SMB SEO

AI search and shopping visibility for small businesses

Tools that track how you show up in AI answers and AI shopping results, and help a store get ready for them. We list 41, and 17 have a free plan.

Order: tools we’ve tested come first, by score, then the rest alphabetically. Payment never changes the order.

Prices checked between Oct 6, 2026 and Oct 13, 2026. How prices compare across categories

How to choose an AI visibility tool

Updated Oct 12, 2026.

Not for Google. Google says “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”, and “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features” (Google Search Central). A page needs to be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet, which Google’s usual technical requirements cover. A tool that sells an AI text file or special markup as the way into Google’s AI answers is selling something Google says you don’t need.

Let the search crawlers in

OpenAI says “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links”, and it recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file (OpenAI). Google lists allowing crawling in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting service, among the practices that still apply (Google Search Central). Before you pay to track AI answers, check that nothing on your site keeps these crawlers out, such as an app or a setting that blocks AI bots.

Start measuring with Search Console

Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console’s Performance report, with the rest of your search traffic (Google Search Central). A tracker reports something else: whether AI answers mention your business for the questions your customers ask, in Google and in other assistants.

Ask what a tracker checks, and how often

Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode “may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary”, and that AI Overviews “often don’t trigger” (Google Search Central). Ask a tool which AI features and assistants it checks, which questions it asks them, and how many times it runs each question before it reports a result.

On Shopify, check what the store already does

Shopify’s Winter ’26 Edition brought agentic storefronts for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot (Shopify). Shopify’s guide to agentic commerce now says “Agentic Storefronts is automatically activated for eligible merchants”, that eligible products “are listed in Shopify Catalog by default”, and that for merchants “there’s nothing to configure” (Shopify). Shopify’s free Product Page Audit for Agentic Commerce checks the structured data AI agents read, though the page says what it checks does “not guarantee your products will be surfaced by AI agents” (Shopify). Our guide to what Shopify does for free has the rest.

Sources for this guide

Words to know