AI SEO tools can save hours on research, content, and reporting—but not every tool delivers on its promises.
After testing dozens firsthand, I narrowed it down to eight tools that actually perform, helping you:
- Track and grow visibility in AI-generated search results
- Plan and optimize content faster
- Automate technical, content, and PR workflows
Each recommendation below includes real test notes, feature highlights, and accuracy insights—so you know what data you can trust and where to stay cautious.
How to Choose the Right AI SEO Tool
AI SEO now spans everything from visibility tracking and AI-cited mentions to automated keyword clustering and technical site audits. The right tools depend entirely on your role and what you’re trying to accomplish.
Use this quick reference to match your main goal with the most relevant tools in this list.
|
Tool |
Best for |
Free plan available? |
Decision tip |
|
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit |
SEOs and marketers who want to track brand presence in AI search answers and benchmark against competitors |
No (add-on) |
Choose this if you want measurable data on how often your brand appears in AI-generated results—and where rivals are outperforming you. |
|
AI PR Toolkit (Semrush) |
Digital PR teams aiming to earn coverage from outlets that influence AI engines |
7-day trial |
Use this to target publications large language models already trust, then manage outreach from the same workspace. |
|
SparkToro |
Strategists and content marketers researching where audiences spend time and what topics resonate |
Yes (5 searches per month) |
Start here when you need audience behavior data to shape your content or ad strategy. |
|
AlsoAsked |
Bloggers and SEOs mapping People Also Ask questions into topic clusters |
Yes (3 credits per day) |
Ideal for mirroring AI “query fan-out” and building FAQ sections that answer real follow-up questions. |
|
Keyword Insights |
SEOs and agencies clustering keywords, generating briefs, and identifying social-influenced results |
$1 trial (7 days) |
Great if you manage large keyword sets and want quick clusters and briefs, with a pay-as-you-scale credit system. |
|
Surfer SEO |
Content teams and writers optimizing drafts using data from top-ranking pages |
No (7-day money-back) |
Pick this for prescriptive, data-driven on-page recommendations to raise content quality and visibility. |
|
AirOps |
Agencies and advanced teams automating multi-step SEO and content workflows |
Yes (Solo) |
Choose this to automate research, refreshes, and publishing tasks across hundreds of URLs. |
|
Screaming Frog SEO Spider |
Technical SEOs and site managers performing deep crawls with optional AI automation |
Yes (500 URLs) |
Best for comprehensive site audits first—with light AI support (e.g., alt-text generation) built in. |
1. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Best for: SEOs, marketers, and agencies that want to track and grow brand visibility across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI search engines
Free basic version available: No (available only with paid Semrush plans)
Pricing: $99 per-month add-on to a Pro, Guru, or Business plan
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit measures how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers—and how you compare to competitors. It brings traditional SEO analytics into the emerging world of LLM-powered search so you can quantify AI visibility with real metrics rather than guesswork.
The main Visibility Overview dashboard shows:
- AI Visibility Score: Benchmarks your brand mentions against competitors
- Monthly Audience: Estimated impressions across AI systems
- Mentions: How often your brand is cited in AI answers
- Trend graphs: to track changes in your AI presence over time
A higher AI visibility score means your brand appears more frequently in AI-generated responses, while a lower score signals missed opportunities.
Beyond raw visibility, the toolkit reveals how your brand is perceived inside AI engines.
The Brand Performance dashboard surfaces:
- Insights: AI-generated recommendations on which narratives to emphasize
- Share of Voice vs. Sentiment: Correlates mention frequency with tone (positive, neutral, or negative)
- Overall Sentiment: Percentage of favorable mentions
- Share of Voice: Shows how your brand stacks up against competitors overall
Scroll further to the Key Business Drivers by Frequency section. It highlights the topics and attributes AI systems most often associate with your brand and competitors. Each cell in the grid shows how often a given brand is linked to a specific driver, which helps you pinpoint where competitors dominate the conversation.
In Your Brand vs. Competitors, you can directly compare visibility and sentiment metrics side-by-side.
For example, when I analyzed B2B software tool Asana with its competitor, Jira, Asana led “Reporting and Executive Dashboards” and “Templates & Standardized Work.” Jira led in “Integration Ecosystem & APIs” and “Portfolio & Dependency Management.”
These insights clarify which narratives your brand already owns, and which need reinforcement.
What I Like
Prompt Tracking is like rank tracking for AI. You can monitor how often your brand appears for specific prompts in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode—similar to keyword rankings in traditional search.
The tool reports both visibility percentage and average position across prompts, which gives you directional metrics for performance in LLM results.
You can also open SERP snapshots to view exactly how an AI generated its answer—what text it wrote, which domains it cited, and where your site appeared within the response.
2. AI PR Toolkit by Semrush
Best for: Digital PR teams and content marketers who want to earn authoritative mentions that influence AI-generated answers
Free basic version available: 7-day trial
Pricing: Starts at $149 per month
The AI PR Toolkit brings traditional PR and AI visibility together. It helps you find journalists, build targeted media lists, send personalized pitches, and track coverage—all within a single workspace.
One standout feature is AI-Cited Media. Enter any topic, and the toolkit reveals which outlets are most frequently cited by AI engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.
This shows you exactly which publications LLMs already “trust,” so your outreach targets the sources most likely to shape both search rankings and AI-generated content.
For example, when I searched “HR software,” the tool surfaced outlets such as “HR Drive,” “Human Resource Executive,” “HR Zone,” and “HR Magazine,” each labeled with an AI Trust score—a measure of how often they appear in AI-generated responses.
From there, you can expand any outlet to view individual journalists, their contact details, and past article topics. With one click, add them to a media list for targeted outreach.
Once your list is ready, move straight into email drafting.
The built-in AI assistant can refine your pitch or adapt an existing press release into a concise outreach email. You can choose from templates or start from scratch, and real-time suggestions appear in a sidebar as you write.
During the free trial, you can explore cited outlets and topics, build media lists, and draft pitches. But, you’ll need a paid plan to actually run campaigns, monitor mentions at scale, and see detailed contact info.
What I Like
The real advantage here is speed and focus.
You can identify which outlets drive AI visibility, find the right journalists, craft your pitch, and track results—all without juggling separate PR tools or spreadsheets.
This unified workflow saves hours per campaign and ensures every pitch supports both brand awareness and AI search visibility.
3. SparkToro
Best for: Content marketers who want to understand where their target audience spends time and what topics resonate most
Free basic version available: Yes (5 searches per month)
Pricing: Personal ($50 per month), Business ($150 per month), Agency ($300 per month)
SparkToro is an audience research platform that uncovers where your customers spend time online and what conversations matter most to them.
You can start with a structured input (like a keyword, website, or a social/bio term) to generate a full audience report detailing demographics, affinities, and platform behaviors.
For example, when I searched for “esports” (U.S.), SparkToro estimated 34,000-47,000 monthly searches and revealed which platforms and tools this audience prefers.
Twitch stood out at +172% above the U.S. average, while Reddit and ChatGPT were the most frequently used search and AI tools.
SparkToro’s newer AI conversational search lets you describe audiences naturally instead of relying on fixed keywords. You can type something like:
- “Decision-makers at small U.S. law firms looking to improve their websites”
- “Tabletop role-playing gamers looking for alternatives to D&D”
The AI translates your description into structured data and returns a detailed report—including websites, podcasts, channels, and affinity scores—so you can identify niche segments that would otherwise take hours to research manually.
In the Topics tab of your report, SparkToro ranks subjects by affinity (how strongly your audience cares) and saturation (how heavily covered they already are).
The example above is from a product explainer video by Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro.
By creating high-quality content around these high-affinity, low-saturation topics, you can meet your audience’s real interests. And because AI engines pull from multiple trusted sources, this also improves your chances of being cited in AI-generated answers.
What I like
SparkToro shows which platforms your audience uses more (or less) than average.
For example, when I looked at visitors to esportsworldcup.com in the U.S., Discord usage was +93.2% above average and X (Twitter) was +22.3%, while Facebook trailed at -6.3%.
These insights make it much easier to prioritize the right platforms for ads, sponsorships, or content distribution. So you’re not wasting time on channels your audience doesn’t care about.
4. AlsoAsked
Best for: Bloggers and SEO specialists who want to uncover People Also Ask queries and build topic clusters that align with AI search behavior
Free basic version available: Yes (3 free credits per day)
Pricing: Basic ($15 per month), Lite ($29 per month), Pro ($59 per month)
AlsoAsked is a keyword research tool that helps bridge the gap between traditional and AI search.
It pulls questions directly from Google’s People Also Ask boxes and organizes them into branching visual maps, so you can see how real users expand on a query.
You can filter results by country, city, and language to reveal the exact questions people in your market are asking.
For example, when I searched “AI SEO tools,” the map surfaced follow-up questions like “Can SEO be done by AI?” and “Can ChatGPT help with SEO?”
AI engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode use a process called query fan-out, which breaks a user’s question into smaller sub-questions before generating a final answer.
As AlsoAsked Founder Mark Williams-Cook explains in this “The Search Session” podcast episode:
“The People Also Ask questions surfaced are the closest in ‘intent proximity.’ If someone asks this, these are the most likely follow-ups. Now, with AI search and query fan-out, that process is automated.”
AlsoAsked gives you a way to see that process in advance.
By mapping related questions, you can plan content briefs, FAQ sections, or topic clusters that mirror both how humans and AI systems naturally explore a topic.
For example, here’s the whole visual map for “AI SEO tools:”
What I like
A standard search goes two levels deep and usually returns around 25 related questions. With a “deep” search, the tool goes three levels down, surfacing around 100 questions at once.
For example, running a deep search for “laser skin treatment” reveals far more variations and follow-ups than a regular search.
This makes it much easier to build complete topic clusters and ensure your content covers the same questions an AI engine might “fan out” when generating an answer.
Note: A “Deep” search requires a paid account (Lite or Pro) and costs four credits per search.
5. Keyword Insights
Best for: SEOs and agencies that want to cluster keywords, create briefs, and identify social channels that influence AI-generated answers.
Free basic version available: No. $1 trial for 7 days (600 credits included)
Pricing: From $58 per month (Basic plan: 10,000 credits)
Keyword Insights is an AI-powered SEO platform that transforms keyword lists into organized topic clusters, complete content briefs, and even draft articles.
Its workflow moves seamlessly from research to planning to content creation, which lets you manage everything inside one interface instead of bouncing between tools.
A newer feature, Social Sources, highlights where user-generated platforms (like Reddit, YouTube, or Quora) appear in search results for your clustered keywords.
For example, after uploading a keyword list about email marketing, the tool grouped them into clusters such as email marketing templates and email marketing benchmarks.
Each cluster displays at a glance:
- Search volume
- Competition level
- Search intent (e.g., people looking for info vs. ready to buy)
- Social source presence (e.g., Reddit or YouTube dominance)
From any cluster, you can launch other in-platform tools:
- AI Writer Agent to generate a first-draft article
- Writer Assistant to polish or optimize existing copy
- Content Brief to auto-create structured outlines with headings, FAQs, and sources
- SERP Analyzer to inspect competitor pages already ranking for these terms
This integration means your keyword research instantly feeds your content pipeline—no exporting or manual rebuilding required.
What I like
The platform runs on a credit system. Each task uses a set number of credits.
This makes it flexible. So, you only pay for what you use, whether that’s clustering thousands of keywords or producing just a handful of briefs.
For example:
- 1 credit = one keyword clustered
- 100 credits = one content brief
- 200 credits = one article with the AI Writer Assistant
- 1,200 credits = one full article with the AI Writer Agent
6. SurferSEO
Best for: Content teams and freelance writers who want data-driven guidance to plan, write, and optimize content for higher visibility in search results
Free basic version available: No (7-day money-back guarantee)
Pricing: Essential ($99 per month), Scale ($219 per month), Enterprise (custom pricing)
SurferSEO is a content optimization platform that analyzes the top-ranking pages for any keyword and translates that data into actionable, on-page recommendations.
Its core feature, the Content Editor, evaluates word count, headings, keyword use, and media depth to suggest what it takes to compete in search.
For example, when I optimized an article for the keyword, “how to find YouTube influencers for your business,” Surfer gave the draft a Content Score of 40/100 and flagged:
- More paragraphs: 127+ vs. 85
- More images: 41-95 vs. 13
- Better keyword coverage across headings and body copy
These benchmarks aren’t rigid rules. Surfer itself notes that a Content Score of 67+ generally indicates “optimum quality and relevance.” Writers should use these data points as guidelines, balancing them with editorial judgment and brand tone.
On the right side of the Content Editor, Surfer offers several AI-driven tools to streamline editing:
- Auto-optimize: Automatically inserts relevant terms into your draft without changing meaning
- Explore missing facts: Suggests additional data points to enhance credibility
- Insert internal links: Surfaces related pages (e.g., from semrush.com in my test) and lets you insert up to 10 at once
In my test, using Auto-Optimize took about five minutes. Surfer added relevant keywords, expanded a few sections, and all changes were fully reviewable and reversible.
AI-assisted writing is efficient, but you should never publish output blindly. Google’s guidelines allow AI content as long as it’s helpful and original.
Focus on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)—content that demonstrates firsthand knowledge and people-first value. Thin, generic or over-optimized AI text can still underperform or be filtered out.
What I like
Surfer’s “Facts” tab (Coverage Booster) scans the top 20 ranking pages.
It uses LLMs to flag missing facts and topics, helping you close content gaps and improve your chances of being cited in AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
I wasn’t able to test this feature directly, but the product demo shows how it works in practice. Surfer also claims that filling gaps with “Facts” can increase AI citations by up to 25%.
7. AirOps
Best for: Agencies and content teams that want to automate multi-step SEO workflows from research to publishing
Free basic version available: Yes (Solo plan)
Pricing: Scale (custom, 14-day free trial), Enterprise (custom)
AirOps is an AI-powered workflow platform built for SEO and content operations teams. It lets you design automated workflows that handle everything from keyword research to content refreshes using prebuilt templates or custom drag-and-drop logic.
For example, I built a “Refresh Existing Content” workflow using one of AirOps’ ready-made templates.
The workflow opened in a Grid view, where each article URL appeared in columns—title, body, meta description, last modified date—alongside action buttons that trigger automated steps like:
- Extract Article from URL pulls in the full article text, links, and images
- AEO Visibility Refresh Suggestions analyzes readability and AI citation potential
- Apply Suggested Refresh Changes implements AI-driven edits while preserving layout and links
I tested the workflow on five articles. Within about 15 minutes, AirOps had extracted the content, flagged AI-visibility improvements, and applied suggested edits.
Opening the Article Comparison column displayed a side-by-side view of the original versus the AI-edited version, with inline highlights showing what changed (e.g., clarifying context, tightening phrasing).
Beyond templates, AirOps allows teams to build workflows from scratch using a visual drag-and-drop builder. You can chain together actions like:
- “Analyze SERP for target keyword”
- “Create article from content brief”
- “Add internal links”
- “Optimize metadata”
This flexibility makes it possible to design end-to-end automation pipelines customized for your exact SEO process—whether that’s refreshing hundreds of pages or generating new content in bulk.
AirOps isn’t fully plug-and-play, though. The interface can feel complex for new users, so booking a guided demo or onboarding session is highly recommended to unlock its potential.
What I Like
AirOps lets you build a Knowledge Base by uploading your own content, such as blog posts, product documents, or even a help center sitemap.
This gives the AI real context about your business, so the workflows generate copy that feels accurate and on-brand.
For example, a SaaS company could upload its support articles, and AirOps would use that knowledge when drafting blog posts or user guides.
8. Screaming Frog
Best for: SEO specialists and site managers who want to automate repetitive technical SEO tasks like generating image alt text or analyzing crawl data with AI.
Free basic version available: Yes (crawl up to 500 URLs)
Pricing: $279 per license per year
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that scans your entire website for technical SEO issuessuch as broken links, missing tags, or redirect loops.
Its latest updates now integrate with AI tools like OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google Gemini, which allows you to automate common auditing tasks with simple natural-language prompts.
For example, you can instruct the crawler to generate missing image alt text automatically, improving both accessibility and search visibility.
Just add your AI API key in the settings, define a prompt such as “generate alt text for images,” and Screaming Frog fills in the tags during the crawl.
Testing note: I was unable to run a hands-on test for Screaming Frog’s AI prompts due to paywall/access limits. Findings are based on the official docs (last updated September 2025).
What I Like
Screaming Frog converts your website structure into an interactive map, which makes it easy to identify hidden pages, weak links, or disconnected sections that impact crawlability and user experience.
Further reading: 15 Crawlability Problems & How to Fix Them
Which Tool Will You Pick?
The best AI SEO tool depends on your focus:
- Want to measure visibility in AI results? Start with Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
- Need to scale content workflows? Try AirOps
- Looking to better understand your audience? SparkToro
- Managing PR at scale? Go for Semrush’s AI PR Toolkit
- Running technical SEO? Screaming Frog
Remember: AI tools work best as assistants, not replacements. Use them to eliminate repetitive tasks, surface insights faster, and support creative decision-making—and you’ll get far better long-term results.
