Developers Started 322 GEO, AEO and AI SEO Projects a Month on GitHub in 2026, Up From 12 a Month in 2024

Summary

Picture a marketing manager at a regional law firm who gets three cold emails in one week, each offering a free AI visibility score. Many of those scores come from small scripts that anyone can build in an afternoon. GitHub shows how fast that kind of tooling is multiplying.

Generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO) and AI SEO all describe the same goal: getting a business named and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features. We counted public GitHub projects that use those terms in their names.

In 2024 developers started about 12 such projects a month. In the first seven months of 2026 they started 322 a month. Almost none of them show signs of outside interest: 94.4% never earned a recorded star.

What we measured

We used GH Archive, the public log of GitHub events, in Google BigQuery. We kept repositories whose names contain GEO, AEO, AI visibility or AI/LLM SEO phrasing, with tight patterns so that geography tools and student IDs were excluded. A repo's first recorded event stands in for its creation date. We removed probable forks: repos with no forks and at most two stars whose short name matches an earlier repo that had been forked.

We counted new repos per month, stars (WatchEvents), forks and months with code pushes. We grouped 2026 repos by the job their name describes. Per study rules we report counts only and name no projects.

New AI search optimization repos grew more than 25-fold in two years

Growth was slow through 2024, picked up in spring 2025 and jumped again in March 2026.

The drop after July 2026 lines up with gaps in GH Archive's own data collection in August and September, so we do not read it as a real slowdown. Even the lower months are far above anything seen in 2024.

GEO is replacing 'AI SEO' as the name developers use

Repo names show which label builders reach for. A repo can carry more than one label.

In 2024 nearly every project called itself AI SEO. By 2026 GEO, AEO and AI visibility together outnumber it. The tools did not change much. The label did.

Audits and scores dominate what gets built

We sorted the 2,679 repos first seen in 2026 by keywords in their names.

Checking a site is easy to automate, so most builders start there. Ongoing tracking is harder because it means running prompts on a schedule and storing results, and fewer than 8% of 2026 repos say they do it.

Almost none of these projects show outside interest

Stars are a rough signal of whether anyone besides the author cares about a project.

Only 166 repos (4.6%) were updated in three or more separate months. Most look like short-lived builds and demos. Star counts are understated for 2026 because GH Archive recorded fewer star events that year, but even the 2024 and 2025 projects show the same pattern.

What this means

The flood of free AI visibility checkers means you will see many conflicting scores for the same site. Most come from projects with no recorded stars and few updates. A score from a one-off script tells you little about whether ChatGPT or Google's AI answers actually mention your business. An AI SEO consultant will check the answers themselves rather than trust a score.

What matters is repeated testing of the questions your customers ask, tracked over time. That is the part almost nobody on GitHub builds. If you want a real read on where your business appears in AI answers, start with our free AI visibility audit, which uses the same live prompts an AEO agency should be tracking.

Limits

We matched repo names only. Projects that do AI search optimization without saying so in their name are missed, and some name matches will be unrelated despite tight patterns.

GH Archive stopped recording descriptions of newly created repos after October 8, 2025, so description matching was not possible across the full period.

First seen is the first recorded public event, not the exact creation date. Fork removal is a name-based heuristic.

GH Archive recorded far fewer star events in 2026, and its overall capture had gaps in October 2025 and August to October 2026. Counts for those months and 2026 star totals are understated.

Frequently asked questions

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