Is Writesonic's GEO (AI Visibility) Tracker Worth It?
Verification log (2)
- Aug 7, 2026Corrected the plan breakdown against Writesonic's current pricing page: Starter, Basic, and Growth track ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews only — Perplexity and the other 6 engines are Enterprise-only, so the free trial's engine mix is not what a $79/mo plan gives you. Added the missing Basic ($199/mo) tier.
- Aug 1, 2026Initial publish. Ran our own domain (theaitoolpick.com) through the free trial as the primary data source — figures below are our real, unedited results, not vendor-supplied examples.
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Test verdict
Trade-off scorecard
| Pick | Price friction | Capability gap | Setup friction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | $0 | One full snapshot report per project, 3 AI platforms (our run: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity), no repeat tracking | Enter your domain, pick up to 5 topics and 5 competitors, results in a few minutes |
| Starter ($79/mo) | $79/mo, annual ~$948/yr | Ongoing tracking instead of a one-off, but on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews only — no Perplexity; 50 prompts tracked daily; scope limited to 1 language + country; no Action Center | Same onboarding as the free trial, billing added |
| Basic ($199/mo) | $199/mo, annual ~$2,388/yr | Same 3 platforms as Starter with higher prompt/answer volume — the step most sites hit when 50 daily prompts stops covering their topics | Same onboarding, higher usage caps |
| Growth ($399/mo) | $399/mo, annual ~$4,788/yr — most expensive tier most sites would realistically need | Adds a limited Action Center (5 off-page + 5 on-page actions/month) on top of tracking | Same onboarding, higher usage caps |
Most “AI visibility” claims on affiliate content are vendor screenshots. We ran our own site through Writesonic’s GEO tool instead and are publishing the real numbers, including the parts that don’t flatter us.
What we actually ran
Domain: theaitoolpick.com (this site). Scope: whole domain, United States, English. We picked 5 topics that map to what we actually cover — AI productivity tools, AI tool directories, AI image generation tools, AI video and audio tools, and AI writing assistants — and let the tool auto-generate 6 real, search-derived prompts per topic (30 total), then ran all of them across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity (25 of 30 completed on the free tier). Worth flagging up front: the paid Starter, Basic, and Growth plans do not track Perplexity — they cover ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and the full 10-engine set is Enterprise-only. So the trial we ran is not a like-for-like preview of what $79/mo buys.
The results
- AI Visibility: 20% — mentioned in 5 of 25 answers.
- Share of voice: 83%, ranked #1 of 6 — but only among the answers where any of the 6 tracked brands showed up, which was a small slice to begin with. Most answers mentioned none of us.
- Citation share: 0% — not one of the 25 answers named a page on our site as its source.
The pages AI models actually cited for our topics were mostly the usual high-authority names: Zapier’s blog, YouTube, Medium, Quora, and a couple of SEO/marketing blogs. None were niche AI-tool-comparison sites like ours — the gap isn’t losing to a direct competitor, it’s not being treated as a source at all yet.
We caught the tool catching a hallucination
One prompt asked whether our site compares Descript vs. Runway for video editing. We don’t — our video/audio coverage is Pictory, InVideo, and Synthesia. Gemini answered anyway, generating a specific, plausible-sounding comparison (“Descript is script-first… Runway emphasizes generative AI for visual effects…”) and citing it as coming from us.
That’s a real, verifiable example of an AI model fabricating page content and attributing it to a real domain — worth knowing if you ever take an AI’s word for what a site says instead of checking the site directly.
What the tool recommended (and how much we buy it)
- Biggest visibility gap: “AI video and audio tools.” We’re absent from 5 of 25 answers here, with competitors filling the space. Reasonable — we don’t have a dedicated page for something like “AI podcast noise removal,” and the report’s suggested structure (problem → solution → proof) matches what already works for our other articles.
- Branded-query trust gap. When a model already knows about us, its answers read as neutral rather than confident, and the tool suggests publishing verifiable methodology (a scoring breakdown, real pricing, a documented test process) so an AI has something concrete to cite instead of guessing. This lines up with our own site’s known weak spot — most articles claim “hands-on testing” in the footer without real per-article test data, which is an honesty gap worth closing independent of this tool.
- Citation authority. The tool’s suggestion — get listed on the sites AI models already trust (Reddit, YouTube, Zapier) and publish original data journalists and other sites would cite — is generic SEO/PR advice dressed up as a GEO insight. Useful direction, nothing GEO-specific about it.
Who it’s actually for
- Sites that already publish regularly and want to know whether that content shows up in AI answers, not just Google rankings.
- Anyone who wants a real answer to “am I visible in AI search” instead of guessing from anecdotal ChatGPT queries.
- Not a replacement for writing the content in the first place — every gap it found for us was a content gap, not a tracking-tool problem.
When it’s worth paying for
If AI-referred traffic is already meaningful to you and you want to track whether specific pages move the needle over time, the ongoing tracking on the $79/mo Starter tier is the point — a single free snapshot doesn’t tell you if anything you did afterward worked. Check which engines matter to you first, though: if your audience leans on Perplexity or Claude, no plan below Enterprise will track them, and Starter buys you ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews only.
When to skip it
If you don’t yet have content covering the topics you want to be visible for, spend that budget on writing first. A tracking tool can’t cite a page that doesn’t exist.
Worth knowing before you compare prices: Writesonic used to be sold as an AI copywriter, and a lot of published comparisons still describe it that way. Writesonic vs Jasper covers what each of them actually became, and why neither is priced for an occasional copy writer any more.
Sites with little to no published content yet. The tool measures whether AI models already cite your existing pages. If you don't have pages covering a topic, the report will correctly tell you that — but that's a content-creation problem, not something the GEO tool itself fixes.
Anyone expecting the free trial to track progress over time. The free tier is a single snapshot. You need a paid plan to see whether your visibility score actually moves after you act on the recommendations.
Sites without $79-399/mo of budget to spend on tracking alone. That's a meaningful recurring cost for a monitoring tool rather than content itself — worth it if AI-search traffic is already a material channel for you, hard to justify for a brand-new or very small site.
Frequently asked questions
What does Writesonic's GEO tool actually measure?
It runs a set of real, search-derived prompts related to your niche through a set of AI engines — the paid Starter, Basic, and Growth tiers cover ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and only Enterprise unlocks all 10 (Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, Meta AI, and Google AI Mode). Our free trial run happened to include Perplexity rather than Google AI Overviews, so don't assume the trial's engine mix is what you get after paying. It then reports whether your brand shows up in the answer, how much of the answer it accounts for relative to named competitors ("share of voice"), and whether your specific pages get named as a source ("citation share").
Is the free trial actually useful, or just a teaser?
It's a full report, not a teaser — you get a real visibility score, a competitor breakdown, a citations list, and prioritized action items, all from actual model outputs, not a mocked demo. What you don't get on the free tier is ongoing tracking over time; it's a one-time snapshot.
What's the difference between AI visibility and being cited?
Visibility means your brand gets mentioned somewhere in the AI's answer. Citation means the AI names your specific page as a source. In our own test, we had 20% visibility (mentioned in 5 of 25 answers) but 0% citation share — meaning even the answers that knew about us weren't pointing to us as the source, they were pulling from bigger sites like Zapier, Reddit, and YouTube instead.
Can the AI just make things up about your site?
Yes, and our test caught it directly. When asked whether our own site compares two video-editing tools we've never covered, Gemini answered "yes" and generated a plausible-sounding comparison attributed to us — a page that doesn't exist. It's a real risk if you're using an AI's summary of "what X site says" instead of checking the site yourself.