Best LLM SEO Tools in 2026: 10 Tools for AI Crawlers and Schema

LLM SEO is the technical and content work that decides whether large language models can reach, read and cite your pages. It’s several jobs, and they don’t all need the same tool:

• Crawler access and analytics: which AI bots visit your site, and which you allow or block.
• llms.txt: a proposed Markdown file that points AI tools at your key pages.
• Structured data: schema markup that says what your pages and entities are.
• Content scoring: optimizers that grade a page on how ready it is to be cited in AI answers.

Read the evidence before you buy. llmstxt.org still calls llms.txt a proposal, first put forward in September 2024. Google’s documentation says you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that no special schema.org markup is required. Search Engine Journal reported in May 2026 that Chrome’s Lighthouse nonetheless added an experimental audit that checks for llms.txt. Treat files and markup as low-cost housekeeping, and measure whether AI answers actually cite you.

For tracking, see the best AI visibility tools. For content and measurement, see the best AEO tools.

The tools

1. Pace Generative: best if you want the work done for you

Pace Generative is a done-for-you generative engine optimization (GEO) service, not a self-serve tool. It tracks visibility across the major AI engines, then does the work to change it: content written to be cited in AI answers, plus schema markup. Its site also lists technical work on site speed and mobile experience for AI crawlability. Reporting covers citations, share of voice and competitor comparisons.

It’s sold as monthly packages, with pricing on request. It suits businesses that want the technical and content side handled without learning every tool below.

See Pace Generative’s GEO services →

Disclaimer: we own Pace Generative (which is how we know they’re good).

2. SEOButler AI Visibility Check: best way to see whether LLMs already cite you

Technical fixes only matter if they change what AI says. SEOButler’s free check takes a brand name, a website and an optional topic, then searches a large index of recorded ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews answers (US, English). It shows where your brand is named, which answers cite your website and which other brands and sources appear for the topic, and you can open the answers behind each number.

No email is needed. Verifying one gives a shareable, unbranded report and three brand checks a month.

What it isn’t: a live tracker. It searches previously recorded answers, so a zero means no matching records, not that AI never mentions you.

Run the free SEOButler AI Visibility Check →

Disclaimer: we own SEOButler (which is how we know it’s good).

3. Cloudflare AI Crawl Control: best free bot visibility and control

AI Crawl Control (formerly AI Audit) shows which AI services access your content and lets you allow or block individual crawlers, with robots.txt compliance monitoring. The Crawlers tab lists each crawler with its operator, requests and data transfer. Metrics adds requests over time, status codes and the most-requested paths. Referral data is paid-plan only. Pay per crawl, which lets you charge AI crawlers, is in closed beta.

It’s available on all Cloudflare plans, including the $0 Free plan.

Limit: your site has to run through Cloudflare.

4. Known Agents: best for bot analytics and robots.txt

Dark Visitors is now Known Agents, and the old address redirects to the new one. It tracks crawler and AI-agent visits, measures human visits that arrive from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI chat platforms, and generates a robots.txt that updates as new bots appear.

• Free: $0, 1 project, 100K events a month.
• Startup: $29/mo, 3 projects, 1M events, CSV export and WordPress rule enforcement.
• Growth: $299/mo, 10 projects, 10M events.

Prices are for monthly billing. Limit: the free plan has a hard monthly event cap.

5. Yoast SEO: best for a one-click llms.txt on WordPress

Yoast adds an llms.txt file in one click and says the feature is free for everyone, in the free plugin and in Premium. Yoast describes the file as a guide that points language models to your most relevant content. Premium is $9.90/month billed annually ($118.80, excluding VAT) and includes crawl optimization settings that let you indicate which parts of your site shouldn’t be used to train language models.

Limit: WordPress only, and Google says such files aren’t needed for its AI features.

6. Rank Math: best for llms.txt plus wide schema coverage

Rank Math’s free plugin includes an llms.txt generator. You enable the module, choose which post types and taxonomies to list (up to 100 items by default), add custom content and preview the file. On schema, the free plan offers 18 pre-defined types plus 6 extra; Pro and above support 840+ types.

Pro costs €7.99/month billed annually, renewing at €8.99. Business is €24.99/month for 100 client sites.

Limit: WordPress only, and prices show in euros.

7. Schema App: best for enterprise schema and entity governance

Schema App builds and manages schema markup across large sites (Editor and Highlighter) and a content knowledge graph, with an Entity Hub add-on and an MCP server that exposes your published schema data to AI tools. Pricing is customized by scope, with a 12-month minimum and a one-time setup fee. The pricing page lists no free trial.

Limit: it’s enterprise-priced. Smaller sites can get schema from a CMS plugin.

8. Frase: best for AI-readiness checks

Frase offers two free checkers. The Agent Readiness Checker tests access (does the page serve real content past firewall challenges), discovery (robots.txt, sitemap and llms.txt) and parseability (structured data and a Markdown alternative); running it needs no signup. The GEO Score checker gives a page a 0 to 100 read on how ready it is to be cited by AI engines.

In the product, AI crawler monitoring starts on Professional ($103/mo billed yearly, $129 monthly). Starter is $39/mo yearly ($49 monthly). There’s a 7-day free trial, no card.

Limit: crawler monitoring isn’t on the entry plan.

9. Surfer: best for content teams optimizing for Google and AI answers

Surfer says its Content Editor optimizes pages for traditional search and AI answers in one workflow, and its AI tracker flags pages where competitors appear and you don’t. Prices below are billed yearly.

• Discovery: $49/mo. Content tools, no AI tracking.
• Standard: $99/mo. 25 weekly prompts, ChatGPT only.
• Pro: $182/mo. 50 daily prompts across five engines.

Limit: the pricing page lists no crawler analytics or llms.txt features.

10. Profound: best for enterprise agent analytics

Profound’s Agent Analytics tracks AI-sourced traffic and attribution across unlimited domains, with integrations for Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress. It sits alongside answer-engine tracking and prompt-volume data. The free trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days. Enterprise is custom, with up to nine answer engines.

Limit: the brand side is sales-led, with no public paid price. Cloudflare and Known Agents cover the basics for less.

Quick comparison

How to choose

1. Check access first. If robots.txt or a firewall blocks the bots you want, nothing else matters. Frase’s free Agent Readiness Checker tests this, and Cloudflare or Known Agents show who actually visits.
2. Add llms.txt only if it’s cheap. If your CMS makes one in a click (Yoast, Rank Math), fine. Documentation sites can use Mintlify’s free generator, which needs only a docs URL. Don’t pay for it on its own.
3. Use your CMS for schema. Yoast and Rank Math cover most sites. Schema App makes sense at the scale of thousands of pages and several teams.
4. Decide per crawler. Blocking a bot stops that service reading your pages, so choose by crawler, not all at once.
5. Measure the result. Run the free SEOButler check, then use a tracker from the best AI visibility tools if you need daily data. If no one has time to do the work, a done-for-you service such as Pace Generative may suit better.