How to choose a GEO platform: what nine months of AI visibility data taught us

We tested Profound, Searchable and AthenaHQ against a 24-criteria measurement framework in September 2026. Here is what separates them, the questions we would ask before signing with any tool, and the part of the job no platform does for you.

Key takeaways

• All three platforms do the core job: they run a fixed set of questions through the major LLMs, count how often your brand comes up, and show which websites those answers cite.
• In our evaluation, AthenaHQ has the cleanest structure and the fullest export. Profound has the widest feature set and the loosest controls on the data. Searchable costs the least and asks the most of your analysts.
• Ask every vendor two questions: what their mention rate is measured against, and whether your prompt list can be locked.
• In the configurations we tested in September 2026, none of the three distinguishes a recommendation from a passing mention in its mention count.
• The platform is about one third of the job. The other two thirds are the measurement discipline around it and the content and earned media work that changes what the models say.

The short answer

All three platforms do the core job. They run a fixed set of questions through the major LLMs, count how often your brand comes up, and show which websites those answers cite.

Where they differ is underneath the dashboards, in the definitions. In our evaluation, Profound has the widest feature set and the loosest controls on the data. AthenaHQ gives you the cleanest structure and the fullest export. Searchable costs the least and asks the most of your analysts.

If you take one thing from this page, ask every vendor two questions.

The first is what their mention rate is measured against: every answer they collected, or only the answers that named some brand. Two vendors can run identical data and report very different scores depending on which one they pick, so this is the question that makes their numbers comparable.

The second is whether your prompt list can be locked, so this month's score is built from the same questions as last month's. Without that, a rise in visibility can be a change to your prompt set rather than a change in the market.

A note on scope

There are hundreds of GEO platforms on the market now, and we have worked in dozens of them, Semrush and Gauge included. This guide covers three that went through a full head-to-head evaluation for a recent client engagement. They were that client's shortlist, so they are the ones we tested to this depth. The questions below apply to any tool you are weighing.

The comparisons describe the accounts and configurations we evaluated in September 2026, not every plan or feature a vendor may offer. Product names such as “recommendation engine” do not, by themselves, establish that a platform separates recommendations from mentions in the metric you report. Ask for that distinction to be demonstrated on real answers.

How we tested

We ran a live evaluation using a prompt set of roughly 500 questions across several markets. We used each platform's own documentation, paid accounts and hands-on data pulls, and scored all three against 24 criteria.

This page covers the findings that apply to any buyer. The table below summarises ten buyer-facing dimensions; it is not the full 24-criteria scorecard.

What we found, September 2026

Findings are from vendor documentation and our own trials in September 2026. These products change quickly, so confirm anything decisive in a demo. Model coverage, API access and controls depend on your plan. Public pricing is linked in the source notes; it is not a like-for-like quote for the same configuration.

What does a GEO platform measure?

A GEO platform (generative engine optimization) runs your questions through LLMs on a schedule, stores the answers, and turns them into numbers: how often you are named, how early in the answer, how you compare with competitors, which websites were cited, and what tone the model took about you.

Two terms decide most of your reporting.

Branded and non-branded prompts. A branded prompt names you. A non-branded one does not. Branded prompts nearly always mention you, so blending them into a single visibility figure flatters it. If a platform cannot split them, its headline number is not a market signal.

Mention rate, sometimes called share of AI mentions. The share of answers that name you. The trap is the denominator. Some tools divide by every answer, others only by answers that named some brand. Same data, different number.

For the wider measurement framework, see how to measure AI search visibility.

Will it recognise my brand, or just match the name?

Just match the name, in all three configurations we tested.

If an LLM recommends Banff, a lodge in Churchill, or a product line that carries its own name, none of these platforms credits that to the parent brand on its own in our evaluation. It counts only if someone added that name to a list by hand. Profound calls it name matching, AthenaHQ calls them identifiers, Searchable matches the brand name.

Two consequences. Your mention rate is undercounted until those lists are built. And once they are built, a change to the list moves the number, so the list belongs in your monthly snapshot alongside the data.

Can I trust a month-over-month comparison?

Only if you protect it yourself.

In the Profound account we evaluated, prompts can be added, reworded or removed at any time, there is no change log in our workflow, and past months are recalculated using the current setup. A jump in visibility can be a change in your prompt set rather than a change in the market. Searchable has no prompt locking or change log that we could find. AthenaHQ locks a prompt's text once it has run, which protects the history, though in our tested workflow prompts can still be added or paused without a record.

Whichever you pick, export the prompt list and the raw answers on the same day each month and keep them. That snapshot is your audit trail. Confirm whether the plan you are buying offers additional audit controls.

Can I get all the raw answers out?

AthenaHQ, yes, by CSV and API. Its public pricing lists Starter API access as an optional paid add-on, so do not assume it is included in the base price. Profound, yes, through the API, which was granted on request in our account rather than by default, so write it into the contract. Searchable returned answers through its paid-plan API cut at 2,000 characters in our data pulls, which rules out any analysis that needs the full text unless a different export option is available.

Reading real answers is where the useful work happens: what the model said, which competitor it preferred, what reason it gave. A tool you cannot export from is a tool you cannot audit.

Does placement understand the sentence?

No, not in the position metrics we evaluated. All three measure position as the order in which brands first appear. In “Canada is too cold, go to Norway instead”, the brand being turned down is named first and scores position one. AthenaHQ caps its scale at fifth place in our evaluation, so everything below that lands in one bucket. None of the tested setups lets you apply your own weighting for named first, top three, in a list, or buried.

The same gap shows up in recommendations. In the metrics we tested in September 2026, “you should visit Canada” and eighth place in a list of ten both count as a mention. If share of recommendations matters to your story, plan to calculate it yourself from exported answers—or require the vendor to demonstrate that exact distinction—which is another reason the export question matters.

How does it handle our other websites?

This is the widest gap between the three in our evaluation.

AthenaHQ reports every subdomain as its own row, so a French site, a media site and a trade site stay separate, and cited sites can be labelled partner and edited in bulk. Profound handles several domains per brand, and custom groups can cover a whole domain or a single section such as travel.example.com/en-ca, though wrong entries have to be removed one at a time in our workflow. Searchable folds subdomains into the root domain and assigns site types we could not change, so a partner site can end up counted as a competitor.

On traffic, Profound and Searchable can read AI bot visits and referrals from your CDN or server records, which your web team connects. The AthenaHQ setup we tested takes AI traffic from Google Analytics. None of the three in our evaluation identifies the exact user prompt that sent an individual visitor, so the link between an AI answer and a booking stays broken for now.

Which one would we pick?

Choose AthenaHQ if your reporting depends on clean structure: several domains and subdomains, partner sites to track separately, and full answers exported every month. Confirm the API and audit-log entitlements for your plan.

Choose Profound if breadth matters most: the widest feature set in our shortlist, citation categories out of the box, server-level AI traffic and content agents, provided you accept that you are maintaining the measurement controls around it.

Choose Searchable if budget is the constraint and you have analysts who will rebuild the measures you need from the API. Confirm the model coverage and response length included in your quote.

Two things to do before you sign up

Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Google's generative AI performance report covers impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing's AI Performance reporting shows citations across Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI-generated summaries and select partner integrations. These are different measures, not interchangeable visibility scores. Judge a paid platform on what it adds on top: ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity coverage, competitor comparison, and one place to see it all.

Get a quote against your real setup. Pricing units differ, and personas and markets multiply prompt counts in some tools. A list price for 500 prompts rarely survives contact with five markets and three audiences.

How to run the evaluation yourself

1. Write your scale before the first demo, in your own words, so every evaluator scores the same thing.
2. Give every vendor the same test: same prompts, same competitors, same markets, and a handful of real AI answers that name only your places, products or sub-brands. Watch what each tool does with them on screen.
3. Ask for a month of raw data during the trial, not after signing.

The platform is one third of the job

A GEO platform is an instrument. It reports what it counts, using definitions it chose. Buying one gets you a third of the way.

The second third is measurement discipline. That means defining the metrics your organisation will be judged on, designing a prompt set that reflects real demand rather than your own vocabulary, maintaining the identifier lists so mentions land on the right brand, and snapshotting each month so the trend holds up in front of a CMO or a board.

The final third is the one that moves the number. Reading the answers, finding which sources the models trust for the questions you care about, and building the content and earned media that put you inside those answers. A dashboard will show you a competitor getting named first. It will not tell you which story to pitch, which page to rewrite, or which publication the model leans on when it answers.

Wild Signal works in those last two thirds. We build the measurement layer on top of whichever platform a client picks, then turn citation data into a content and earned media plan aimed at the answers that matter most. If you are running a selection now, we will share the evaluation framework behind this page and show you how to turn the data into earning those answers.

Talk to Wild Signal about your GEO platform evaluation

Sources and verification notes

The hands-on findings above are Wild Signal's September 2026 evaluation of the tested accounts. The linked public pages below support plan, pricing and search-reporting details; they do not independently verify every trial observation.

• Profound: pricing and plan entitlements — custom enterprise pricing, model coverage, exports and API access.
• Searchable: pricing and model options — Pro and Scale list pricing; additional models and custom configurations affect cost.
• AthenaHQ: pricing and plan comparison — Starter pricing, 11-model coverage, CSV exports, API add-ons and enterprise controls.
• Google Search Console: generative AI performance report — what AI impressions include and how they are reported.
• Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance — citation reporting, cited pages and grounding queries. Grounding queries are not individual visitor-to-sale attribution.

Pricing and capabilities change. Recheck the linked pages and ask vendors to demonstrate your decisive requirements before signing.