Best GEO tools for small businesses: prices checked, and what to buy first

Search "best GEO tools for small business" and a dozen names turn up within minutes. Nearly all of them are one of four things: a free checker, a one-time audit, a monthly dashboard, or an agency retainer. We sell exactly one of those four — the one-time audit — so the bias is declared up front. Everything else on this page is described by what it publicly states, at its published price, with a fit judgement written for a single-location business on a finite budget.

The list at a glance

• Google Search Console — $0. Shows which of your pages Google's AI features actually surfaced.
• Manual spot checks — $0. Ten to twenty buyer questions a month, written down.
• Our free check — $0. A technical pre-flight of your site, plus the exact 30 questions a full measurement would ask.
• Our llms.txt checker — $0. Whether your domain serves the AI-facing files at all.
• Otterly.ai — from $29/month. The cheapest dedicated tracker here — though several engines cost extra.
• Semrush — $165/month billed annually. AI search tracking bundled into a full SEO suite.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar — from $50/month. An add-on for businesses already paying for Ahrefs.
• Peec AI — €90–€499/month in third-party listings. Enterprise-leaning, quoted on a call.
• Our one-time audit — $4.99 once. 30 questions across five AI surfaces, every claim fact-checked.

Vendor prices were read from their own pricing pages on 2026-10-07; our price is current as of 21 October 2026. Tiers change; verify before you buy.

Tier 1: the free routes ($0)

Google Search Console. In its Performance report, Google shows the impressions your pages earned inside AI Overviews — the only figure on this page whose source is Google itself. It answers the one question no paid tool answers better: whether Google's AI features surfaced your pages at all. Read it monthly, then look at the rest of this list.

Manual spot checks. Pick 10–20 questions a real buyer would ask, ask them in a clean session once a month, and write the answers down. It costs an hour, it catches what a dashboard summary rounds off, and for a single-location business it is a genuine baseline rather than a toy version of one.

Our free check and llms.txt checker. This pair is ours, so weigh it accordingly. The free check reads your site, runs the technical pre-flight, and shows the exact buyer questions a full measurement of your market would ask — two minutes, no account, no card. The llms.txt checker tells you which AI-facing files your domain serves at all. Neither assigns a score, and neither tells you whether assistants name you: a free check inspects what you publish; it does not measure what machines say about you. Free is still the right first step — the way a readable shop sign is fair and necessary — it is just not a measurement.

Tier 2: the monthly dashboards ($29 to about €500 a month)

Otterly.ai — AI search monitoring built for marketing teams, tracking brand mentions and links across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces. Published plans: Lite $29/month (billed monthly; $25 annually), Standard $189/month and Premium $489/month, with Enterprise custom from 1,000 prompts. Read the structure before comparing headline prices: Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude tracking are paid add-ons per engine ($9–$149/month depending on tier), so the $29 entry price does not cover every assistant your buyers use. Best fit: a business with someone whose job includes watching prompts every week.

Semrush — bundles AI-search tracking into its plans rather than selling it separately. The "SEO + AI Search" tier starts at $165/month billed annually ($199 monthly), one step above its entry SEO plan. A sensible upgrade if your team already works inside Semrush; hard to justify if the AI data is all you are after.

Ahrefs Brand Radar — an add-on to an Ahrefs subscription. The AI Visibility Index starts at $50/month; prompt-level tracking starts at $199/month (83 prompts a day, 2,500 checks a month, all platforms), with an all-models tier at $699/month. It makes sense for businesses already paying for Ahrefs and wanting AI citations next to backlink data; bought for this alone, it is the most expensive route here.

Peec AI — a Berlin dashboard, enterprise-leaning, with media and consumer brands on its customer list. Third-party listings put it around €90–€499/month; the vendor sells on a call. If you are weighing that against a one-off, our ledger of one-time alternatives does the arithmetic.

The trade-off, in one paragraph. What you buy in this tier is cadence, and cadence is the part a single-location business may not need. The changes you control land on a weeks-scale clock: the assistant has to re-crawl, re-read and re-decide, so one re-measure after your fixes catches most of the movement. Daily or weekly movement is the right granularity for an agency watching thirty clients, and the wrong one for a shop deciding what to fix next month. The one-time versus monitoring fit guide is the long version of this paragraph.

Before you pay any of them, get four answers in writing: who owns the time series if you cancel; can you export it; which engines exactly are included at that price; and is the counting rule published. A dashboard that shows a score without the underlying answers is a verdict, not a measurement.

Tier 3: the one-time audit ($4.99 once — the route we sell)

A one-time audit asks real buyer questions of live AI systems once, grades every answer against a published counting rule, checks every claim made about your business against your own pages, and hands you fixes you can implement without hiring anyone. Ours, concretely: 30 real buyer questions across five live AI surfaces — ChatGPT (searching the web), Gemini (searching the web), Claude (from memory), Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode — producing 176 graded answers from 302 API calls. You get the answers verbatim, each claim fact-checked against your pages, and copy-paste fix code. $4.99, once, with no subscription behind it. A 30-day money-back applies, the method is published, and a complete real report is free to read, so you can see the deliverable before paying anything.

Fit: a single-location business that does not want another login, and does not want to fund a year of monitoring before knowing whether the channel matters. The honest limit: it is a snapshot, not a live trend line. If you need weekly movement, that is Tier 2 — and after one audit you will know which engines and questions are worth watching.

What no tool on this list fixes

Every tool above measures the same thing: presence — whether you appeared, whether you were cited, whether the number went up. None of them checks whether what was said was true. In our published sample — a Nashville med spa, measured fresh — the assistants made 14 wrong factual claims among 333 claims checked, and produced 53 price quotes, 17 of which had no price on the business's own site to check them against. Every one of those wrong answers would count as a mention on a tracking dashboard. A brand appearing next to a wrong price is not visibility; it is a referral working against you.

That is why the order of operations matters more than the choice of tool: get the facts about your business right first, then pay for cadence. A dashboard watching a wrong answer only means you hear about it every day instead of once.

What to buy first

1. Run the free layer this week. Google Search Console, our free check, one written spot check. Cost: zero, and you will know what your site does and does not put in machine-readable form.
2. Buy one audit. If the free layer surfaced gaps — or you simply do not know what AI tells buyers about you — one audit settles it for about the price of a coffee, once, with no recurring charge behind it.
3. Fix, then check again. Once the changes have had time to surface, ask the same questions: did the wrong claims drop out of the answers?
4. Only then consider recurring spend. If the channel proves real for your buyers — and you need trend lines, many locations, or client reporting — choose from Tier 2 with the four questions above, and arrive with your own baseline: a measurement you commissioned yourself is the only way to check anyone's later claims of improvement.
5. Stopping after step 3 is a win, not a failure. If the audit shows your category is barely asked about yet, or your record is already clean, keep the money. A measurement is allowed to tell you not to spend.

For the wider picture — free checkers, one-off human audits, agency retainers, and where $4.99 sits among them — our comparison of seven published price points lays out the whole ladder.

Start with the free check: all 30 questions in full, before you decide anything. And if you want to see what an audit returns, the full sample report is free to read.