The best AEO tools for optimizing content, schema and crawl access

What are AEO tools?

AEO tools are products that help you make content more likely to be retrieved and cited by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Answer engine optimization has two halves: measuring where you show up, and changing it. This page is about the second half.

If you need the first half, prompt tracking and share of voice, our list of the best AI visibility tools compares eleven trackers, and our roundup of free AI visibility checkers covers one-off checks. Some trackers below also have fix features; we cover them only for those.

The tools here do five jobs. Most teams need two or three, not all five.

How do the 12 AEO tools compare?

Prices are the cheapest paid plan on each vendor's pricing page, with the billing basis, because several vendors show only annual-billed prices.

The 12 best AEO tools, reviewed

The order reflects how much each tool helps the average B2B or content team do AEO work per dollar. We built it from the vendors' own feature and pricing pages; we didn't run controlled tests on citation outcomes, and no tool has published one either.

1. Frase: best overall for answer-first content

Price: Starter $49/mo billed monthly, $39/mo billed yearly; 7-day trial, no card1.

Frase has moved furthest toward AI search of the classic content tools. Its pricing page lists "GEO Optimization" ("Tune content to get cited by AI"), SEO and GEO scores on every plan, and "AI crawler monitoring" from the Professional plan up1. If you host pages on its FraseCMS, it adds structured data and llms.txt to every page. For a small team, it's the cheapest way to get research, briefs and an answer-first editor in one place.

The catch is the score. A "GEO score" is Frase's model of a good page, not a measurement of citations, so use it to catch thin sections, not as proof you'll be quoted.

2. Clearscope: best for editorial teams

Price: Essentials $129/mo, monthly, no contract; 14-day trial2.

Clearscope's most useful AEO feature is "Query fan-out awareness," which it describes as seeing "the web searches AI platforms trigger to construct their answers"2. That maps directly onto how Google AI Overviews and Gemini retrieve sources, through related sub-queries. It also tracks queries in ChatGPT and Gemini. Its Write and Optimize modules, drafts and topic explorations are built for writers and editors rather than analysts, which makes it the easiest fit for a team with freelance writers.

3. Surfer: best if you want optimization and light tracking together

Price: Discovery $49/mo billed yearly; Standard $99/mo billed yearly. Monthly prices aren't shown3.

Surfer lists "GEO content optimization," AI SEO guidelines and a Content Score, and its AI Tracker page pitches "Topical Map and Fanout Queries insights" alongside writing missing "AI-ready articles" in the Content Editor3. AI prompt tracking starts on Standard with 25 prompts checked weekly. That's enough to see whether a rewrite moved anything on a handful of prompts, not enough to replace a dedicated tracker.

4. Goodie: best action platform

Price: Core $399/mo, billed monthly, quarterly or annually (annual gets two months free); 50 action credits a month; 7-day trial4.

Goodie is the clearest example of a tracker turning into a doer. Under "Agents and Optimizations" it lists an AEO Content Writer, Content Optimization, a Technical Agent, "LLM.txt + Sitemap Repair," an Outreach Agent and a Page Visibility Scorecard4. If you have the tracking data but no one to act on it, this is the most complete set of fix tools at a published price. Check what 50 credits buys before committing, since that's the real limit.

5. Writesonic: best for teams already writing with AI

Price: Starter $79/mo billed yearly. Action Center is a trial on Growth ($399/mo billed yearly, five on-page and five off-page actions a month); the full Action Center and content optimization are Enterprise only5.

Read the plan table carefully. The headline features, "Action Center," "Technical Actions" and "Automatic AI Fixes," mostly sit on Growth and above5. Its docs describe flagging robots.txt blocks on AI crawlers and errors served to AI bots, which is real technical value. The $79 plan is mainly an AI writer.

6. AthenaHQ: best for tracking and guided fixes in one tool

Price: Starter $295/mo billed monthly; free Essential plan with a $25 credit6.

AthenaHQ is a tracker first (we review that side in the AI visibility tools comparison). On the doing side, Starter lists a "Content optimization agent" and "On-page and off-page GEO/SEO actions"6. It's credit-based, so model your usage. Pick it if you'd rather buy one tool that tracks and suggests fixes than a tracker plus Frase.

7. Semrush Content Toolkit: best if you already live in Semrush

Price: $60/mo billed annually; 7-day trial7.

The Content Toolkit lists "AI and SEO content optimization," an SEO Brief Generator, Topic Finder and brand-voice writing7. The draw is integration: briefs built from the same keyword data your SEO team already uses.

8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider: best for technical AEO checks

Price: £199 per licence per year; free version crawls up to 500 URLs8.

The cheapest serious way to answer "can an AI crawler read this page?" Screaming Frog lists JavaScript rendering, structured data validation, custom extraction and "Crawl with OpenAI & Gemini," and all of them work in the free version within the 500-URL limit8. Crawl once with rendering off and once with it on: content that only appears with rendering is content a non-rendering fetcher, such as Claude's web fetch tool, may never see. Pair it with Google's free Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator to check markup9.

9. Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow: best free tool for real citation data

Price: free.

The only first-party report of AI citations from a major engine. The AI Performance report, in public preview since 10 February 2026, shows total citations, average cited pages, page-level citation activity and a sample of grounding queries across Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partners10. The same post recommends IndexNow, a free protocol that tells Bing when a URL changes11. That's the "doing" part: publish a fix, ping it, then watch the citation count. Every team on this list should have it set up before paying for anything else.

10. InLinks: best for entity schema without a developer

Price: Freelancer from $49/mo, cancel anytime; free plan available12.

InLinks automates schema and internal links from an entity graph of your site, adding JSON-LD through a script. Be clear about what that buys. Google says structured data isn't required for its generative AI features13, and no AI engine has said it ranks sources on schema. Entity markup helps keep your facts consistent; it isn't a citation lever on its own.

11. Yoast SEO, Rank Math and AIOSEO: best for WordPress sites

Price: free plugins. Paid tiers: Yoast Premium 118.80 a year; Rank Math PRO from €7.99/mo billed annually (introductory); AIOSEO Basic $49.50 for the first year, renewing at $99141516.

All three now generate llms.txt, free in Yoast and Rank Math, and all three generate schema. That's useful housekeeping at no cost. Just don't mistake it for AEO: Google's AI optimization guide says Google Search doesn't use llms.txt and that creating it "will neither harm nor help" visibility in Search13. Our llms.txt guide covers who does read it.

12. AlsoAsked: best for finding follow-up questions

Price: Basic $12/mo for 100 credits ($144 a year)17.

AlsoAsked maps Google's People Also Ask questions into a tree. It has no AI features, and doesn't need them. Those follow-up questions are the closest public proxy for the sub-queries AI Overviews and AI Mode fan out to, so it's the cheapest way to build the section list for a page.

Also considered

• Scrunch AXP serves AI crawlers an AI-friendly version of your site at the CDN. Its price isn't published, and serving bots a different page than people see raises a fair question about keeping the two in sync18.
• Schema App is strong enterprise schema and entity tooling, but it has no list price, a 12-month minimum and no free trial19.
• AnswerThePublic starts at $20/mo and now bundles an AI writing suite. AlsoAsked is more focused for question mapping.
• Profound, MarketMuse, Conductor and AirOps have optimization features but publish no prices we could verify, so we left them off the ranked list.

Do AEO scores predict AI citations?

Not in any public evidence. Content scores are each vendor's model of a well-optimized page. The best independent test of what predicts citations, Slate's 1,000-question study from August 2026, found that page-quality signals like word count separated cited from skipped pages only in Claude. In Perplexity, Google rank mattered and every on-page attribute stayed under 0.10 effect size20. So a higher score helps if it makes the page more complete and quotable, and it can't tell you whether an engine will retrieve the page at all. Retrieval depends on index access and ranking, which is why the technical tools on this list matter as much as the writing tools. Our guide to how AI engines choose sources explains each engine's index.

Which AEO tool stack fits your budget?

Our own free tools fit in the $0 stack too: the citability grader scores a page's answer-first structure, the robots.txt AI checker shows which AI crawlers you allow, and the schema generator builds Organization and FAQ markup.

How should you choose an AEO tool?

Start from the gap, then pick the tool. Three checks tell you where it is:

• Can engines reach the page? If your logs show no OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot hits, or your content needs JavaScript to appear, you need technical tools first. Writing tools can't fix a page that never gets fetched.
• Does the page answer the question? If engines cite competitors' pages on prompts where your page ranks, the gap is the content. That's where Frase, Clearscope or Surfer earn their fee.
• Are you named on the pages engines cite? If the cited pages are third-party listicles and reviews that skip you, no software fixes it. That's outreach, covered step by step in our ChatGPT ranking guide.

Before you buy, run a free trial against five pages you know well and ask the vendor which of its recommendations are backed by citation data rather than its own score. If the third gap is the big one, a tool won't close it. That's the work agencies sell; Arobis AI does it for B2B SaaS, and our list of AEO agencies compares others. The GEO audit checklist turns the three checks into pass/fail tests.

Frequently asked questions

Sources