Who this ranking is for
Teams and solo marketers starting from nothing. That is a deliberate lens, and it changes the answer: the tool with the widest engine coverage is not the best first purchase if getting to it costs several hundred dollars a month.
If your situation is different - an existing Ahrefs or Semrush subscription, an enterprise procurement process, a need for seventeen engines - the ranking below still tells you which tool fits, and the chooser above points you straight at it.
What the scores are built from
Published pricing and product pages, read and dated. Where a vendor publishes no price we write "not published" rather than estimating, and it counts against them on the first criterion - a tool you cannot buy without a sales call is not one you can start with this week.
Why every price carries a date
This category is roughly eighteen months old and repackages tiers constantly. An undated price in a market moving this fast is worse than no price at all.
Ownership and money
LLM Brand Boost is operated by the same people who publish this site. It is labelled as ours everywhere it appears and scored on the same five criteria as everything else. It ranks first here because it is the only tool in the set with a permanent free tier and the lowest paid entry step - on engine coverage, the criterion weighted third, it is beaten by four of the others and we say so on its page. Some links are affiliate or first-party links and we may earn from them.
More on who runs this site and how that disclosure is handled day to day is on the About page.
None of this replaces checking for yourself. Our GEO audit guide sets out the same kind of check we run when scoring a tool - ask the assistants your own buyer questions, more than once, and see who actually gets named.
The reason we score tools this way rather than by rank alone: zero-click search is now the majority outcome, and an AI Overview on a query cuts the click-through of the #1 organic result by roughly 58%. A tracker's job is to measure what happens on the answer side of that gap, not just where a link sits.
Questions about how a specific score was reached come up often enough that we keep a running list on the FAQ page.
One specific tactic gets recommended constantly as a shortcut to this kind of visibility: publishing an llms.txt file. We checked the evidence directly rather than taking the pitch at face value - adoption is real, confirmed readership by answer engines is not, and the one outcome study we found shows no measurable effect on citation rate. It is a reason this ranking scores tools on whether they measure actual citations, not on whether a site did its technical homework.