The newest freelance service line is helping clients get named and cited by AI engines — AEO and GEO — and it is wide open, because demand arrived before most tools learned to do more than report. The catch for a solo operator is leverage: the work (schema, FAQ markup, comparison content) does not scale if you do it by hand for every client. The right tool closes that gap. We build Cituna, one of the options below; the rest are read from each vendor’s own page on the date shown.
The freelancer’s real cost:
What a freelancer needs (that a brand doesn’t)
- A low, cancellable per-client price. No annual lock-in, no enterprise contract — each client started and stopped with the engagement.
- A tool that does the work. You are the whole team. A dashboard adds to your to-do list; a tool that writes and publishes the fix takes work off it.
- Client-ready proof. You do not have an analyst to build the deck. The tool should hand you the before/after answers and the Search Console tie-in.
- A way to show value before the invoice. A free trial you can run on a prospect’s domain turns a pitch into a demo.
The tools, read for a solo operator
| Tool | Entry price | Engines | Writes & publishes the fix? | Search Console proof? | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cituna | $39 | 7, daily | Yes — in 50+ languages | Yes | 3 days (card) |
| Otterly.ai | $29 | 4 | No (3 fixes/week) | No | Yes, length not stated |
| LLMrefs | $79 | 11 | Free tools only | No | 7 days |
| Peec AI | $95 | 3 of 6 | No (sentiment, multi-country) | No | Yes, length not stated |
| Rankscale | $99 | 17+ | Page audits | No | 7 days (Pro) |
Read from each vendor’s own page (see /compare for dates). For a freelancer the ‘writes the fix’ column is the one that decides how many clients you can carry.
Why “does the work” beats “cheapest”
Run the numbers on your own time. A monitoring tool tells a client they are missing from five engines; closing that gap is then your evening: schema for three templates, a comparison article, an FAQ block, an llms.txt file. Across four clients that is most of a week, every month, and it does not shrink as you add clients — it grows. A tool that generates those fixes from the exact prompts a client is missing, and publishes them to the client’s CMS, turns that week into a review-and-approve. That is the only way a solo consultant takes on a fifth client without working a seventh day.
Selling GEO as a freelancer
Package the loop, not the tool. Audit what AI says about the prospect (a free check makes a strong first call), scope the fixes, run them monthly, and report in clicks, not scores. Price it as a retainer, because AI answers move and a one-off audit goes stale. The concepts you will sell on are in our guides to answer engine optimization, optimising content for AI engines, and choosing the tool you will standardise on.
Clients in any language
If your clients are not all in one country, the fix has to ship in their language. Cituna writes and publishes its fixes in 50-plus languages to the client’s own CMS, and tracks the global engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and both Google AI surfaces — on the $39 plan, so a freelancer serving clients across markets is not boxed into a single-language, single- region tool. It does not track Microsoft Copilot; if a client’s buyers rely on it, Otterly.ai covers it at $29.
Where Cituna fits
We build Cituna, and for a freelancer the pitch is simple: it is the cheapest tool that does the work rather than handing it back to you. $39 a month per client, seven engines asked daily, the schema, FAQ markup, llms.txt and articles written and published for each gap in 50-plus languages, and the result tied to clicks in Search Console — most of the client report, written for you. What it does not do: Microsoft Copilot, or a sentiment dashboard; for pure low-cost monitoring, Otterly’s $29 is the honest cheaper pick. Plans are $39 / $119 / $399 on our pricing page.
Next: the AI visibility tools under $200 line by line, and — if you are scaling past solo — AI visibility tools for marketing agencies. Buying for an internal team instead? See for in-house marketing teams.
Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.