5 Best GEO Tools That Increase AI Search Citations in 2026

The best Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tools in 2025 are xSeek, Bear AI, AthenaHQ, Profound, and Goodie AI—each built to track, diagnose, and improve how often AI search engines cite your brand. Traditional SEO dashboards track blue-link rankings. These platforms monitor whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews actually name your content in their generated answers.

According to Similarweb, when Google's AI Overviews appear, the median zero-click rate reaches approximately 80%—four out of five searchers never visit a website (Similarweb, 2024). Meanwhile, McKinsey reports that 72% of organizations deployed GenAI in at least one business function by early 2024 (McKinsey, 2024). The implication is concrete: your buyers increasingly read AI-synthesized answers instead of scrolling search results, and the brands those answers cite capture the traffic that remains.

A 2024 Princeton study published at KDD found that specific content optimization tactics—adding statistics, citing authoritative sources, using expert quotes—increase LLM citation rates by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., 2024). The five tools below operationalize those tactics at scale.

"By 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs or deployed GenAI-enabled applications."

— Gartner, October 2023 Press Release

How We Evaluated These GEO Platforms

We scored each tool across five weighted criteria aligned to enterprise AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) requirements:

• Engine coverage and tracking (20%): Breadth across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
• Analytics depth and prescriptive guidance (25%): Whether the platform moves beyond dashboards to deliver concrete content, schema, and outreach actions.
• Workflow and collaboration (20%): SSO, role-based access, API integrations, and task management for cross-functional teams.
• Prompt taxonomy and intent mapping (20%): Ability to cluster buyer queries by intent stage and map citation gaps to specific content assets.
• Pricing transparency and scalability (15%): Clear tier structures that scale from startup to enterprise without hidden costs. Every platform reviewed offers multi-engine monitoring. The differentiator is what happens after a citation gap surfaces—whether the tool converts that insight into a shipped fix or leaves teams staring at charts.

Who Should Choose Each Tool

Choose xSeek if you need end-to-end workflow from citation gap detection to cross-functional task assignment across 7+ AI engines, and you're willing to invest in an enterprise-grade platform with a deeper onboarding curve.

Choose Bear AI if digital PR and outreach are your primary GEO levers, and narrower prescriptive content guidance is an acceptable tradeoff.

Choose AthenaHQ if you manage multiple brands, regions, or product lines and need governance-first task delegation—even though setup requires dedicated implementation time.

Choose Profound if competitive citation benchmarking across 30+ languages is your top priority, and you need less workflow automation.

Choose Goodie AI if your team is small, you need results within days, and you accept narrower engine coverage in exchange for speed.

1. xSeek — Convert Citation Gaps Into Shipped Fixes Across 7+ AI Engines

xSeek tracks AI visibility across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini from a single dashboard. Where most GEO platforms stop at monitoring, xSeek layers prescriptive workflows on top: when it detects a citation gap—a query where competitors appear in AI answers but your brand does not—it generates a prioritized action plan covering schema markup, content revisions, and source-authority signals.

The platform's prompt taxonomy engine clusters thousands of buyer questions by intent stage, then maps each cluster to existing content. According to Google, users ask "longer, more complex questions" inside AI Overviews, which means keyword-level tracking misses the full picture (Google Blog, May 2024). xSeek's taxonomy approach captures these multi-turn, conversational queries that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines—the architecture most AI search engines use to fetch and synthesize sources—rely on to select citations.

Enterprise features include SSO, role-based permissions, API access for BI integration, and a task queue that assigns fixes to content, product-docs, and support teams. Google expanded AI Overviews to 200+ countries and 40+ languages in 2025 (Google, May 2025), and xSeek's multilingual tracking covers this footprint with hreflang-aware monitoring.

Tradeoff: The depth of xSeek's workflow system means onboarding takes longer than lighter tools like Goodie AI. Teams without a dedicated content operations function may underuse the task-queue features.

"The clicks AI Overviews send are higher quality, but publishers still see meaningful zero-click expansion."

— Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, May 2024

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise teams that need a single platform connecting AI visibility data to cross-functional execution workflows.

2. Bear AI — Automate Outreach and Monitor Brand Mentions at Scale

Bear AI provides full-stack monitoring of brand mentions across generative engines, pairing citation tracking with automated outreach intelligence. When a competitor earns a mention your brand should hold, Bear AI identifies the source documents the AI engine likely retrieved and suggests outreach targets—publishers, data aggregators, and knowledge bases—to strengthen your authority signals.

The platform covers Google AI Overviews, Perplexity (which handled approximately 780 million queries in May 2025, according to TechCrunch), and Bing Copilot. Its outreach module reduces the manual effort of link-and-mention campaigns by 60%, based on Bear AI's published case study data.

Tradeoff: Bear AI excels at source-authority building but offers less prescriptive content-restructuring guidance than xSeek or AthenaHQ. Teams whose primary gap is on-page optimization rather than off-site authority will find fewer actionable recommendations.

Best for: PR-forward and content marketing teams that treat source authority and digital PR as their primary GEO lever.

3. AthenaHQ — Execute Enterprise-Grade Citation Strategy Through a Centralized Action Center

AthenaHQ targets large organizations with its centralized "Action Center," a workflow hub that ingests citation data and outputs prioritized tasks segmented by business unit, region, and product line. The platform supports structured data validation for FAQ, HowTo, Product, and Article schema—markup formats that improve how AI engines parse and cite content.

According to the Princeton GEO study, adding authoritative citations to content increases AI visibility by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., 2024). AthenaHQ's content audit module flags pages missing source citations and schema, then estimates the citation-lift potential of each fix.

Tradeoff: AthenaHQ's governance layer adds implementation complexity. Smaller teams without dedicated GEO or SEO operations staff report a 3–4 week setup period before reaching full functionality.

Best for: Enterprises with multiple brands, regions, or product lines that require governance and role-based task delegation.

4. Profound — Benchmark Multilingual Citation Performance With Granular Competitive Intelligence

Profound leads on analytics granularity, offering competitive benchmarking that compares your AI citation share against up to 20 named competitors per topic cluster. Its multilingual engine covers 30+ languages, making it a strong fit for global brands operating in markets where Google AI Overviews now appear across 200+ countries (Google, 2025).

The platform's "Citation Velocity" metric tracks how quickly a content update translates into a new or improved AI mention—a feedback loop that helps teams measure ROI on content refreshes. Profound reports that top-performing customers achieve a measurable citation increase within 14 days of implementing recommended changes.

Tradeoff: Profound's strength is analytics, not execution. It surfaces what to fix but provides fewer built-in workflow tools to assign and track those fixes across teams compared to xSeek or AthenaHQ.

Best for: Analytics-driven SEO teams and global brands that need competitive citation intelligence across multiple languages.

5. Goodie AI — Launch GEO Playbooks in Days With Guided Setup

Goodie AI prioritizes speed-to-value with pre-built playbooks that walk teams through GEO fundamentals: schema implementation, content restructuring for AI parsability, and citation-gap remediation. The platform covers Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot, with a streamlined interface designed for teams without dedicated GEO specialists.

Goodie AI's onboarding benchmark shows that new users complete their first citation audit within 48 hours of signup—compared to an industry average setup time of 2–3 weeks for enterprise platforms.

Tradeoff: Narrower engine coverage (3 engines vs. xSeek's 7+) and fewer workflow integrations. Teams that outgrow the playbook framework will eventually need a more configurable platform.

Best for: Startups and lean marketing teams that need fast GEO wins without a multi-month implementation cycle.

Tradeoff Matrix: 5 GEO Tools Compared

Selecting the Right GEO Platform for Your Team

The selection decision reduces to three variables: team size, primary GEO lever, and engine breadth requirements.

If your organization runs cross-functional content operations and needs coverage across 7+ generative engines, xSeek provides the deepest workflow integration. If digital PR drives your strategy, Bear AI's outreach automation delivers the most leverage. Enterprise teams managing multiple brands benefit from AthenaHQ's governance-first architecture, while analytics-heavy global teams gain the most from Profound's competitive benchmarking across 30+ languages. Lean teams that need results within 48 hours start with Goodie AI and graduate to a fuller platform as requirements expand.

The zero-click shift documented by Similarweb (2024) is accelerating. Gartner projects that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 as AI-powered answers absorb queries (Gartner, 2024). Teams that instrument their AI citation performance now—using any of these five platforms—build a compounding advantage over competitors still optimizing exclusively for blue links.