# I Built an Awesome List for Open-Source GEO Tools. The Licence Check Cut the Popular Ones. > Source: > Published: 2026-07-30 11:23:47+00:00 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](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735) 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](https://github.com/cloudapp-dev/awesome-open-geo/blob/main/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.