What is Geofound? GEO, AEO and SEO in one AI visibility tool

Geofound is an AI visibility tool for small and mid-sized teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Shopping, Gemini and Grok the questions your buyers ask in AI search, records which brands the answers recommend, and shows you why a competitor got picked instead of you. When you fix something, it measures whether the answers changed. Plans start at $39 a month.

The work it supports goes by two names. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the effort to get your brand named inside the answers that AI models write. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the same job under a different label; some teams say GEO, some say AEO, and this article treats them as one. Search engine optimization (SEO) sits underneath both, because an assistant can only cite a page that it, or the search index it draws on, can find and read. SEO vs GEO and AEO covers where the three overlap and where they do not.

So GEO visibility and AEO visibility measure one thing: how often the answers written by large language models (LLMs) mention you, where you appear in the answer, and which sources the AI cited on the way. Geofound reports that per prompt, per engine and per competitor. If you are comparing the best AI visibility tools, our honest comparison puts Peec, Otterly, Frase and Profound side by side. This page is about Geofound itself: what it does, where it is weaker, and how it compares with Otterly AI and Profound.

What Geofound tracks

Geofound tracks eight AI surfaces. Six are core engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and ChatGPT Shopping. Gemini and Grok are add-ons ($19 a month each on Starter, $29 on Growth) and are included on Scale.

Claude is on every paid plan. On Starter it is one of the three engines you choose, so a team whose buyers use Claude can track it for $39 a month. Peec AI lists Claude on its Enterprise plan only.

You add the prompts; Geofound finds the competitors. Any brand an answer recommends in your category is picked up and counted, so a rival you had never heard of shows up in the data as soon as the answers start naming it.

Profound covers one more surface than Geofound. The two lists differ, though: Profound has Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Exa Search, and Geofound has Grok and ChatGPT Shopping, neither of which Profound lists outside Enterprise.

Why a competitor wins, and what to do about it

When a competitor appears in the answers to one of your prompts far more often than you do, Geofound writes a playbook for that prompt. It reads the answers, scrapes the pages the AI cited, explains why the competitor gets recommended, and lists the steps: the page to publish, the sections it needs, and where it should go.

Some of those steps are off your site. The citations view shows the exact pages AI cited in answers you lost, and the Action center turns them into tasks such as "Get listed on g2.com". Reddit and other community threads that AI cites get a list of their own.

For on-site steps, "Draft this content for me" writes the recommended page as Markdown. It lands in your Drafts library with a "copy markdown" button, ready to paste into WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or whatever CMS you use. Drafts are on every paid plan.

Mark done, then check the numbers

Every card in the Action center has a "✓ Mark done" button. Press it after you ship the fix and Geofound does three things:

• re-asks that prompt straight away, so the first "after" answer arrives the same day;
• keeps your mention rate on that prompt before the fix as the "before" figure;
• counts only answers collected after you marked it done for the "after" figure.

The results sit under "Completed: did it move the needle?". A result stays labelled early until enough new answers have come in, because AI answers vary from one run to the next and a single good answer proves very little. For site-wide fixes, such as structured data, Geofound compares your 7-day visibility score on the day you marked it done with the score now.

Be careful with what the comparison proves. If you shipped a new page and a rival lost a review-site listing in the same fortnight, the "after" number includes both. Geofound shows you the change on the prompt you worked on; it cannot isolate one cause from everything else that moved that month.

Products and ChatGPT Shopping

For e-commerce brands Geofound tracks products as well as the brand. The Products page, on Starter and above, shows three figures for each product you add:

• "Named in answers" is the share of the last 30 days' answers that name the product.
• "Top pick" is how often it is the first of your own tracked products to be named in an answer. It compares your products with each other, not with competitors'.
• "Where AI sends buyers" sorts the sites the answers cite next to the product: your own store, marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Walmart, retailers, or review sites.

That last figure is the one store owners ask about. If ChatGPT Shopping keeps naming your product but cites Amazon every time, the buyer is being sent to a marketplace, and your margin goes with them. GEO for e-commerce covers what to change on product pages.

Which AI crawlers read your site

Google Analytics will not show you this. Its help page says traffic from known bots and spiders is excluded automatically, and you cannot switch the exclusion off. GA4 also runs as JavaScript in a browser, and most AI crawlers fetch raw HTML without running scripts. So the visits that decide whether ChatGPT or Claude can quote you never reach your marketing reports.

Geofound reads them at the server instead. There are three ways to connect it:

With the WordPress plugin or the code snippet, the crawler view is page-level: "Most-crawled pages" and "Latest fetches" show which bot requested which URL and when. If a page never earns a ChatGPT citation, you can check whether OAI-SearchBot has fetched it at all, or whether something such as a robots.txt rule is stopping it. With Cloudflare you get daily totals per bot, without page paths.

Geofound recognises these crawlers by user agent:

Training crawlers collect pages that may be used to train models. Search crawlers build the index an assistant searches when it answers. A user fetch is a single page request made because someone asked the assistant about that page.

Anyone can put "GPTBot" in a user agent, so where a company publishes its crawler IP ranges, Geofound checks each visit against them. Anthropic, Amazon, Meta, ByteDance and Common Crawl publish no machine-readable IP list, so those bots are matched by name only. For what each bot does and how to allow or block it, see which AI crawlers exist.

The crawlability audit

Seeing bots arrive is half of it. The other half is what they find. Every week Geofound audits up to 12 of your pages (the homepage, the pages linked from your navigation, then pages from your sitemap). It fetches each one as raw HTML without running JavaScript, the way most AI crawlers do, and checks:

• whether robots.txt blocks each AI crawler, plus the Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended tokens;
• the HTTP status the page returns;
• whether it has JSON-LD structured data;
• whether it has a title and a meta description.

Where structured data is missing, the Action center gives you JSON-LD to paste, with a "copy code" button. If a page's main content only appears after JavaScript runs, an AI crawler sees a near-empty page; can AI read your website explains how to tell.

SEO and Google Ads research next to the AI answers

Geofound is built on one assumption: GEO works alongside SEO and paid search, and the three belong in one view. When a competitor beats you in ChatGPT, its Google rankings, its backlinks and its ads are three places to look for the reason, and Geofound puts that research next to the AI answers instead of in three other tools. The data comes from DataForSEO.

On the SEO side you get:

• keyword opportunities: search demand, related keywords, and the organic keyword gaps between you and up to five competitors, so you know which product and landing pages to work on first;
• competitor rankings in Google's organic results, which you can set against how often AI recommends the same competitors;
• backlinks: the referring domains for your site and your competitors', which shows who links to them and not to you;
• site health: a crawl of up to 100 pages that checks your site the way a search engine would.

On the paid side, Geofound researches competitors' Google Ads; it does not run or bid on campaigns for you. You can see the keywords competitors pay for, the headlines and descriptions of their search ads (which is where the discounts, offers and calls to action they lead with show up), and the entries in their Google Ads Transparency library. Google Shopping listings show competing products with price and seller next to your own. There is no spend data.

A typical session: ChatGPT Shopping recommends a rival's product over yours. You check whether the rival has far more referring domains, whether it outranks you on the plain Google keyword, and which product features its ads repeat. If the ads all say "free returns" and the AI answer says it too, you have a good lead on where that line came from.

Geofound vs Otterly AI vs Profound

Otterly AI is the cheaper way in. For €29 a month you get 15 prompts tracked daily on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, unlimited team members, unlimited countries and languages, and URL-level audits: a GEO audit, a crawlability audit and a content check, with 1,000 GEO audits a month on Lite. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini cost extra, and its pricing page lists no keyword, backlink or search-ad research.

Profound is built for enterprise teams. Its brand plans are a free trial and a custom Enterprise package that starts with a demo; Enterprise adds SSO, SOC 2, more engines and regions, and AI Marketer agents that turn findings into finished content. Its Agent Analytics connects to Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress, which suits companies whose traffic runs through several CDNs. Geofound's crawler view is simpler: one site, one connection, and a list a web manager can act on that afternoon.

Verdict. Choose Otterly AI if your budget is tight, you need several markets or languages, or you want Microsoft Copilot. Choose Profound if you are an enterprise team that needs SSO, SOC 2 and agents producing content at scale, and you are ready for a sales process. Choose Geofound if you run an e-commerce brand or a small growth team and want ChatGPT Shopping, Claude and Grok tracked, with competitor SEO and Google Ads research in the same tool and a way to check whether each fix worked.

Where Geofound is weaker

These are the limits we would want to know before buying:

• Each paid plan includes 2 users, and there is no SSO.
• It does not track Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek or Exa Search.
• There is no country or language targeting yet.
• There is no public API; exports are CSV.
• Crawler data through Cloudflare is daily totals per bot, without page paths.
• Anthropic's crawlers cannot be checked against IP ranges, because Anthropic publishes no machine-readable list.

If two or more of those rule it out, Otterly or Profound will suit you better, and the table above shows which.

FAQ

What is Geofound? Geofound is an AI visibility tool for GEO and AEO. It tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Shopping, Gemini and Grok answer your buyers' questions, shows which competitors they recommend and why, and measures whether your fixes change the answers. It also includes SEO and competitor Google Ads research.

Is GEO the same as AEO? Yes, for practical purposes. Generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) both mean getting your brand mentioned and recommended in AI-generated answers. GEO visibility and AEO visibility are the same measurement: how often the answers name you.

How much does Geofound cost? Starter is $39 a month for 25 prompts on 3 engines you choose. Growth is $169 a month for 70 prompts on all 6 core engines and 3 websites. Scale is priced on request. There is a 7-day free trial, and it needs no card.

Does Geofound track ChatGPT Shopping? Yes, on every paid plan. For each product you add, it shows how often answers name it, how often it is your first-named product, and whether the answers cite your store, a marketplace or a retailer.

Can Geofound see AI bots that Google Analytics hides? Yes. Google Analytics excludes known bots automatically, and most AI crawlers do not run its JavaScript. Geofound reads crawler visits at the server through Cloudflare, a WordPress plugin or a code snippet, and with the plugin or snippet it shows which page each bot fetched.

Does Geofound replace an SEO tool or Google Ads? It covers the SEO research most small teams need next to GEO: keyword opportunities, competitor rankings, backlinks and site health. For paid search it researches competitors' ads; it does not run or bid on your campaigns, so you still manage those in Google Ads.

How is Geofound different from Otterly AI? Otterly AI starts lower at €29 a month and includes unlimited team members and markets. Geofound starts at $39 and adds ChatGPT Shopping, Grok, Claude on every paid plan, SEO and competitor ad research, Markdown drafts, and before-and-after tracking of each fix.

Try it on your own brand

The free scan asks ChatGPT three buyer questions about your category and emails you which brands it recommends, and where you appear. It needs an email address and no account. If what comes back is worth tracking, the 7-day trial runs 10 prompts on ChatGPT without a card.