GEO Tool
What a GEO tool tells you — and where one check runs out
Start with a single free check across 60 prompts. This page is honest about what that gets you, and at what point you need more than a point tool.
60 prompts, one engine, no credit card.
What is a GEO tool?
A GEO tool is a utility that checks whether an AI answer engine mentions your brand when asked the questions your buyers ask. You give it a domain and a market; it sends a set of prompts to an engine, reads the answers, and reports how often you were named and who was named instead.
A GEO tool is narrower than a GEO platform. A tool answers “am I visible?” for one brand at one moment. A platform answers that repeatedly, across engines and competitors, and carries the workflow of fixing it. Most people should start with the tool.
The distinction matters commercially, because the two are priced completely differently — and buying the platform shape when you needed the tool shape is the most common way to overspend in this category.
What a single check does and does not settle
Worth reading before you conclude anything from one run.
Whether you have a problem at all
If you are absent from 60 buyer-intent prompts, that is not noise. One check is entirely sufficient to establish that a gap exists, and for many brands it is the first hard evidence anyone has seen.
Who is being named instead of you
The competitor list that comes back from a single run is usually stable and usually surprising — it is often not the competitor set your sales team names.
Which questions you are closest on
Prompts where you appear occasionally are the cheapest wins. They tell you the engine already considers you plausible for that question.
Your true share of voice
Sixty prompts against one engine is a sample of one engine's behaviour on one day. The number is directional. Do not put it in a board deck as a metric you intend to track.
Whether other engines agree
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot routinely disagree about who belongs in an answer. Being absent from one is not being absent from all — and being present in one is not safety.
What specifically to change
A check tells you the score. Naming the pages to write, the schema to add and the sources to pursue is a different piece of work, and it needs the cited-source data a single check does not go deep enough to gather.
Point tool or full suite?
Pick the row that describes your situation, not the column with more ticks.
| A GEO tool (single check) | A GEO suite (full analysis) | |
|---|---|---|
| Prompts | 60 | 400 |
| Engines | 1 | 4 — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot |
| Output | Visibility matrix and prompt explorer | Adds cited-source attribution, competitor mapping and a written fix plan |
| Best for | Establishing whether a gap exists | Deciding what to do about it and proving it moved |
| Re-run cadence | Whenever you are curious | Quarterly, or after shipping fixes |
| Price | Free | From $59 per analysis |
There is no subscription in either column. Both are run-when-you-need-it, which is the right shape for something you measure quarterly rather than daily.
Getting a useful read out of a free check
Three things that change the quality of the answer more than the tool does.
Use the questions buyers ask, not the keywords you track
“Best invoicing software for freelancers” is a prompt. “Invoicing software” is a keyword. AI engines are asked full questions with constraints and context, and the brands that get named are the ones that fit the constraint. Prompts that read like a real person typing will tell you far more than your keyword list will.
Include the comparison and alternative phrasings
“X vs Y” and “alternatives to X” are where competitive displacement happens, and they are frequently the prompts where a brand discovers it is missing from its own category conversation.
Read the raw answers, not only the score
The most useful output of a first check is usually a sentence in one of the answers — an engine describing your category in terms you had not considered, or recommending a competitor for a reason you can directly address. The percentage is the headline; the answer text is the finding.
GEO tool FAQs
What is the difference between a GEO tool and a GEO platform?
Scope and repeatability. A GEO tool performs one check and reports a result, which is what you want when you are establishing whether a visibility gap exists. A GEO platform runs that measurement across multiple engines, competitors and brands on an ongoing basis and carries the workflow of fixing what it finds. Tools are usually free or cheap per run; platforms are priced for repeated use.
Is there a free GEO tool?
Yes. BlueJar's free tier runs 60 prompts against one engine at no cost and without a credit card, which is enough to see whether you are being named in your category. The paid analyses widen that to 400 prompts across four engines and add the cited-source and fix-plan output that a free check does not include.
How many prompts do I need for a reliable reading?
For a yes-or-no answer about whether you appear at all, a few dozen prompts is plenty. For a share-of-voice figure you intend to track over time, you want several hundred, because AI answers vary between identical runs and a small sample swings widely on that variance alone. This is why the free tier is described as directional and the paid analyses run 400 prompts.
Can I just use ChatGPT itself as a GEO tool?
For a first look, absolutely — ask it the ten questions your buyers ask and see whether you come up. It is a genuinely useful five-minute exercise. What it cannot do is cover the other engines, repeat itself consistently enough to measure change, or tell you which sources the answer was drawn from. Those three gaps are the entire reason dedicated tooling exists.
Does a GEO tool work for local and service-area businesses?
It does, with one adjustment: your prompts need the geography in them, because AI answers to local questions are strongly shaped by the location in the question. “Best emergency plumber in Leeds” behaves nothing like “best emergency plumber”. Local brands often find AI answers lean heavily on directories and review sites, which changes where the fix work goes.
Related reading
Sixty prompts is enough to know
The free check will not give you a plan. It will give you the answer to whether you need one.