The SEO, AEO, and GEO Tools I Use — and How Marketers Can Use Them 

Being an SEO, AEO, or GEO practitioner isn’t for the weak. 

The search landscape changes constantly. The questions people ask change. The way search engines surface information changes. And now, increasingly, people are asking AI platforms to do the searching for them. 

For marketers, that creates a pretty obvious problem: How do you know what people are looking for, how AI engines understand your brand and whether your content is actually doing its job? 

There isn’t one tool that answers all of those questions. 

My approach is to use a collection of tools — many of them free or inexpensive — to look at the same problem from different angles. 

I’m the SEO/AEO implementation expert for EndeavorB2B. I don’t work in marketing, but I work closely with our marketing teams, and I train more than 150 journalists in our newsroom on optimizing content for traditional search and answer engines. I’ve been working in SEO, GEO and AEO for nearly 20 years, and I’ve learned that the most useful tools aren’t necessarily the most expensive ones. 

They’re the ones that help you ask better questions. 

That’s particularly important in a newsroom. Journalists aren’t creating content simply because a keyword has search volume. They’re trying to understand what an audience wants to know, what information is missing, which sources are authoritative and whether the resulting story actually reaches the people it was intended to reach. 

Marketers can apply much of the same thinking to brands and campaigns. 

Instead of asking only, “How do I rank for this keyword?” you can ask: 

• What questions are my customers actually asking? 
• What does an AI engine say about my brand? 
• Which sources does it trust when answering questions about my category? 
• Are my company’s own channels part of that information ecosystem? 
• What content is attracting the right audience? 
• Where are people finding us—and what are they doing once they arrive? 

That’s the thinking behind my SEO/AEO/GEO toolbox. 

My toolbox isn’t about having the most tools. It’s about having the right questions. 

I use a combination of Google Search, Google AI Mode, Google Trends, Google Analytics, Data Studio, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. 

Some are traditional search and analytics tools. Others are generative AI platforms. I don’t use them interchangeably.  

I use each one to answer a different question. 

• Search helps me see what is visible. 
• Trends help me see what is changing. 
• Analytics helps me see what actually happened. 
• AI platforms help me understand how brands and topics are being interpreted. 
• Data Studio helps me see the patterns. 

Perhaps most importantly, I use the tools together. 

Google Search and AI Mode: What does the search engine actually show? 

Tools I use: Google Search and Google AI Mode 

One of the simplest — and most useful — things I do is search. 

That sounds almost too obvious to be an SEO strategy, but there is an important distinction between knowing what you think Google should show and actually looking at what Google shows. 

I’ll search topics related to the audiences we serve and look at: 

• Which sites appear? 
• Which companies and organizations are being cited? 
• What types of content are showing up? 
• What questions does Google appear to be answering? 
• Are news stories, product pages, videos, forums or other formats appearing? 
• What happens when I change the wording of the query? 
• What does AI Mode add to the conversation? 

Google has continued to blend traditional search with conversational AI, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. 

That makes simply looking at the results increasingly valuable.  

How marketers can use this 

Do the same thing for your brand. Don’t start with your marketing copy. Start with the questions. 

Search for things like: 

• “[category] companies” 
• “best [category] for [use case]” 
• “[product category] alternatives” 
• “how does [product/category] work?” 
• “[competitor] vs. [your brand]” 
• “problems with [category]” 

Then look at what appears. 

You may discover that your company’s website isn’t the dominant source of information about your own category. You may find that third-party publications, industry organizations, review sites, distributors or even Wikipedia are doing more of the explaining. 

That’s not necessarily a problem, but it is information. And information is what optimization starts with. 

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot: Ask the machines how they see your brand 

Tools I use: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot 

This is one of my favorite ways to use generative AI for generative AI work: 

I use AI to help me understand how AI sees a brand. 

If I want to understand how a company, product or topic is perceived by generative engines, I don’t necessarily begin by telling the AI everything I already know. 

I go in cold. 

I’ll ask questions a buyer, decision-maker, journalist or researcher might actually ask. 

For example: 

• “What companies are important in [category]?” 
• “What should someone know before buying [type of product]?” 
• “What are the leading publications covering [industry]?” 
• “What are the biggest challenges facing [industry]?” 
• “What companies are known for [specific capability]?” 

Then I do something important: I ask the same or similar questions across multiple AI platforms. I’m not looking for one definitive answer. I’m looking for patterns. 

Does the same company appear repeatedly? Does one source keep getting cited? Does the AI describe a brand differently from the way the brand describes itself? And perhaps most interestingly: Where did the answer come from? 

If an AI platform repeatedly cites one of Endeavor’s publications, Wikipedia, an analyst report, a company’s About page or a particular third-party website, I want to know why. 

That’s where the analysis gets interesting. The question isn’t simply, “Why isn’t my website being cited?” It’s “What information ecosystem is teaching the AI about my brand, and where is my brand participating in that ecosystem?” 

How marketers can use this 

Try the same exercise with your company, product or category. Ask several AI platforms the questions your customers might ask. 

Then document: 

• What each platform says. 
• Which brands appear. 
• Which sources are cited. 
• How your brand is described. 
• What information is missing or inaccurate. 
• Where the engines appear to agree—or disagree. 

This can become a surprisingly useful form of market intelligence. 

And it can reveal something traditional keyword research doesn’t always show: how your brand exists in the broader information ecosystem. 

Google Trends: What are people becoming interested in? 

Tool I use: Google Trends 

Google Trends is one of those tools that is easy to underestimate because it’s free. I use it several times a week. 

Our newsroom covers highly specialized B2B industries, which means the thing that is “trending” with the general public isn’t necessarily relevant to our audience. Trends gives me another way to look at search behavior and compare topics over time. Google describes Trends as a way to explore what people are searching for and examine search interest over time. 

I also use it to investigate traffic spikes. If a story suddenly takes off, I don’t just want to know that it got a lot of traffic. I want to know why. 

Was there a major news event? Did interest in the topic spike? Did the language people were using to search change? That’s the difference between reporting a metric and investigating a metric. 

How marketers can use this 

Google Trends can be useful before, during and after a campaign. 

• Before a campaign, compare the language people use around different products, problems or categories. 
• During a campaign, watch whether interest in the topic is changing. 
• Afterward, investigate whether a traffic spike corresponds with a broader increase in search interest. 

And don’t limit yourself to the obvious keyword. Try different ways of describing the same problem. 

Your internal marketing language and your audience’s search language may not be the same thing. That’s a useful discovery in itself. 

Google Analytics: What happened after someone found you? 

Tool I use: Google Analytics 4 

Search visibility is not the same thing as business value. That’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned working with journalists. A page can generate a lot of traffic and still tell us very little about whether we reached the right audience. 

Google Analytics helps me investigate what happens after people arrive. GA4 can be used to monitor traffic, investigate data and understand user activity across websites and apps. 

I’m interested in questions such as: 

• Where did the audience come from? 
• Which pages are attracting visitors? 
• Which sources send engaged audiences? 
• Do visitors continue to another page? 
• Are certain types of content generating repeat visits? 
• Which pages appear to need further optimization? 
• Are we attracting people who actually have an interest in the subject? 

This is where newsroom analytics becomes particularly useful to marketers.  

Journalists are often trained to think about an article as a product that needs an audience. Marketers should think about content the same way. Publishing isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of the measurement cycle. 

How marketers can use this 

Instead of only asking: “How many people visited this campaign page?” Ask: “What did the people who visited this page actually do?” 

Look at traffic sources, engagement, user behavior and the paths people take through your site. Then connect that information back to the original intent. 

If your campaign was designed to attract people researching a specific problem, are those people actually arriving? If they are arriving, are they engaging with the content? And if they’re not, is the problem the traffic, or the content itself? 

Those are very different problems. 

Data Studio: Turn data into something people can actually use 

Tool I use: Google Data Studio 

I love dashboards. 

Not because dashboards are inherently exciting, but because they can turn a pile of data into something a newsroom — or a marketing team — can actually use. 

Google’s Data Studio is designed for creating shareable, customizable reports and dashboards from multiple data sources. I use it to create dashboards that help teams monitor site performance, traffic sources and content performance without requiring everyone to become an analytics expert. 

The important part isn’t the dashboard itself; it’s the question the dashboard is designed to answer.  

A dashboard shouldn’t exist simply because someone can make one. It should help someone make a decision. 

How marketers can use this 

Build dashboards around decisions rather than metrics. 

Instead of a dashboard containing every possible SEO-related number, build one that answers questions such as: 

• Are we becoming more visible? 
• Are people finding the content through the channels we expected? 
• Which content is attracting the audience we care about? 
• What changed after we launched the campaign? 
• Where should we investigate next? 

The best dashboard isn’t necessarily the one with the most charts, it’s the one that makes the next question obvious. 

The real SEO/AEO/GEO tool isn’t a tool at all 

After nearly two decades of working in SEO and search-driven content, I’ve become less interested in finding the perfect optimization tool. I’m more interested in developing a repeatable way to investigate a problem. That’s something I’ve learned from working in a newsroom. 

Journalists are constantly asking: 

• What’s happening? 
• Why is it happening? 
• Who is involved? 
• What evidence supports it? 
• What are we missing? 
• What does the audience need to know? 

Those are surprisingly good questions for marketers, too. 

When you’re optimizing a product page, planning a campaign or trying to understand why your brand isn’t appearing in AI-generated answers, you can apply the same investigative mindset. 

• Start with the audience. 
• Look at what people are searching for. 
• Look at what search engines return. 
• Ask AI platforms how they understand your category. 
• Look at the sources they rely on. 
• Measure what happens when people reach your content. 
• Then go back and investigate what you found.  

That’s the workflow. The tools simply make it easier.

A simple starting stack 

If you’re trying to build your own SEO/AEO/GEO toolbox, you don’t need to buy everything at once. 

Start with: 

• Google Search — Understand what is visible today. 
• Google AI Mode — Explore how conversational search is answering more complex questions. 
• Google Trends — Identify changes in search interest and compare topics over time. 
• Google Analytics — Understand what happens after people reach your site. 
• Data Studio — Turn your data into shareable reports that help teams see patterns and make decisions. 
• ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot — Conduct generative-engine research, test questions and investigate how brands, products and topics are described. 

You can build a sophisticated optimization program with a much smaller toolbox than you might think.  

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