LLM SEO Tools Come in Three Kinds. Only One Is New.

An LLM SEO tool tracks whether AI assistants mention or cite your brand when someone asks a question in your category, and how that changes over time. They come in three kinds, and the difference between them matters far more than the feature lists suggest.

I want to be straight about what this article is and is not. I have not run a controlled comparison of these products, so you will find no scores and no winner here. What you will find is what each category actually measures, taken from the vendors’ own published descriptions, and the questions I would ask before paying for any of them. If someone tells you they have rigorously tested fourteen of these, ask how long they had each one.

What is an LLM SEO tool?

It is a tool that asks AI assistants a list of questions on your behalf, on a schedule, and records whether your brand shows up in the answers. Everything else in the product is reporting built on top of that loop.

That is worth stating plainly because the category name oversells it, and the category names in this corner of the market are unusually slippery, which I have unpicked in AEO and GEO against plain SEO. This is not optimisation in the sense that a technical SEO tool optimises something. Nothing in these products changes your website. They are measurement instruments, and the work they measure still has to be done by you.

What do dedicated AI visibility trackers do?

They run your prompt list across a spread of AI engines and report where you appeared, who was cited, and how your share compares to competitors. Breadth of engine coverage is their main claim.

Some of them sell themselves as an LLM tracker rather than a visibility tool. The name on the tin changes, the loop underneath does not.

LLMrefs describes itself as tracking “keyword rankings, citations, benchmark competitors” for AI search, and covers a wide list of engines including ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot and others, at 79 dollars a month for up to 500 tracked prompts with a seven-day trial. Otterly.ai positions itself as an “AI Search monitoring and optimization platform”, covering ChatGPT, Google’s AI surfaces, Copilot and Perplexity, and reporting brand mentions, citations, average brand position, share of voice and sentiment, starting at 29 dollars a month.

Prices and terms above were taken from each vendor’s own pages while writing this, and they will move. Check them before you decide anything.

The vocabulary these tools report in is worth learning even if you never buy one. Profound, another tool in this category, publishes its definitions openly: citation share measures “how often a brand’s domain is cited as a source”, while share of voice is “the AI equivalent of market share in search”. Those two move independently, and knowing which one your problem lives in tells you what to work on. All four of the metrics these products report, and what each one misses, are in LLM visibility and how to measure it.

What do the established SEO suites add?

They add prompt tracking to the dashboard you already use, which is convenience rather than capability. The measurement underneath is the same loop.

Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tracks brand mentions and sentiment against competitors for prompts you choose, flags technical issues that could block AI crawlers, and reports the URLs cited in AI responses. It runs at 99 dollars a month on its own, or from 199 as part of a combined subscription with the SEO toolkit, and there is no free trial, only a demo.

The honest case for this category is workflow, not data. If your rankings, your backlinks and your AI prompts sit in one place, you will actually look at them. If AI visibility lives in a second tool with a second login, you will look at it twice and then stop.

Where do content optimisers fit?

They do not measure AI visibility at all. They score the page you are writing for depth, structure and coverage, on the theory that a better page is more likely to be cited.

I have put them in this article because they keep appearing in lists titled “LLM SEO tools”, which muddles the decision. They solve a real problem and it is a different problem. If your audit shows you are absent from answers your competitors own, a writing tool may genuinely be the right purchase. Just do not expect it to tell you whether the absence changed.

Why does every list of LLM SEO tools rank its own tool first?

Because the companies selling these tools are the ones best placed to rank for the query, and they have every reason to take it. This is checkable rather than cynical, and I checked it.

I pulled the United States search results for “llm seo tools” while researching this piece. Surfer’s blog ranks in the top three with a list of thirteen tools whose first entry is Surfer. AIclicks ranks below it with a list whose first entry is AIclicks. LLMClicks ranks further down with a list whose first entry is LLMClicks. Semrush’s blog ranks for the neighbouring “best AI visibility tools” query. Four of the pages competing to tell you which tool to buy are published by companies selling one of them.

None of that makes those lists worthless, and I am not accusing anyone of anything they have hidden. It does mean the ordering carries no information. Read them for the feature detail, which is usually accurate, and ignore the rankings entirely.

What should you check before you pay?

Three things, and none of them appear on a pricing page. How many prompts you can track, how often they are refreshed, and whether you can export the raw answers.

Prompt limits are where these products get expensive quietly, because a useful question set for a business with several product lines runs past the entry tier fast. Refresh frequency decides whether you are watching a trend or a snapshot. Raw answer export is the one I would not compromise on: the percentage is the least interesting output, and the actual text of what a model said about you is the part you will want to re-read in six months.

Ask for the trial. Two of the three tools above offer seven days without a card, which is enough to see whether the prompt list you would actually track fits inside the plan you would actually buy.

Do you need one at all?

Not to find out whether you have a problem. You can answer that question in an afternoon with a spreadsheet, which I have written up as a step by step AI visibility audit.

Buy a tool when the counting has become the bottleneck rather than the thinking. That point arrives when you are tracking enough prompts that doing it by hand eats a day, or when you need a defensible history rather than a current reading. Before then, the subscription mostly buys you a nicer chart of a number you could have got for free.

There is a fourth option worth knowing about, and I built it, so weigh that accordingly. Vantage is not a dedicated AI tracker. It is a competitor analysis that happens to include how each brand shows up inside AI answers, alongside search visibility and share of voice, and it is sold per report rather than per month. That suits a different job: a decision you are making now about a specific set of competitors, rather than a metric you are watching continuously. The reports are AI created, so apply your own judgement to what they say. If what you need is a monthly time series, one of the trackers above is the better fit and I would tell you the same in person.

Whichever way you go, the sequence matters more than the software. Get your number first, decide what you are trying to move, and only then work out whether a subscription helps you move it. The measurement is cheap. The attention is not.