To track GEO and AEO progress without an SEO suite, pair free Google Search Console with a programmatic SERP API: GSC tells you which queries already send you clicks and impressions, and the SERP API tells you whether your page actually shows up for a target query and which People Also Ask questions surround it. That covers the two things you care about for generative and answer-engine optimization, position on the page and question coverage, for roughly the cost of a few thousand API calls instead of $100-500 a month.
A founder on r/Agentic_SEO ran exactly this setup. They took a small native Mac app (macmdviewer) plus about 25 blog posts and ran the whole SEO/GEO operation through Claude Code agents, no Ahrefs, no Semrush, no Surfer. The Search Console numbers they reported: March (half a month) about 35 clicks and 2,700 impressions, April 69 clicks and roughly 3,600 impressions, May 239 clicks and about 9,400 impressions, and the first 20 days of June around 1,100 clicks against roughly 60,000 impressions. They said compounding kicked in around week 8. Those are the OP's reported figures, not Scavio's data, but the shape is what matters: a curve that stays flat then bends, which you can only see if you are watching the right signals from day one.
What GSC gives you for free
Search Console is the ground truth nobody can sell you a better version of. It is your real impressions, clicks, average position, and the exact query strings Google matched you on. For AEO this is gold, because the long, question-shaped queries that answer engines feed on ("how do I open a markdown file on mac") show up here before they show up anywhere else. Filter the Performance report to queries containing how, what, why, or can, and you have your answer-engine target list straight from real demand. Sort by impressions with low clicks and you find pages that rank but do not convert the click, which is usually a title or snippet problem you can fix in an afternoon.
What a SERP API adds
GSC will not tell you where on the page you sit relative to competitors, and it will not show you the People Also Ask block or related searches that define an answer-engine topic. A SERP API fills that gap. With Scavio's Google endpoint and light_request: false, one call returns organic results, the knowledge graph, people_also_ask, and related_searches, costing 2 credits.
import requests
resp = requests.post(
"https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/google",
headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
json={"query": "how to open a markdown file on mac", "light_request": False},
)
data = resp.json()
organic = data.get("organic", [])
mine = next((r for r in organic if "macmdviewer" in r.get("link", "")), None)
print("my rank:", organic.index(mine) + 1 if mine else "not on page 1")
for paa in data.get("people_also_ask", []):
print("PAA:", paa.get("question"))
for rel in data.get("related_searches", []):
print("related:", rel.get("query"))Run that across your target queries on a schedule and you get a position tracker plus a PAA coverage map. If three of the People Also Ask questions are ones your page does not answer, that is your next section to write. That loop, target query in, missing questions out, is most of practical AEO.
Reddit as a leading indicator
For GEO specifically, Reddit threads tend to surface a topic before it stabilizes in search. Scavio's /api/v1/reddit/search lets you watch the questions people ask in your niche and write the answer page early, so you are already indexed when the query volume arrives. Treat it as a directional signal, not a forecast.
Be honest about what this does not cover
This stack checks SERP presence and PAA coverage. It does not track whether Google's AI Overviews cite you, and Scavio does not return AI Overview data, so do not expect that. It also will not give you a backlink graph or keyword difficulty scores. This is the real line where a paid suite still wins. Ahrefs and Semrush sit on a backlink index and a historical keyword database that took years and a crawl fleet to build; if you need to see who links to a competitor, or want difficulty estimates and multi-year volume trends, pay for the suite. GSC plus a SERP API cannot reconstruct that.
For a small site that mostly needs to know "do I rank for my queries and am I answering the questions around them," the free-plus-API stack is enough, and it is what turned a half-month of 35 clicks into 1,100 in three months. Scavio's free tier is 50 credits, pay-as-you-go is $0.005 per credit, and Project is $30/month for 7,000 credits, which is a lot of SERP checks. Start by exporting your top GSC queries, run them through the Google endpoint weekly, and write toward the questions you are missing.