the 56 answers that cited anything cited YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit or Quora. A tool can tell you that; it cannot go and participate.
3. They do not gate on originality. The leaders generate content. None advertises refusing to publish something that adds nothing, which is the difference between producing pages and earning citations.
4. They grade with their own metric. A vendor-defined blended score is exactly the number a vendor can move without moving your business.
5. They cannot decide what deserves a page. Volume of tracked prompts is not a content plan, and a tool that reports 400 gaps has given you a list, not a sequence.

When to buy software, and when not to

Buy it to size the problem before funding a solution. Buy it when your category is broader than the 62 queries we track by hand. Buy it when someone on your team is contracted to act on what it reports. Do not buy it as a substitute for the work: reporting is not remediation, and a dashboard that never becomes a published page or an earned placement has changed one thing, your monthly spend. The Princeton GEO research, Aggarwal et al., measured passage-level changes lifting visibility by up to 40% under controlled conditions, and those changes are made by someone writing, not by a tool observing.

What we use and what we built instead

We run our own probe panel rather than buying a tracker, for one reason: we wanted the loop to end at leads rather than at share of answer, and no product in the set does that. Our own reading is published either way. Across 8 Dubai buyer questions Ivanooo scored 0% named and 0% cited on three dates, and our Share of Recommendation across the 62-query panel reads 0.0, with 59 of 62 questions returning us absent. As Firoz Azees puts it: "a measured zero is a work order; a flattering estimate is a story you tell yourself."

Questions buyers ask

Which tool should I buy? The one whose tracked-prompt count matches your category's breadth, at the cheapest band that covers it. Above that, the differences are workflow preferences rather than capability gaps.

Is the entry band enough? For a baseline, yes. At roughly $95 a month you are buying monitoring, and your team does everything else.

Do I still need an agency if I buy software? If you lack the writing or placement skills, yes. The in-house versus agency split turns on which of three skills you already employ.

Can a tool tell me what to write? It can tell you which questions you lose. Deciding which of those deserves its own page is a judgment the category does not automate, and getting it wrong produces doorway pages.

Why does the lead gap matter so much? Because share of answer is a proxy. If it rises and pipeline does not, you have bought a metric. Ours is the loop we chose to build rather than rent.

Are the tools worth it for a small business? Rarely on day one. One manual reading of 8 questions costs an hour and answers the only question you have at that stage: which answers am I absent from. We ran exactly that before building anything.

How fast does this market move? Fast enough that any list of 31 is dated on publication. We keep ours as a tracked registry rather than an article, and 21 of the 31 remain unresearched in depth, which we record rather than paper over.

At Ivanooo, Firoz Azees runs Distinctiveness Engineering for the AI-answer era: measuring who the engines name, cite and recommend, then engineering the gap between listed and chosen. Start with a free AI visibility check.