AI Search Engine Optimization Tools: What You Actually Need

Start with four free things and one habit

You probably need no paid tool yet. These four are free, and the habit is what turns them into evidence.

1. Google Search Console. Your own queries and pages, plus a generative AI performance report for impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report, in preview, shows citations in Copilot and Bing summaries.
3. A crawler. Screaming Frog's free version covers up to 500 URLs, enough for many small sites.
4. A spreadsheet. For the prompt log described in how to track your brand in AI answers.

The habit is a monthly run of the same prompts. Without it, a dashboard only gives you a prettier number.

Five questions to answer before you buy

Most small businesses stop at the second question. That is a good result, because the fix costs nothing.

Four stages and what each adds

Prices below are published figures we read in November 2026, shown in the currency on each page. Monthly totals are our arithmetic.

The costs of Stage 2 plus a paid crawler are worked out in our AI SEO tools comparison, and the feature detail for trackers is in the visibility tools comparison.

A Cyprus example: languages and countries change the count

This example is illustrative. A Limassol clinic wants to know how assistants describe it to English-speaking residents and to Greek speakers. It writes 20 prompts and runs them in both languages, which makes 40 prompts. That already exceeds the 15 prompts in Otterly.AI's Lite plan and fits inside the 50 in Peec AI's Starter plan, at USD 95 a month by the page we read. Peec's Starter also covers one country, and its Pro and Advanced plans list three, so a business that wants to track Cyprus and one more market needs to check the country limit before the prompt limit.

We have not checked how well any tracker handles Greek-language answers, and you should test that in a trial. Our own October 2026 sample of 33 results pages found Google AI Overviews on every one, but we have not measured Greek-language results separately.

What Stage 0 looks like in hours

Free does not mean effortless. This is a realistic monthly time budget for one site and about 20 prompts. The hours are our estimates, not a measured benchmark.

That adds up to roughly 2 hours 45 minutes. If you already spend more than about 2 hours on the prompt runs alone, a tracker starts to make sense, because it replaces the largest line in the table. If the run takes 30 minutes, it does not.

Before you cancel or switch

Tools hold your history, and history is what you cannot rebuild. Before you subscribe, check what you can export. Before you cancel, export the raw answers, the prompt list and the settings, not only the summary charts. Otterly.AI's Standard and Premium plans list API and MCP requests, and its Lite plan does not, while SE Ranking's Core and Growth plans list API credits and MCP access. Those routes are worth asking about, for any vendor, if you want your data in a spreadsheet you control.

What tools cannot replace

• The choice of questions. A tool tracks what you give it.
• Judgement about accuracy. A tool can flag that you were mentioned. It cannot know your prices were wrong in the answer.
• Access fixes. A tracker will report that you are missing. It will not unblock a bot.
• Good pages. Google's guide asks for original, non-commodity content. No tool supplies it.

What to ignore for now

• llms.txt generators. None of the OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity crawler documentation we read says their search crawlers use the file. See what llms.txt is.
• "AI schema" generators. Google says its AI features need no special markup.
• Bulk article writers. Mass-produced pages with no added value risk Google's scaled content abuse policy.
• "AI readiness" scores with no stated method.

A buying brief you can copy

Before a demo, write these five lines and send them to the vendor:

1. The prompts we need to track, and in which languages.
2. The engines that must be included in the price.
3. The countries we sell to.
4. The export we need each month.
5. The decision this tool will change.

If a vendor cannot answer in writing, move on. For our part, the AI search optimization service uses the free stack first and we quote in writing. Start with question one in the table above and write the list of 20 questions.