Three different productsare sold under one name.
Search “GEO audit” and the results mix free page checkers, monitoring subscriptions and €9,000 consulting engagements as if they were alternatives to each other. They answer different questions. Here is which is which — and, at the end, the honest case for and against ours.
Claims about other products are quoted from their own pages and verified 27 July 2026. Products change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
The three categories
Page & schema checkers
Free to ~$20/mo- Answers
- Is my site technically legible to AI crawlers?
- Cannot tell you
- Whether any engine actually names you.
You give it a URL. It reads the page — schema markup, headings, content structure, robots.txt access, page speed — and returns a readiness score with a fix list. This is the largest category and it is what most results for “GEO audit” and “AEO audit” lead to.
Otterly’s GEO Audit describes itself as “auditing your website & scoring your pages across 25+ AI-visibility factors”, and their own write-up of the tool is explicit that it analyses your pages rather than testing how engines cite you. Geoptie’s free GEO audit takes a URL with no signup and says it “scans your content, schema, technical signals, and bot access” across six factors including Citation Readiness and Knowledge Graph Optimization.
None of that is a criticism of the work — technical legibility is a real prerequisite and these tools check it quickly and cheaply. The problem is the name. A readiness score is a hypothesis about why you might be invisible. It is not a measurement of whether you are.
Answer-sampling platforms
Monthly subscription, often enterprise-priced- Answers
- How often do engines name us, tracked over time?
- Cannot tell you
- Nothing, at the price — these are the real thing, sold as a subscription.
These do query the engines: they run prompt sets on a schedule, extract brand mentions and citations, and chart them. Profound, Peec, Otterly’s rank tracking and the AI-visibility modules now shipping inside Ahrefs and Semrush all sit here, as does Geoptie’s rank tracker alongside its free checker.
This is genuinely the right shape for the problem, and if you need ongoing monitoring you should buy one of them rather than us. The friction is commercial, not technical: a monitoring subscription is a decision with a budget line and a procurement conversation attached, which is a lot of ceremony for a company that does not yet know whether it has a problem.
Agency GEO audits
Low thousands and up- Answers
- What should we do about it, interpreted by a human?
- Cannot tell you
- Deliver next week for a few hundred dollars.
A consultancy runs the analysis, a strategist reads it, and you get a deck and a workshop. Vaimo publishes three tiers for its GEO Audit service — “Core Audit (from €2,000)”, Standard from €5,000, and Full from €9,000 — which is a fair representation of the band. Informatics, Optix Solutions, Univio and Manhattan Strategies all sell comparable engagements.
You are buying judgement, and judgement is worth paying for once you know what the problem is. Paying agency rates to find out whether you have one is the expensive way round.
Where this one sits
The measurement in category two, delivered as the one-off artifact in category three, at a price set by compute rather than by a consultant's week. You enter a domain, we run 480 grounded answers across four engines, and you get a report with a fix list. $349 once. No subscription, no call, no procurement.
The reason that gap exists is that measurement used to require a human to interpret it. For the first audit — the one where you are just establishing whether there is a problem and who is beating you — it mostly does not.
When not to buy this
You need ongoing monitoring. This is a snapshot with a frozen prompt set you can replay later. If you want a dashboard that updates weekly and alerts you when a rival moves, buy a monitoring subscription. That is a different product and we are not pretending otherwise.
You need consumer-surface parity. We measure through each provider's API with grounding enabled, not by scraping the consumer ChatGPT app or Google's AI Overviews. The answers are close but not byte-identical. If a stakeholder needs a screenshot of the actual ChatGPT UI, that is manual work and we do not do it in v1.
You already know you are invisible and want a strategist. Then the measurement is not your bottleneck. Hire the agency.
You are pre-category. If nobody is asking AI engines about your problem space yet, there is nothing to be visible in, and the audit will tell you that in a way you could have guessed for free.
What we will not do
No aggregate star ratings on a product with no customers. No invented testimonials. No single visibility score with the formula withheld — ours is published, down to the weights and the grade bands, so you can argue with it.
And every report states its own sample size, its dates, its engine list and how many runs failed and were excluded. If a tool shows you a number without those, you cannot tell a measurement from a guess.
Related
- GEO audit
Readiness checks versus measurement, and why the distinction decides your spend.
- AEO audit
Why the checklists dominating this term are not audits.
- AI visibility audit
The four metrics and the formula that turns them into one score.
- Methodology
Everything we do, including the parts that make our numbers weaker.
Find out what the engines actually say about you.
If you are still deciding which category you need, run the free scan first. Twenty sampled answers across four engines will tell you whether you have a visibility problem worth spending anything on.