Everyone sells the AI visibility scan now: six questions that show who will make the changes

Almost every AI visibility provider now sells the same thing: a scan of what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers say about you, and a list of what to change. The scan is the easy part, and it gets cheaper every month. What decides whether the answers change is who writes the pages, fixes the access and chases the listings once the list arrives. Six questions tell you which kind of provider you are talking to.

The disclosure first: AEOscore is our product, and our top tier is built on doing that work, so this post makes our case. We answer all six questions for ourselves below, with numbers, so you can hold us to the same standard as everyone else.

The scan is now the cheap part

In our own scans of one buyer question, “Best AEO tools in 2025 for an in-house SaaS marketing team of three people”, the AI engines named at least 25 different tools across 118 answers between 18 August 2026 and 2 November 2026. The lists the engines cite run long too: Profound’s own guide reviews 19 answer engine platforms, and one UK list of AEO agencies now compares 20 (both checked on 2 November 2026).

Prices have followed. Otterly.AI starts at $29 a month, and the content tool Frase now includes AI visibility tracking in a plan from $39 a month billed yearly. Nearly all of them report the same measurements: how often you are named, which pages get cited, who gets named instead and in what tone. Those numbers matter, and you should have them. None of them changes an answer on its own. Our comparison of AEO tools for small in-house teams lists the good ones, including the ones that cost less than we do.

What moves an AI answer

The answers move when the sources the engines read change. In practice that is five kinds of work, and each one takes somebody’s hours:

• Letting the AI crawlers in, because robots.txt rules and CDN settings often block them by accident (the Cloudflare check).
• Writing the page that answers the buyer’s question, with the direct answer first so an engine can lift it (why Perplexity cites a competitor).
• Getting onto the lists and comparison pages the engines already cite, by pitching the people who run them.
• Making your facts match everywhere: prices, locations and what you do, on your site and on every profile that describes you.
• Turning up where buyers ask: review sites, Reddit threads and industry forums.

Our estimate is that a small team working from a tracker’s charts spends 5 to 15 hours a month on this. That is the cost the subscription price leaves out.

Six questions to ask any AEO provider

Ask these before you sign anything, us included. Each one has a short answer, and a vague answer tells you something too.

1. Who makes the changes, and what is their name?

A provider that does the work can name the person who will edit your pages and say how many hours a month they will spend on it.

Ours: Olly, the founder, an AEO consultant and full-stack developer with 20+ years in search. On Monitor + Strategist he spends a strategist and developer day each month on your site and your channels.

2. Will you edit my site, or send me a list?

Many providers deliver recommendations only, which leaves the writing and publishing with you, so ask which it is and get the answer in writing.

Ours: on Monitor + Strategist, with access, we make the change ourselves. Sites that deploy from GitHub get each fix as its own pull request with the evidence in the description. On Monitor, at £99 a month, you get a written fix plan for every gap and a brief your developer can work from.

3. What do you do off my site?

Most of what the engines cite is other people’s pages, so a provider that only works on your site leaves most of the sources untouched.

Ours:in our scans, over 80% of what Perplexity cites is other people’s pages. The software finds the roundups, directories, Reddit threads and videos the engines cite instead of you and drafts the pitch for each one, and on Monitor + Strategist we run the outreach.

4. How will I know a fix worked?

Ask how each change is measured against the same buyer questions afterwards, and whether the fixes that did not work stay in the report.

Ours: every fix marked shipped is re-checked against the same questions 7 and 28 days later, and the result stays on the record whether the answer moved or not.

5. Have you done it for yourselves, and will you show the numbers?

A provider that sells AI visibility should be able to show its own, with dates.

Ours: across five engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode; Claude was not in our August scan, so it is left out of both windows), the share of answers naming AEOscore rose from 12.6% on our first full scan (18 August 2026) to 19.3% across four weekly scans from 14 October to 2 November 2026, and the rise came on Perplexity. Of the 8 fixes we shipped in that first week, 63% got us named within five weeks and 25% turned into repeat mentions. The detail is in how long AEO takes and our SaaS guide.

6. What does it cost, and can I leave monthly?

Published prices and a monthly term let you test a provider for a quarter, where several agencies on our UK AEO agency roundup publish minimum terms of 3 to 12 months.

Ours: £395 one-off AI Visibility Audit, credited against your first month, £99 a month Monitor, £1,495 a month Monitor + Strategist. Monthly, cancel anytime, prices in pounds excluding VAT.

When a scan on its own is the right buy

If someone on your team has those 5 to 15 hours a month to write pages, fix access and chase listings, a tracker plus that person can be the cheaper route, and you should buy the tracker. The tools comparison shows which trackers fit a small team, and monitoring vs fixing sets out the trade in hours and pounds.

What we do differently

We do the work. The software runs your buyer questions through all six AI engines every week (every day on Monitor + Strategist), finds the gaps and writes the fix for each one. Claude is one of the six on every tier, whereas most trackers keep it for a higher tier, an add-on or an enterprise plan. On Monitor + Strategist, a named UK expert, backed by an in-house dev team, then ships those fixes on your site and your channels, and the next scans show whether the answers moved. Why we built it that way round: monitoring is the easy half, and the back-and-forth tax explains why speed matters more in AI search.

Ask us the six questions

Start with the free AEO score: your buyer questions on all six engines, who gets named instead of you, human-checked and emailed within 1 to 2 working days. No card. Then ask us the six questions above, by email or on a call, before you decide. Get your free AEO score, or see pricing in pounds.