I Built an Awesome List for Open-Source GEO Tools. The Licence Check Cut the Popular Ones.

A developer built Awesome Open GEO, a curated list of 62 open-source tools for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), requiring all entries to be free to run and OSI-licensed. The list excludes popular tools like firecrawl/llmstxt-generator and Canonry due to missing or restrictive licenses, highlighting the difference between true open-source and labeled-only open-source.

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.