GEO Araçları Karşılaştırması 2026: Hangi Aracı Seçmeli
Three tabs are open on the screen. In the first, an AI visibility tool's dashboard says "visibility score: 34" for your brand. In the second, a different tool shows half that number for the same brand in the same week. In the third you asked ChatGPT your own question by hand; your brand name sits in the middle of the answer, one of three suggested options. Which one is right?
All three are right about the thing each of them measures. The problem is that the three are not measuring the same thing. One counts the brand name appearing in the answer text, one counts a link in the source list, the third is a single snapshot answer to a single question. Different prompt sets, different engines, different counting rules. When the dashboards disagree, do not look for a bug; look for the definition.
This article takes five tools — Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit and Ahrefs Brand Radar — not through a feature list but through which question each one answers. And one sentence has to be said up front: a tool measures visibility, it does not produce it. Looking at a dashboard does not change your chances of appearing in answers; closing the gap the dashboard shows does. Buying a tool is not doing GEO; it is how you verify that you are doing GEO.
What these tools actually measure: mentions or citations
This is the most confused distinction in the whole category.
Mention: your brand name appears inside the generated answer text. The user reads you but has no link to click. This is an awareness signal. The user may keep your name in mind and search for it directly later; but at that moment it leaves no trace in your analytics.
Citation: a page of your site sits in the answer's source list, clickable. This is the only form that can produce measurable traffic. It shows up as a referrer in your analytics, and you can see which page pulled it.
The two do not always come together. A model recognizing you and writing your name does not require it to cite your site; the reverse is possible too — it can quote a sentence from one of your pages without naming you at all. So the first question to ask any vendor showing a single number called a "visibility score" is this: does this score count mentions, citations, or both? If both, what is the weighting? If the answer is not clear, the score is not clear either.
We detailed this distinction, and which metrics need to be reported separately from each other, in how to measure AI visibility. Take that metric list with you when you evaluate a tool: how many of those metrics can you see separately on its dashboard, and how many are crushed into a single score?
The number a tool gives you is only as good as your prompt set
Every tool ships with a ready-made prompt set. These sets are usually generic and do not match the real buying language of your sector. Leave the tool on its default set and you start tracking the answers to questions your customer never asks.
Build the tracking list yourself, and separate it on three axes:
By funnel stage. Information stage ("how many sessions does implant treatment take"), evaluation stage ("how do I choose an implant clinic in Istanbul"), decision stage ("is this particular clinic trustworthy"), competitor comparison ("what is the difference between A and B"). Appearing at the information stage brings brand awareness; appearing at the decision stage brings customers. Melt them into the same score and you cannot see which one is working.
By customer segment. A corporate buyer and an individual buyer do not phrase things the same way. Keep two separate prompt groups.
By topic. Split out your service headings. If you offer five services, keep a separate group for each; otherwise strong performance in one service masks absence in the other four.
Practical size: 30-60 prompts is enough for most local and mid-sized businesses. More importantly, keep the list fixed. Add and remove prompts every month and your trend line breaks, which makes comparison impossible. If you are going to change it, version it and note the date.
Working out systematically which prompts your competitors lead on is a separate exercise; we set out the method in the competitor analysis guide for AI search. Define the competitor list at the same time as you build your prompt set — you cannot generate the data retroactively later.
Engine coverage: which tool sees what
This is the biggest real difference between the tools. Being strong in one engine does not guarantee being strong in another, because every engine has its own source selection logic and its own knowledge base.
| Engine | Why it matters | Ask before you buy |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | The most widely used; produces answers from both model knowledge and web search | Is the measurement taken with web search on or off? The two give different results |
| Google AI Overviews | Appears above classic search; the highest-volume touchpoint | Technically different from the others, it requires scraping the search result. Does the tool genuinely cover this, or is it "coming soon"? |
| Google AI Mode / Gemini | Google's conversational side; behaves separately from AI Overviews | Is it reported as a separate engine, or merged with AI Overviews? |
| Perplexity | The only major engine built around citing sources; the cleanest data for citation measurement | Are the source URLs reported one by one, or do you only get a number? |
| Microsoft Copilot | Widespread on corporate desktops; should not be ignored for B2B | Is it in scope? In many tools this is the most recently added engine |
Coverage lists change fast — this month's gap can be next month's feature. For that reason we do not give a definitive per-tool coverage table here; verify it from each provider's own current documentation at the moment of purchase and, where possible, test it with your own prompts on a trial account.
For the Turkish market, add one more item: are Turkish prompts and a TR location supported? Some tools appear to support queries in languages other than English but take the results from a US location. For a local service business that means the number you are measuring has nothing to do with the screen your customer sees. During the trial, ask the same prompt both in the tool and by hand from Turkey, and compare.
Perplexity's source selection logic differs noticeably from the other engines; we covered how it works and what it takes to get into its source list in getting cited by Perplexity.
Price bands and who they suit
The figures below are the starting prices advertised at the time of publication; providers change pricing often, and package contents and prompt quotas change too. Check the current pricing page before you decide.
| Tool | Advertised starting price | Typically suits |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly.ai | ~29 USD/month | Single-location small business; a team that wants to try the category at low cost |
| Peec AI | ~89-199 EUR/month band | Mid-sized business; a small agency tracking several clients |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | ~99 USD/month as a separate product; from ~199 USD/month in Semrush One packages | A team already on Semrush that wants this on the same screen as its classic SEO data |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Depends on the Ahrefs plan structure | A team with an Ahrefs subscription that wants brand tracking without managing a separate tool |
| Profound (enterprise platforms) | From around ~499 USD/month | Multi-brand or multi-country setups; teams that need internal reporting and an API |
One common-sense rule holds for the pricing decision: the cost of the tool should be a small line inside your total GEO budget. If half your monthly budget goes to a measurement tool, you have no resource left to produce anything worth measuring. In that case invest in content and the technical side first, and automate measurement at the next stage.
Things to check before signing: monthly or annual commitment, how large the prompt quota is, what happens when you exceed it, how many user seats there are, whether data export (CSV/API) exists, and how long historical data is retained.
What the tools cannot measure
This section is the most skipped part of a tool evaluation. Three things do not appear on the dashboard, and most of the information you need for a decision is in them.
Context and tone in the answer. Your brand name may have appeared — but it may have appeared as "among the affordable options" just as easily as in a sentence about "being hard to get an appointment with". The score counts both as "1 mention". Once a month, read the full answer text of a few of your tracked prompts by hand. What the number does not say, the sentence says.
Why you were not cited. The tool shows the absence, not its cause. The cause might be that your page does not answer that question directly, that the answer is buried inside a long marketing text, that the date and author information is missing, or that no third-party source confirms your claim. None of those is a row on the dashboard; each of them is a separate piece of work.
Which source got the competitor cited. In most cases the model quotes not the competitor's own site but a directory, industry round-up or review site that lists them. The tool tells you "the competitor is ahead"; the actual action is to get into that directory. This is why, in a manual check, collecting the cited URLs is more valuable than collecting the score.
Add sampling noise on top of that: ask the same prompt twice and you can get different answers. A single week's dip is not a signal. Read the trend across at least four measurement points.
Measuring for three months and seeing nothing move needs its own diagnosis; we gathered the causes, and the order in which to check them, in three months of GEO with no results.
Before you buy a tool: a free one-hour check
Do this before you open a subscription. It costs nothing, takes an hour, and teaches you what the tool would be buying you.
- Write 10-15 prompts. Spread them across the funnel stages: three information, five evaluation, three decision, two competitor comparison questions.
- Ask them by hand in three engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (check whether AI Overviews appears). Use an incognito window so session history does not personalize the results, and note your location.
- Write every row into a table. Columns: date, engine, prompt, was the brand mentioned (Y/N), was a link given as a source (Y/N), how far into the answer it was named, which competitors appeared, which third-party sources were cited.
- Take the last column seriously. The "which third-party sources were cited" column is your action list itself. If the same three directories keep coming up, you know what your job is.
- Repeat monthly with the same prompts. Same day, same time window, same order.
After three months you have a data set more meaningful than most free plans give you. And you know which feature you are paying for: whichever column takes the most time in the manual table is the one you are actually buying the tool for.
You bought the tool: measurement is not action
The work does not end the day the subscription opens, it starts. A healthy cycle runs like this:
- Look monthly, not weekly. Weekly fluctuation is mostly noise and produces unnecessary panic.
- Ask one question about every drop: which prompt, which engine, in whose favor? If there is no answer, there is no action either.
- Put every finding into one of three buckets. Content gap (no page answers that question directly), structure problem (the page exists but is not written to be quotable), third-party shortfall (directory, review, press, forum). The fix for each one is different.
- Give every bucket an owner and a date. A finding with no owner sits in the same place on the same dashboard three months later.
- Keep the time ratio. Looking at the dashboard should be a small part of the total time you give to GEO. If it inverts, you are producing reports, not results.
Deciding how much to load onto each of those three buckets is the genuinely hard part of the job; you can find how we work on content, technical infrastructure and third-party visibility on the solutions page.
The number on the dashboard and the actual visitor arriving at your site are two separate tables; to see the second one you need to measure AI traffic on the GA4 side.
A short decision guide
- Single location, limited budget: the manual table first. When you want to automate it, start from the lowest price band.
- Already using Semrush or Ahrefs: try your own package's module first. A separate tool means a separate login and a separate reporting load.
- Multiple brands, multiple countries, team reporting: the enterprise band. API and export genuinely make a difference here.
- The deciding criterion: whose desk will the tool's report land on, and what decision will that person make with it? If those two questions have no clear answer, do not buy the tool; it means you do not yet have a process to measure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do AI visibility tracking tools actually work?
They do if you ask the right question of them. These tools measure systematically how often and in what context your brand appears in AI answers, and they scan prompts and engines regularly at a volume you could not track by hand. But none of them produces visibility; they only report the current state. Buy the tool and do no work on content, page structure and third-party visibility, and the dashboard will show the same number for months. The tool exists to verify the result of work done, not to take the place of the work.
What is the difference between a mention and a citation?
A mention is your brand name appearing in the answer text the AI produces; the user reads you but has no link to click, so it is a brand awareness signal and leaves no direct trace in your analytics. A citation is a page of your site appearing in the answer's source list in clickable form, and it is the only form that can produce measurable traffic. The two can happen independently of each other: a model can cite your page without naming you, just as it can write your name and give no link at all. With tools that show a single "visibility score", always ask how these two are weighted.
Which is the cheapest AI visibility tool?
By the starting prices advertised at the time of publication, Otterly.ai represents the lowest band at around 29 USD/month; Peec AI sits in the roughly 89-199 EUR/month range, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit starts at around 99 USD/month as a separate product or around 199 USD/month in Semrush One packages, and enterprise platforms such as Profound start from around 499 USD/month. These figures change often and cannot be compared directly, because package contents and prompt quotas differ. When you decide, weigh the prompt quota, the engine coverage and Turkish query support alongside the price.
Can I measure my AI visibility without buying a tool?
You can, and in the first stage that is the recommended path. Prepare a list of 10-15 prompts, ask them by hand in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google in an incognito window, and record the results in a simple table: date, engine, prompt, was the brand mentioned, was a link given as a source, which competitors appeared and which third-party sources were cited. This takes about an hour and, repeated monthly, produces a more meaningful data set within three months than most free plans do. It also shows you which step tires you out most, which in turn clarifies which tool you should buy.
How many prompts should a tracking list have?
For most local and mid-sized businesses 30-60 prompts is a sufficient start; what actually decides it is not the number but whether the list is spread evenly across funnel stages, customer segments and service headings. Track only information-stage questions and you measure awareness while missing purchase intent. Once the list is built, keeping it fixed matters more than the number, because adding and removing prompts every month breaks the trend line and makes month-to-month comparison meaningless.