GEO tools typically work by analyzing your website or content topic to find content gaps, evaluate current performance, and compare you to competitors. You simply input your website URL or main topic, and the tool does the heavy lifting.
Some GEO tools, like LLMrefs, offer extra helpful features such as A/B testers that tell you which meta descriptions or titles LLMs prefer to read. I generally recommend tools that focus more on actions than just data, because it's really easy to get lost in endless data and fall into analysis paralysis, given the millions of opportunities.
Action oriented tools will let output you the best keywords, topics and placements (e.g. Reddit) for content that LLMs should cite.
Connect your Google Search Console and Google Analytics account to the GEO Tools to let them sift through relevant data for you, alongside the LLM insights.
Brand vs. Query Focus: Geo Tools either focus on Brand visibility with brand citations (Promptwatch, Wellows) or on finding the right queries for your niche (LLMrefs, semrush). For my business for example the brand focus is useless because I don't care how often I'm mentioned, I want pages to mention my content, not my brand. So when you get started, consider first what it is that you want the tool to output for you.
Segmentation per countries not languages: A fact that really surprised me is that cited pages are grouped differently for different countries, even when they share the same language. For example, my image generator page answers 99 US prompts, but only 15 British and 14 Australian ones. I'm still trying to figure out why this happens.
Feeling lost in the beginning: Since this is such a new area, I often found myself unsure how to interpret certain data. I wish the platforms provided more information on how to understand these metrics.
FAQs vs. regular content: It's interesting to see that my second website, www.whichaitool.com, where we target LLM searches by answering questions only in FAQs, usually has double the AI visibility of my main site despite having a very low authority score (normal for a new site).
Keyword vs. sentiment: I believe that in the future, keywords won't be as important for SEO as they are now. Sure, you still need to make your overall topic clear to LLMs by mentioning it throughout your content. But the exact wording will matter less as LLMs will decide for themselves which content is relevant to the query. I'm already focusing more on creating unique and relevant content while putting less emphasis on keyword placement.
To optimize your website for AI-generated search answers like ChatGPT, follow these 5 points:
1.Crawlability for AI
Make sure AI bots (GPTBot, Google-Extended) can crawl your site by allowing them in your robots.txt file and ensuring fast Core Web Vitals and mobile speed.
2.Schema markup
Use structured data (JSON-LD) like Organization, Article, FAQ, and HowTo on key pages to help LLMs easily extract facts and authors. What's great for SEO is a must for GEO.
3.Content structure and TLDRs
Use clear headings, lists, tables, visible dates, and authors so AI prefers your easily scannable content. For longer content, add a TLDR at the top of your page to help bots decide if your page is relevant.
4.Authority through regular updates
Regularly update your page and refresh insights. You can assume your content gets copied across the internet, so stay ahead as a thought leader rather than just copying others. This builds additional authority with LLMs.
5.Site architecture
Maintain flat URLs, strong internal links, HTTPS, and noindex thin pages to guide AI through your best content hierarchy.
Isn't it ironic how less than 2 years ago we were thinking about how to prevent LLMs from stealing our content? Today GEO tools include bot crawl detectors which will make sure the opposite is the case. If I had to look into my crystal ball, I'd say that a monetisation system similar to YouTube's will be launched within the next 5 years.
How else will pages like mine be able to monetise and continue to create valuable content, if the queries and their clicks are not reaching my website anymore? LLMs will be interested in unique content and will incentivise creators who generate their own insights. After all, it's their fuel.
I really like LLMrefs; it's one of the more intuitive tools I've tested. It's super easy to work with, and the free plan is generous because it already gives you real features to start working with, even if you don't sign up.
Their ChatGPT-powered split testing tool is fantastic - it reveals which meta description or website copy AI search engines actually prefer, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of optimization.
And I love the prompt explorer feature where the geo tool shows you the most common prompts users would request from an LLM in your area. This gives you incredible insight into what people in your region are actually asking AI for.
LLMrefs includes a Reddit thread finder, which makes it even clearer that Reddit will soon be infiltrated even more than it is now by brands looking to leverage these insights.
The AI crawl checker is really useful too. It checks if all your settings are properly configured so that bots can reference your page. Before the era of LLMs, bots crawling your page wasn't necessarily a good thing. Today, ironically, we want them to "steal" our content.
What I really like about LLMrefs is that it gives you such a good roadmap and action points on what to improve. Especially compared to the more data-focused platforms like Semrush, this is actually helpful to get stuff done rather than just overwhelming you with numbers.
Promptwatch is better for brands, because the main features are brand visibility, Top Cited Domains or Organic Brand Mentions. Whatever I tried, I could always just see my brand, queries were connected to AItoolssme (not helpful) and citations too. Of course I'm looking for keywords like AI tools List etc. instead. But for brands I do see the value and I think it's a good tool, although I felt a bit lost getting started with it.
Also, Promptwatch has some super helpful features, e.g., Track AI search traffic to find out how big the LLM search volume of my topic is.
I like the "AI Search Performance" feature which tells me how many of the visitors arrived at my page through LLMs. You just have to past a code in the header of your website.
Promptwatch categorized me as a B2B company, which is funny, because in the end it is, I just never looked at it this way.
Another tool to offer a special discount when canceling the trial plan, 30% for 3 months ;)
Weird that if I test this tool over a new test email, then my AI visibility is 7/100, but over my regular account, it's 20.
To be honest, I'm not very fond of the Semrush AI toolkit. I simply didn't find it too helpful. I feel more overloaded by data than having an action plan after using it.
For example, I checked the Topic Opportunities feature and received 72K topics. When I ordered them by AI volume, I received very irrelevant topics, like YouTube and Video Streaming Platforms and Amazon Prime Services. So this feature disappoints because I'd have to sift through so many suggestions.
The Competitors Research was disappointing too, as 2 out of 4 competitors it assigned to me were not relevant: Reddit and Medium. Measuring them against me for the already irrelevant topics it suggested is silly. If you enter your real competitors, and all of a sudden, you don't look so bad in comparison anymore.
With SEMrush, I feel like the tool is trying to sell itself to you by always positioning you low. For example, in the competitor research, it chose only pages that were outperforming me and, therefore, made me look bad. The competitors I'm watching are in a similar range as me.
By the way, once you try to cancel the trial account and go through their lengthy questionaire why you want to leave, you're offered a 50% discount on the first month. Keep that in mind if you want to use semrush despite my bad review of their tool ;)
Wellows looks to me as if it was build with lovable, the simple dashboard makes it easy to get around and not get overwhelmed by too many features.
Let's start with it's weaknesses:
Surprisingly, according to Wellows, I have no LLM visibility at all. Surprisingly, that's not what other tools said (see Semrush).
The suggested topics after scanning my website were not relevant to my business; they included keywords like Security, Performance, Customisation, Pricing Value, etc. These keywords can often be found on my website as they are part of the rating factors or from the tool comparisons, but by context, it could have understood that the overarching topic is AI tools. So I recommend to enter your own competitors and keywords to have a good base to work with. For the Explicit opportunities it seems to only give me topics involving consultants, not really my target audience. Implicit opportunities it can't find any.
The strenghts: I like the clarity of the dashboard, not overloading me with too much information like other tools. I also like the dashboard where you see a breakdown of all the LLM traffic coming to your page.
Passionfruit Labs is so much cheaper than all other GEO tools that I was rightfully suspicious. I'm still not sure if this is a lead generator actually for their consultation business, because the content Strategy feature is a bit weird: they suggest different gaps in content, but when you choose a topic to implement, they want to book an implementation meeting with you.
I think Passionfruit Labs is another product most likely built with Lovable and would require more experience for this specific topic.
I had to give Passionfruit Labs my domain and 4 competitors to get started and also tried to connect my Google analytics account but it didn't work.
Also all 10 topics they suggested are basically the same, only a word is changed in the suggested titles, but all are about ai tools for SMEs. I was looking for more variety, content too close to each other would cannibalise itself.
Prompt Analytics: I could only work with 5 predefined keywords I chose out of a list of about 20 in this feature, but they are not 100% what I’m looking for. A free search would make much more sense.
Basically all data I see within this platform is only based on 5 provided but irrelevant prompts.
