Best GEO & AI SEO tools for contractors (2026)

GEO tools (generative engine optimization — also called AI SEO or AI visibility tools) track whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity mention your business when customers ask who to hire. The category matured fast in 2025–2026, but almost every tool in it was built for SaaS and enterprise brands. This guide compares the five tools a contractor or trades business should actually shortlist, including where our own product fits and where it doesn't.

A GEO tool asks AI engines the questions your customers ask — repeatedly, because answers change run to run — and reports how often you're named, who gets named instead, which sources the engines cite, and what to fix. That's different from SEO tools like Ahrefs or classic Semrush, which track Google rankings: a page can rank #1 on Google and still never be cited by ChatGPT. If AI answers are becoming a lead source in your market, you need the AI-native measurement.

The short answer: it depends on whether you're a local trades business or a national brand. Here's the honest breakdown.

Tibly (that's us) is the only GEO tool in this list built specifically for contractors: it generates the buying questions for your trade and city ("who's the best roofer in Miami?", "tile roof replacement cost"), scans them daily across up to 8 engines, benchmarks you against the local competitors you actually lose jobs to, and drafts the fixes — priced cost guides, service pages — from your real jobs. Plans start at $49/month (Starter, 50 prompts) and $149/month (Growth, 200 prompts), which makes it the cheapest daily-tracking option in the category. If you're a national SaaS brand, the enterprise tools below fit better; if you're a roofer, HVAC, plumber, electrician, or GC, this is the one designed for you.

Profound is the deepest analytics platform in the category and the G2 category leader, with customers like Ramp, Figma, and MongoDB. It offers agent-level crawl diagnostics and a huge real-prompt dataset. Enterprise plans are custom and commonly cited around $499/month and up. It's the right choice for a large brand with a dedicated marketing team — and overkill in both price and complexity for a local trades company.

Peec AI is a well-regarded mid-market option (from roughly $95/month) with clean competitive benchmarking, daily tracking, and unlimited seats. It's built around brand-level prompts rather than local trade-and-city questions, which is the main gap for contractors — you'd write and maintain your own local prompt set.

Otterly starts at $29/month and is the most accessible way to simply monitor a handful of prompts. It's monitoring rather than optimization — it tells you where you stand, with less help on what to do about it. A reasonable first step if you only want a monthly pulse check.

If you (or your agency) already pay for Semrush, its AI visibility module keeps AI-answer data inside the same workflow as your SEO reporting. It's an add-on to an SEO suite rather than an AI-native tool, but for agency-managed contractors it can be the path of least resistance.

• Local question generation — your customers ask city-specific questions; a tool that only tracks brand-name prompts misses the queries that win work.
• Repeated runs, not single checks — AI answers change every run, so visibility is a frequency. Daily scans across dozens of runs are the minimum for real measurement.
• Per-engine breakdown — the same company's visibility can differ 3.5× between engines (Tibly sampling, July 2026). One-engine tools miss most of the surface.
• Competitor benchmarking — the useful number is not "am I named" but "who's named instead of me, and is the gap closing."
• Action output — tracking without fixes is a scoreboard. Look for tools that turn losing questions into specific pages to publish.

And if the decision rule above points you our way: Tibly's Starter plan is $49/month for 50 tracked prompts with daily scans, Growth is $149/month for 200 prompts, and both are month-to-month with no contracts. You can be tracking your market this afternoon.