Not a 47-tool listicle. The actual stack our team runs day-to-day, organized by what they do, with one-line opinions on each. Updated when something gets replaced — which happens more often than you'd think.
Tools we use to monitor AI search visibility, track citations, and run traditional SEO. The AEO/GEO category is barely two years old, so this section moves fastest.
What it does: AI search visibility tracking — see what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini say about your brand. Verdict: Best-in-class for AEO right now. The category leader.
What it does: Lighter-weight AI search monitoring with prompt-level tracking. Verdict: Better fit for SMBs than Profound's enterprise pricing.
What it does: Backlink data, keyword research, competitor analysis. Verdict: Still the gold standard for traditional SEO. Pricey but earns it.
What it does: Same lane as Ahrefs with better content tools. Verdict: We use both. Semrush wins for content gap analysis; Ahrefs wins for backlinks.
What it does: Question-based research — what people actually ask Google about a topic. Verdict: Cheap, fast, indispensable for AEO content briefs.
What it does: Structured data generation and management at scale. Verdict: Worth it past 50 pages. Below that, Google's schema generator is fine.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn, attribution. We use the platform-native tools more than people expect — most third-party "ad managers" overpromise.
What it does: Bulk Google Ads optimization — n-gram analysis, bid management, alerts. Verdict: Worth the spend if you're managing $20K+/mo across multiple accounts.
What it does: Bulk editing for Google Ads campaigns. Verdict: Free. Mandatory. If your agency isn't using this, you're paying for slow.
What it does: Attribution and analytics for D2C ecommerce. Verdict: If you're running Meta + Google + Klaviyo for an ecom brand, this is the cleanest read on what's actually working.
What it does: Native LinkedIn ads platform. Verdict: Painful to use, expensive, but irreplaceable for B2B mid-market and up.
What it does: Cross-channel attribution with longer windows than platform-native. Verdict: Useful for high-LTV B2B with long sales cycles. Overkill for SMB.
AI assists. Humans finish. The whole stack here is configured around that principle — first draft fast, final polish slow.
What it does: Long-form drafting, structured outputs, AEO-friendly content. Verdict: Our default for anything that needs to read like a human wrote it. Better at nuance than GPT.
What it does: Research, summarization, ad copy variations. Verdict: Strong for fast iteration. We use it more for research than final writing.
What it does: Content brief generation, SERP research, AI outlines. Verdict: Underrated. Faster than building briefs by hand, less BS than Surfer.
What it does: Final-pass editing, brand voice enforcement. Verdict: Fine. Sometimes oversteps. Always set custom rules per brand.
No analytics tool will save a bad strategy, but the wrong one will hide a good one. We try to keep this stack lean.
What it does: Web analytics from Google. Verdict: Annoying but mandatory. Set it up correctly once, never touch again.
What it does: Free dashboarding from GA4 + ad platforms + Sheets. Verdict: Free is the killer feature. Builds the client-facing dashboards that make weekly updates legible.
What it does: Session recordings, heatmaps. Verdict: Good for finding the leaks that GA4 can't show. Skip on low-traffic sites.
What it does: Privacy-first analytics, no cookie banner. Verdict: What we run on this site. Cleaner data than GA4, fraction of the setup pain.
For balance. We've tried these. They didn't earn their spot.
You know the ones. They promise to replace your strategist, your copywriter, and your media buyer with a single chatbot interface. They don't. They produce mid output across all three. Hire specialists; let AI augment them.
Article Forge, Word AI, anything that promises "1,000 articles for $99." Google catches these now. AI engines don't cite them. The juice isn't there. Cheap content has gotten cheaper, sure — but the floor for ranking content has gotten higher.
Tools that promise to fully automate your ad spend without human review. Performance Max in Google Ads is the most famous. It works for some accounts. For most B2B SMBs, it converts your spend into noise.
If a tool sends results via email instead of showing them on-page, that's a lead-capture funnel, not a tool. Nothing wrong with that — we run one (the Free Score) — but call it what it is. You're trading email for a report, not using "free software."
This page updates roughly quarterly. If you'd rather not check back, we'll send the diff when we update — no other emails, no newsletter spam. Just the stack changes.