Generative Engine Optimization is the unglamorous name for a real problem: your content now has to be findable, parsable and citable by systems that answer instead of link. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews. The original GEO paper from KDD 2024 showed the levers differ from classic SEO — citations, statistics and quotable structure move the needle where keyword density does essentially nothing.
The tooling around it is almost entirely paid SaaS. There are two existing awesome-lists for GEO and both are good, but their tools sections read like a funding announcement: Profound, Otterly, Goodie, Semrush. Useful if you have a budget. Useless if you want to read the source and run it yourself.
So I built the other half: ** Awesome Open GEO** — 62 entries, one criterion,
awesome-lint
clean.Every entry has to be free to run and published under an OSI-approved licence.
That sounds like a formality. It is the entire list.
Two of the most-linked tools in this space didn't make it, and explaining why is more useful than the list itself.
** firecrawl/llmstxt-generator** — 534 stars, genuinely handy, generates
llms.txt
and llms-full.txt
for any site. It has LICENSE
file** Canonry** — 99 stars, an AEO monitoring platform, source fully readable. Licensed
Neither of those is a criticism of the projects. A missing licence file is usually an oversight, and FSL is a deliberate, defensible business decision. But a list that calls itself open-source has to actually check, or the label means nothing.
I found the same pattern repeatedly: repos described as "open source" in their own README with no licence in the tree, and "open" platforms whose licence quietly excludes competing use. If you're picking a tool to build on, that distinction is the difference between a dependency and a liability.
I did not want to hand-pick from memory, so:
`topic:generative-engine-optimization`
, `topic:llms-txt`
, `topic:answer-engine-optimization`
, `topic:ai-visibility`
, plus keyword searches), producing llms.txt
.curl
'd every linkTen sections, ordered so a newcomer can start at the top:
llms.txt
, Schema.org, ai.robots.txt
, and Joost de Valk's Website SpecificationSelf-submissions are welcome and don't need an apology — just disclose it in the PR. My own audit tool is in there exactly once, under the same rules, with no special placement.
The bar is in contributing.md. Removals count as contributions too: if something on the list is abandoned, relicensed away from open source, or simply worse than it looked, open an issue and I'll cut it.
Repo: github.com/cloudapp-dev/awesome-open-geo The niche is young enough that a lot of good work isn't on the list yet. If you maintain something that clears the bar, I'd rather hear it from you than find it in six months.