Recommended Generative Engine Optimization Software: 3 Picks

Generative engine optimization (GEO) software, in the form most tool lists recommend, asks AI assistants your buyers' questions every day and records whether your brand appears in the answers. For a solo business in September 2026, I would choose between three entry plans by the engines you need: HubSpot AEO at $50 a month, Otterly.AI Lite at $29 and Peec AI Starter at $95.

Three entry plans, compared on the same points

Prices below come from each vendor's own page, checked on 30 September 2026, in US dollars. "Answers per month" multiplies prompts, engines and 30 days of daily tracking, the same method Peec AI uses on its pricing page.

HubSpot AEO: free to start, on three chat assistants. $50 a month, or $45 a month paid annually, with no other HubSpot subscription required. It tracks 25 prompts daily in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with a cap of 2,500 answers a month (HubSpot knowledge base, updated 27 August 2026). You can track the same 25 prompts for free before paying, with no card, and the data carries over. The product is labeled beta, and its three engines leave out Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot and Claude.

Otterly.AI Lite: the cheapest way to watch Google AI Overviews and Copilot. $29 a month, or $25 a month billed annually. It tracks 15 prompts daily in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, about 1,800 answers a month if each prompt runs once a day on each engine. Gemini and Google AI Mode cost $9 a month each on this plan, Claude $29. The limit to know before you start: Lite cannot buy extra prompts, so a 16th question means moving to Standard at $189.

Peec AI Starter: the most prompts, on the engines you choose. $95 a month, or $80 a month billed annually (€85 and €70 for visitors shown euro prices). It tracks 50 prompts daily in three models you pick among ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini: 4,500 answers a month, for one project. Each extra model costs $35 a month on this plan. Claude does not appear among the models its pricing page offers on self-serve plans.

Per answer, the three cost about the same: roughly $22 per thousand for HubSpot, $16 for Otterly.AI and $21 for Peec AI at monthly prices. So choose on two things. Which engines do your buyers actually use, and how many distinct questions do they ask before buying? Up to 15 questions with Google's AI Overviews in the mix, Otterly.AI Lite. Up to 25 questions on the chat assistants alone, HubSpot AEO. More than 25 questions, or more than 15 with AI Overviews, Peec AI Starter.

Before paying anything: Bing's free citation report

Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report in public preview on 10 February 2026 (Bing announcement). It counts how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and "select partner integrations", lists the cited pages, and shows a sample of the "grounding queries" that retrieved them. These are real citations, not answers to prompts you picked, and the tool is free once your site is verified.

It covers Microsoft's surfaces only and shows no clicks. Google offers no separate report: Search Console counts AI Overviews and AI Mode appearances inside the ordinary Web performance data (Google Search Central). Open the Bing report first and use its grounding queries as raw material for your prompt list.

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Judge AI visibility by how often you appear across many runs, not by the position shown in a single answer.

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Read the mention rate, never the rank

In a study published in January 2026, SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI, 2,961 times in total (SparkToro study). The chance that two answers to the same prompt named the same brands was under 1 in 100; the same order, about 1 in 1,000. Yet on the headphones prompt, the leading brands still appeared in 55 to 77% of answers. The authors call "visibility % across dozens to hundreds of prompts run multiple times" a reasonable metric, and say a tool that gives a "ranking position in AI" is "full of baloney".

Trackers often show an average position beside the mention rate; Peec AI's documentation defines one. Read the rate, pooled across prompts, and treat a single check in your own ChatGPT window as one draw from a list that changes every time.

A worked example: 15 prompts for a fictional business

The business and every number in this section are invented to show the method. Stillbook is a one-person booking app for independent yoga teachers. Its 15 prompts fit Otterly.AI Lite exactly, or HubSpot AEO with room for ten more:

Unbranded: does an assistant recommend Stillbook?
1.  best booking app for yoga teachers
2.  best scheduling software for a solo yoga studio
3.  cheapest way to take bookings for private yoga classes
4.  yoga booking app with class packs and payments
5.  simple alternative to Mindbody for one teacher
6.  how do I stop no-shows for my yoga classes
7.  how can students book and pay for yoga online
8.  how do I sell a 10-class pass online
9.  how to run a waitlist for yoga classes
10. how to take yoga bookings from Instagram

Branded: what does an assistant say about Stillbook?
11. Stillbook reviews
12. Stillbook pricing
13. is Stillbook good for yoga teachers
14. Stillbook alternatives
15. Stillbook vs Mindbody

Unbranded prompts measure whether you get recommended. Branded prompts check whether the facts about you are right, and those need no statistics: if the answers to "Stillbook pricing" keep quoting last year's price, put the current price in plain text on your pricing page today.

Now the first month. The ten unbranded prompts on four engines produce 1,200 answers, and Stillbook appears in 84 of them: a 7% mention rate. On prompt 8, Stillbook appears in 9 of 30 ChatGPT answers. The next month, 12 of 30. Progress?

Not on that evidence. The 95% Wilson interval around 9 of 30 runs from about 17% to 48%; around 12 of 30, from 25% to 58%. The ranges overlap almost completely. Pooled over all ten unbranded prompts and four engines, a move from 84 to 120 mentions out of 1,200 is closer to a signal: 5.7 to 8.6% against 8.4 to 11.8%, which barely overlap. The same prompt asked on consecutive days is not an independent draw, so the true uncertainty is wider than these intervals. The rule I propose: judge progress on the pooled unbranded rate over at least two months, never on one prompt in one month. Two months is a rule of thumb, not a threshold; more prompts or more engines give you more answers and a shorter wait.

When the recommendation changes

Your buyers use Claude. HubSpot AEO does not track it and Peec AI's pricing page does not list it for self-serve plans, so Otterly.AI Lite plus its Claude add-on, $58 a month in total, is the entry option among these three.

The free tracking shows zero mentions everywhere. If HubSpot's free prompts and the Bing report both come back empty, a paid plan would record that zero every day. Spend the month on your pages instead, answering the questions from your prompt list in plain text, then track again.

You already pay for an SEO suite. Some now include AI prompt tracking, as Semrush's pricing page shows. Check your current plan before adding a second subscription.

You would rather pay someone. Visibility work is one of the offers sorted in AI Marketing Agency: Three Offers and Five Questions to Ask. Hand the agency your prompt list and ask for the mention rate before and after, on those prompts. To follow the field yourself, Growth Memo is the pick on AI search among four AI marketing newsletters sorted by job and reading time.

FAQ

Do I need special markup or an AI text file to appear in Google's AI answers?

No. Google states that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode" and that you do not need "new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup". A GEO tool that sells markup as the fix for Google is selling something Google says you do not need.