How do I check if my SaaS shows up in AI search?
The fastest way is a five-prompt audit run across the four major AI tools. Ask each tool the same five questions a real buyer would ask, score the result, and you have a baseline you can improve against.
Don't outsource this to a tool the first time. Doing it manually for an hour teaches you more about your AI visibility than any dashboard.
Which AI tools should I check?
Four cover almost all B2B software research in 2026:
- ChatGPT with browsing enabled - by far the most-used.
- Perplexity - shows citations on every answer, so it tells you exactly which sources are being used.
- Google AI Overviews - increasingly the first thing buyers see on Google.
- Claude - growing fast in technical B2B audiences.
Gemini and Grok are worth checking if you serve their core audiences, but the four above will give you a representative picture.
What questions should I ask?
Use the same five prompts in every tool. They cover the spectrum of how buyers actually search.
Always start a fresh chat for each prompt. AI tools personalise based on conversation history, and you want clean, comparable results.
How do I score the results?
Use a simple 0-4 rubric. It's coarse enough to apply consistently and granular enough to track change over time.
For each prompt in each tool, record the score, what was said about you, and which sources were cited (Perplexity makes this obvious; for ChatGPT and Claude you'll need to ask follow-up questions like "where did you get that?").
How do I track this over time?
A spreadsheet is enough to start. Columns: date, tool, prompt, score, mentions, sources cited. Re-run the same five prompts every month. Aggregate your average score per tool and per prompt type. The trend matters more than any single data point.
Once your tracking is consistent and you understand what "moving" looks like, then consider a paid tool. Profound, Otterly and AthenaHQ all do AI visibility tracking. They are useful, but they don't replace the qualitative signal you get from running prompts yourself.
What does a "good" score look like?
For an established player in their category, an average of 2.5 or higher across all 20 cells (5 prompts x 4 tools) is healthy. A new or niche product should aim for 1.5 within six months of starting GEO work, and 2.5 within twelve.
Branded prompts (prompt 04 in the framework) should be a 3 or 4 in every tool within weeks of tightening your on-site content and Organization schema. If they aren't, your entity isn't being recognised yet - fix that first.
What should I do with the results?
Three things:
- Identify the pattern. Are you weakest on category prompts? Branded? Comparison? Each one points to a different fix - category weakness is usually an off-site authority problem; branded weakness is usually an on-site or schema problem.
- Capture the source list. For every cell scoring 2 or above, note the sources cited. That list IS your GEO target list - the third-party properties you need to be on.
- Pick one improvement per pillar. One technical fix, one on-site rewrite, one off-site outreach. Ship them this month. Re-run the audit. Compare.
Repeat monthly. The compounding effect is the whole game.
The best free GEO monitoring tools for B2B marketing teams
The best free GEO monitoring tools for B2B marketing teams in 2026 are the AI assistants themselves, used directly and consistently. You do not need a dashboard to start. You need the prompts, the rubric and a habit. Below is the current best-free stack and what each is actually useful for.
- ChatGPT (free tier with web search). The single highest-traffic AI tool for B2B research. The free tier now includes browsing, so it returns live answers with sources. Use it for category, branded and comparison prompts.
- Perplexity (free). The best free monitoring tool for source tracking. Every answer shows its citations, so you can see exactly which pages on your site (or your competitors') AI is pulling from. Run all five audit prompts here first.
- Google AI Overviews. Free, integrated into normal Google search. Use an incognito window to avoid personalised results, then run your category and question prompts. Screenshot what appears in the AI Overview block.
- Google Search Console. Free. Filter the Performance report for query patterns that look like prompts (longer, conversational, question-led). Rising impressions on those queries with flat clicks is a strong sign of AI Overview eclipsing.
- Bing Copilot and Claude (free tiers). Useful supplementary checks. Bing Copilot reflects Microsoft's index; Claude is increasingly used by technical B2B audiences. Run your branded and comparison prompts in both monthly.
- A shared Google Sheet. The unsexiest tool on the list, and the one that makes the rest work. Columns for date, tool, prompt, score, mentions, sources cited. The free GEO monitoring "stack" only compounds if the results are in one place.
Paid GEO monitoring platforms - Profound, AthenaHQ, Otterly, Peec AI - are useful once you are running prompts at scale or want competitor benchmarking. They are not a substitute for the manual audit. Start free, prove the signal moves, then graduate to paid if you need volume or board-level reporting. For the metrics that actually matter inside the tracker, see GEO metrics that actually matter.
Full shortlists for each category: the best AEO tools for B2B marketing, the best ChatGPT rank trackers and the best AI brand visibility tools for B2B SaaS.