B2B SEO tools are the software a business-to-business company uses to find the searches its buyers make, fix what stops its pages from ranking, and show that organic visitors turn into pipeline. Most B2B teams need five jobs covered, not five subscriptions:
- First-party search data: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, both free
- Lead attribution: Google Analytics 4, free, with demo requests and sign-ups marked as key events
- Keyword and competitor research: one suite — Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking or Moz Pro
- Technical audits: a crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free for up to 500 URLs
- AI answer visibility: the free AI reports from Google and Microsoft, the AI tracking now built into the research suites, or a dedicated tracker — if your buyers ask AI assistants for vendor shortlists
This guide explains what each job means for a B2B site, what each tool does and what it costs. Every price and feature below was read on the vendor's own website on 19 October 2026 and is linked where it is used. Prices change often, so check them before you buy.
TopCited is a GEO platform with SEO included, so several tools on this list overlap with ours. We name them anyway, report what each vendor says rather than what we think of it, and set out where TopCited fits at the end.
Key definitions
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| B2B SEO | Search engine optimization for a company that sells to other businesses. Success is measured in qualified leads and pipeline — demo requests, trials, sales conversations — more than in raw traffic. |
| First-party search data | What a search engine reports about your own site: the queries you appeared for, impressions, clicks and position. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools provide it. |
| Research suite | A paid tool with its own keyword and backlink database, used to estimate demand and to see what competitors rank for. |
| Site crawler | Software that crawls your site the way a search engine does and reports technical problems such as broken links, redirects and missing metadata. |
| Key event | Google Analytics 4's term for an event that measures "an action that's particularly important to the success of your business" — on a B2B site, a demo request or a trial sign-up. |
| AI visibility tracker | Software that runs a set of buyer questions (prompts) through AI assistants on a schedule and records whether your brand is mentioned and your pages are cited. |
Why B2B SEO needs a different tool mix
The tools are the same ones every SEO team uses. What changes in B2B is which of their reports matter.
- The valuable queries are small. A question that a handful of qualified buyers type each month can be worth more than a query with thousands of searches. Research suites estimate search volume from their own databases; Search Console reports the queries your pages actually appeared for. For a niche B2B topic, the first is an estimate and the second is evidence.
- The conversion is a lead, not a sale. Revenue is often booked in a CRM weeks or months later. The report that matters ties a landing page to a demo request, which is a job for analytics, not for a rank tracker.
- Comparison and alternative queries carry the buying intent. Searches such as "X vs Y" and "X alternatives" usually come from buyers who already have a shortlist. Competitor research shows who ranks for them and what those pages cover.
- Buyers ask AI assistants. If your buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot which vendors to consider, a rank tracker will not tell you whether you are named. Google and Microsoft now report part of this for free; the rest needs a tracker.
- The site is a mix. Product pages, documentation, a blog, gated resources and app pages often share one domain. A crawler finds the technical problems that come with that mix before they cost you rankings.
B2B SEO tools compared
| Tool | Job | What a B2B team uses it for | Free option | Paid entry (19 Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | First-party Google data | Queries, pages, clicks, impressions and position; a separate report of AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions | Free | None |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | First-party Bing data | Search performance, URL inspection, Site Scan; AI Performance (public preview) for Copilot citations | Free | None |
| Google Analytics 4 | Lead attribution | Demo requests and sign-ups as key events, reported by landing page | Free | Analytics 360 is a separate paid product |
| Semrush | Research suite + AI tracking | Keyword and competitor research, Position Tracking, Site Audit, AI visibility | Free plan; 7-day trial | SEO plan $139/mo; SEO + AI Search from $199/mo |
| Ahrefs | Research suite + AI tracking | Competitor and keyword research, Rank Tracker, Site Audit; Brand Radar for AI answers | Ahrefs Free (your verified sites) | Starter $29/mo; Lite with Rank Tracker $129/mo |
| SE Ranking | Research suite + AI tracking | Rank tracking, audits and research, with AI results tracking included | 14-day trial, no card | Core $129/mo |
| Moz Pro | Research suite + AI tracking | Tracked keywords, site crawl and AI prompt tracking | Trial on the Medium plan (card required) | Starter $49/mo; Standard $99/mo |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Technical audits | Crawl audits, redirects, broken links; JavaScript rendering on the paid licence | Free up to 500 URLs | $279 per user per year |
| OtterlyAI | AI visibility tracker | Daily prompt tracking in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot | None listed | Lite $29/mo (15 prompts) |
| Peec AI | AI visibility tracker | Daily prompt tracking across three models you choose | None listed | Starter €85/mo ($95/mo outside Europe) |
| Profound | AI visibility (enterprise) | Up to nine answer engines on its Enterprise plan | 7-day free trial | Enterprise: custom pricing |
The rest of this guide takes the jobs in order.
1. First-party search data: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Start here. It costs nothing, and it is the only data on this list that comes from the search engines themselves.
Google Search Console is, in Google's words, "a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results" (Search Console Help). Its Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for the queries and pages that brought people to your site, by default for the past three months (Performance report).
For B2B work, filter the report to one product or solution page and read its query list. It is the closest thing you have to a transcript of how buyers describe the problem you solve, including the low-volume questions no research suite estimates well.
Search Console now also has a generative AI performance report. It counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode — "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search" — and Google says it was rolled out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026 (Search Console Help). It reports impressions only, broken down by page, country, date and device. It tells you that a page appeared in Google's AI answers; it does not show clicks, or which query triggered the appearance.
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's equivalent. Microsoft calls it "free and full of powerful features": search performance reporting "using up to 16 months of data", a URL inspection tool, keyword research, a Site Scan audit and backlink insights (Bing Webmaster blog).
Since February 2026 it has also had AI Performance, a public preview that "shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations", with total citations, average cited pages and a sample of the grounding queries behind them (Bing Webmaster blog). In June 2026 Microsoft added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare in preview, and noted that Citation Share "does not expose competitor domains" (Bing Search blog).
Together, these two free tools give you a first-party view of your pages in Google's and Microsoft's AI answers. For ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app, you need one of the trackers in job 5.
2. Lead attribution: Google Analytics 4
Google says Google Analytics gives you "the tools, free of charge, to understand the customer journey" (Google Marketing Platform). Analytics 360, its enterprise version, is a separate paid product.
For B2B SEO the feature that matters is the key event. Google defines it as "an event that measures an action that's particularly important to the success of your business"; it is the name GA4 now uses for what it used to call conversions (Analytics Help). A standard property can mark up to 30 events as key events (Analytics Help).
Mark the actions that start a sales conversation as key events: the demo request, the contact form, the trial sign-up. Then report key events by landing page for organic search. That turns "this page gets traffic" into "this page produces demo requests", which is the sentence a B2B sales leader cares about. If you want to follow a lead past the first form, carry the same identifiers into your CRM.
3. One research suite: Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking or Moz Pro
A research suite is where most of a B2B SEO budget goes. You need one, not several — they overlap heavily. The deciding questions are how many sites and keywords you track, whether you need competitors' backlink data, and whether AI answer tracking is included in the plan you can afford. All four suites below now include some AI tracking.
Semrush sells an SEO plan at $139 a month ($117.33 a month billed annually) covering five websites and 500 tracked keywords, with Position Tracking and Site Audit. Its combined SEO + AI Search plans start with Starter at $199 a month, which adds 50 AI prompts tracked daily (Semrush pricing). There is a free plan, and the page offers a seven-day free trial. Semrush also sells its AI Visibility Toolkit on its own, at $99 a month per domain billed annually, reporting "mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity" (Semrush AI pricing).
Ahrefs offers Ahrefs Free, the renamed Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, for sites you verify. It includes a Site Audit that "scans your website for 170+ common technical & on-page SEO issues", Site Explorer for your own pages and links, and web analytics (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools). Analysing competitors' sites needs a paid plan. Starter costs $29 a month; Lite costs $129 a month and adds Rank Tracker, with 750 tracked keywords updated weekly (Ahrefs pricing). Its AI product, Brand Radar, is priced separately: from $199 a month, or $699 a month for every AI platform it indexes — AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot (Brand Radar).
SE Ranking's Core plan costs $129 a month ($103.20 a month billed annually). It includes 2,000 tracked keywords and 100 AI prompts tracked daily, with a 14-day free trial that needs no credit card (SE Ranking pricing). Its AI visibility tracker follows brands "across Google AIOs, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini" (SE Ranking); Perplexity tracking sits in a separate SE Ranking product, SE Visible.
Moz Pro starts at $49 a month for a single site (Moz Pro pricing). Its Standard plan, at $99 a month ($79 a month paid yearly), tracks 300 keywords across three sites and includes 150 tracked AI prompts across four AI models — GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity — refreshed weekly. Moz offers a free trial on its Medium plan only, and a credit card is required to start it (Moz Help).
The AI tracking in each suite differs more than the SEO features do:
| Suite | Cheapest way to get AI tracking | AI engines named by the vendor | Tracking cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush | AI Visibility Toolkit, $99/mo per domain (billed annually); or Starter, $199/mo with 50 prompts | ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity | Daily (Starter prompts) |
| Ahrefs | Brand Radar, from $199/mo | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot | Not stated on the pricing page |
| SE Ranking | Core, $129/mo with 100 prompts | Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT | Daily |
| Moz Pro | Standard, $99/mo with 150 prompts | GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity | Weekly |
Use the trials before you pay. Each suite estimates search volume and difficulty from its own database, so judge them on whether their competitor and query data matches what Search Console shows for your own pages.
4. Technical audits: Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Ahrefs Free
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a downloadable crawler that, its developer says, audits a site "for over 300 SEO issues" (Screaming Frog). It is free for crawls of up to 500 URLs. A licence removes the limit and costs $279 (£199) per licence per year, and licences are per user (Screaming Frog pricing). The free version does not include JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, saved crawls or the Google Analytics and Search Console integrations — which matters if your site renders its content with JavaScript.
If you would rather stay in a browser, Ahrefs Free's Site Audit covers your verified sites at no cost, with 5,000 crawl credits per project per month (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools). Every suite in job 3 also includes a site audit.
On a B2B site, audit the pages that produce key events first: pricing, demo, product and solution pages. A redirect chain on the blog costs less than one on the demo page.
5. AI answer visibility: free reports, suites and dedicated trackers
If your buyers ask AI assistants for vendor shortlists, you need to know whether you are named. There are three layers, and most teams should start at the first.
- Free and first-party. Search Console's generative AI report shows your impressions in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing's AI Performance report shows your citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Both are covered in job 1.
- Bundled in your suite. The AI tracking in Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and Moz Pro, compared in the table in job 3.
- Dedicated trackers, which cover more assistants or more prompts:
- OtterlyAI. The Lite plan costs $29 a month for 15 prompts, tracked daily in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot; Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons (OtterlyAI pricing).
- Peec AI. The Starter plan costs €85 a month (shown as $95 outside Europe) for 50 prompts, tracked daily across three models you choose from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver (Peec AI pricing).
- Profound. Built for enterprises: its Enterprise plan tracks up to nine answer engines at custom pricing, and a free trial runs 50 prompts daily for seven days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews (Profound pricing).
For a longer comparison of the dedicated trackers, see our guide to the best AI search monitoring tools.
How to build a B2B SEO tool stack, step by step
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both are free, and every other tool on this list is easier to judge once you have first-party data to check it against.
- Mark lead actions as key events in GA4. Demo request, contact form, trial sign-up. Report them by landing page for organic search.
- Export the queries for your product and solution pages from Search Console. Sort them into problem queries, comparison and alternative queries, and brand queries. Our guide to content gap analysis for SEO covers what to do with the gaps you find.
- Choose one research suite on a trial. Compare Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and Moz Pro on the queries you exported in step 3, not on feature lists.
- Crawl the site. Use Screaming Frog's free version (up to 500 URLs) or Ahrefs Free's Site Audit, and fix the pages that produce key events first.
- Check whether AI assistants name you. Read Search Console's generative AI report and Bing's AI Performance report, then ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the questions your buyers ask. If competitors are named and you are not, start tracking those questions.
- Review monthly. Search Console and Bing queries, key events by landing page, and AI visibility — then update the pages that bring buyers closest to a sales conversation.
Which B2B SEO tools to choose
- Starting out, or a small team: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, GA4, Screaming Frog's free crawler and Ahrefs Free. Cost: nothing.
- A growing team with a content plan: add one research suite. At list prices on 19 October 2026, the entry points are Moz Pro Standard ($99 a month), SE Ranking Core ($129), Ahrefs Lite ($129) and Semrush's SEO plan ($139). Pick on a trial, not on feature count.
- If AI assistants are part of your buyers' research: use the free Google and Bing AI reports first. Then choose either a suite plan that includes AI prompt tracking or a dedicated tracker such as OtterlyAI ($29 a month for 15 prompts).
- Enterprise: an enterprise suite plan plus a dedicated AI platform such as Profound, priced by quote.
What these tools will not do
Every tool above diagnoses. None of them writes the comparison page you are missing, rewrites the solution page that ranks but never produces a demo request, or decides which issue on a long audit list matters this week. For a B2B team without a dedicated SEO person, that gap — between the report and the finished page — is the part no tool on this list closes.
Where TopCited fits
TopCited is a GEO platform with SEO included, built to produce the work rather than only the report.
- AI answer monitoring. TopCited's content monitoring runs your query sets on a schedule you set (cron, with timezone support), records the brand mentions in the answers, and reports gap analysis — the queries where competitors appear and you do not — along with share of voice.
- Rewrites, not issue lists. The CORE optimizer rewrites your existing content and scores it before and after, including keyword coverage.
- A starting point. To see where you stand, request a GEO audit through the form on our site.
It does not replace Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools or GA4, which are the first-party sources everything else should be checked against, and it is not a substitute for a research suite's keyword and backlink database.
Frequently asked questions
For most B2B teams: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for free first-party search data, Google Analytics 4 with demo requests and sign-ups marked as key events, one research suite (Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking or Moz Pro), a crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and, if your buyers use AI assistants, AI answer tracking. Prices and features in this guide were checked on each vendor's own site on 19 October 2026.
Yes. Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics 4 are free. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is free for crawls of up to 500 URLs, Ahrefs Free gives you Site Audit and Site Explorer for sites you verify, and Semrush has a free plan with limits.
Usually not. The research suites overlap heavily, and most B2B teams pick one after a trial. Choose on the site and keyword limits you need, whether competitors' backlink data matters to you, and whether AI prompt tracking is included in the plan you can afford.
Mark the actions that start a sales conversation, such as demo requests, contact forms and trial sign-ups, as key events in Google Analytics 4, then report key events by landing page for organic search. A standard GA4 property can mark up to 30 events as key events.
It shows AI Overview and AI Mode impressions, not clicks. Search Console's generative AI performance report, which Google says was rolled out to all websites as of August 31, 2026, counts how often links to your site were shown in those features, by page, country, date and device.
Many now do. Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar and SE Ranking include ChatGPT tracking, Moz Pro tracks prompts in GPT, and dedicated trackers such as OtterlyAI, Peec AI and Profound cover ChatGPT alongside other assistants. The free reports from Google and Microsoft cover only their own AI features.
The short version
- Free first: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4 cover search data, AI impressions in Google and citations in Copilot, and lead attribution, at no cost.
- One suite, chosen on a trial: Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking or Moz Pro. All four now include some AI tracking.
- One crawler: Screaming Frog's free version or Ahrefs Free's Site Audit, starting with the pages that produce demo requests.
- AI tracking when the evidence says so: start with the free Google and Bing reports, then add a suite plan or a dedicated tracker for ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest.
- Measure by key events, not traffic. A B2B page earns its place by the conversations it starts.