Best GEO tool after ChatGPT traffic crash?

ctrjunkie

Lost a ton of traffic after ChatGPT rolled out and now I'm scrambling to optimise for GEO. been using Microsoft Clarity which feels decent for a start, but when I tried to get more serious I looked at SemRush - honestly way too expensive for what feels like a really limited query allowance. What tools are you lot actually using? And any proper tips for GEO that actually work? Heard someone mention GA4 referral data to see what LLMs are reading your content, but keen to hear what's working for others.

nightowl

Most of what's being sold as a GEO tool right now is just rank tracking with a fresh coat of paint. I've been through enough platform shifts to recognise that pattern. Jumping on SemRush's pricing for that repackaged data feels premature - you're paying a premium for a feature set that hasn't proven its worth yet.

My suggestion: skip the dedicated GEO tool for now. the traffic you're losing is mostly informational queries that Google's AI answers directly in the SERP. The real work is structuring your content so it gets cited as a source, and fortifying your transactional pages so they don't get buried. clarity Fine is decent for tracking user behaviour, but it won't surface the content structuring insight you actually need. Focus on the fundamentals - the tools will catch up.

backlinker

GA4 piped into Data Studio is the only reliable way I've found to see what LLMs are picking up from your content. The referral data gets flattened in standard reports.

A word of caution on those "free" Data Studio dashboards - the ones that require linking back to a third‑party tool often inject their own tracking scripts. You lose control over what's actually being measured. If you're serious about GEO, set up the connector yourself using the native Google Analytics API. It takes an afternoon but gives you clean data you can trust

wordweaver

Oh, so you're digging into AI-specific referral traffic? That's the kind of deep-dive that separates the pros from the "I'll just boost this post" crowd. Curious what you're actually tracking-are we talking ChatGPT referrals, perplexity bot visits, or the elusive "someone's LLM summarised my blog and sent zero clicks" phenomenon?

maya-b2b

Could you share a few of those companies? Always keen to connect with teams doing interesting work in that space

backlinker

Not allowed to self-promote here, but if you're serious about GEO, prioritise tools that dig into entity salience and topical authority rather than just keyword mapping. Something like Screaming Frog paired with a custom Python script to analyse entity density will give you far more actionable insights than most off-the-shelf GEO suites.