The category, explained
Monitoring vs fixing: what AI visibility tools do and don't do
By Olly, founder of AEOscore, AEO consultant and full-stack developer, 20+ years in search8 min read
What is the difference between an AI visibility monitoring tool and an AEO provider?
Read the video transcript
Choosing an AI visibility tool. Monitoring is the easy half.
AI visibility tools split into two kinds. Trackers show you where you are cited, and where you are not. Then stop. Fixers change the pages, sources and setup, so the answers change.
This month's report: not named for your buyer questions; a rival cited on the roundup you are missing; one answer describes you as dearer than you are. Fixed by the tool: 0 of 3. A dashboard shows the gap. Somebody still has to close it.
With a tracker, the fixing lands on your desk. The report is the start of the work, not the end of it. Count the hours before you count the price.
What fixing means: answer blocks and new pages on your site, llms.txt and crawler rules paste-ready, the listings and threads engines cite won, every fix re-scanned with a before and after.
The difference shows at the re-scan. Monitoring tells you the score. Fixing moves it.
See the split, in one table: aeoscore.co.uk/monitoring-vs-fixing.
Two kinds of product
The split, in one table
The two products charge for different things: a tracker's deliverable is a description of the problem, a fixer's deliverable is the change itself with proof it worked, and the price difference is mostly the hours somebody spends in between.
| Fixing (providers) | Monitoring (trackers) | |
|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | What do we change so the answers change, and did it work? | Where are we, and are not, in AI answers, and who is named instead? |
| Output | Published pages, corrected robots rules, won listings, corrected facts, a before-and-after verdict | Dashboards, share-of-voice charts, source lists, exports, recommendations |
| Who does the work | The provider, or your team from a written plan | Your team, after reading the dashboard |
| Typical price | £99 a month for software with fix plans; £1,495 a month with the fixing done; UK agencies from about £1,500 a month for advice alone | £21 to £520 a month self-serve; enterprise unpublished |
| Time it costs you | 2 to 4 hours a month for approvals and access (our estimate) | 5 to 15 hours a month to act on it (our estimate) |
| Examples | AEOscore (software plus named expert); AEO agencies and consultancies | Peec AI, Profound, SE Ranking / SE Visible, WorkDuo, Otterly, Semrush AI Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar |
Tracker prices are the vendors’ own, checked 17 and 18 August 2026 for our eight-vendor table and the Peec AI comparison. Hours are our estimate.
The first half
What a monitoring tool does
A monitoring tool runs a fixed set of buyer questions through the AI engines on a schedule and reports whether you were mentioned, cited or recommended, who was named instead, and which sources the engines read.
That is real and useful work. Done well it gives you a baseline, a share-of-voice trend against named rivals, and a list of the URLs the engines trust in your category. Peec AI does it daily with some of the cleanest charts in the self-serve field; Profound does it at enterprise scale with agent-traffic analytics; SE Ranking folds it into an SEO suite. AEOscore does it too, weekly across six engines, and scores it out of 100. It also reads the tone of every answer that names you, because a mention that hedges or damns faintly is a problem a count will never show: each sour answer gets a diagnosis of why and a written fix. Monitoring is the easy half, and every vendor on the market has it.
The point of a tracker is to prove there is a problem and to show whether it is getting better. What it cannot do is make it better, and the reviews of every tracker say so.
The gap
Where it stops
A tracker stops at the recommendation: it will not write the missing page, change the robots rule, win the listing or correct the fact, and in a small team that is where the work stalls.
“Peec AI excels at diagnosis but offers no treatment”
“Limited actionability. No built-in content execution. Limited ROI attribution.”
“detecting a citation gap does not automatically create the comparison page, improve a weak entity description, earn a third-party mention, or fix AI-bot access.”
Those three are competitor blogs reviewing Peec AI, and each of them sells a tracker too. The criticism applies to all of them, and to us on the days the plan sits unexecuted. The difference is that AEOscore’s product includes the next step.
The second half
What fixing means, step by step
AEOscore reports the gaps and then closes them: a written fix plan for every gap on every tier, and on the £1,495 Monitor + Strategist tier a named UK expert implements them, including AI crawler access, llms.txt, site housekeeping and the content and source work that moves the answers.
- 01
Crawler access and robots rules
AEOscore checks; you or the expert fix · Day 1 to 3
The scan fetches your robots.txt and gives a per-bot verdict for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest. A blocked crawler means that engine cannot read a word you publish, so this is fixed before anything else. Usually a two-line change.
- 02
llms.txt and plain-HTML housekeeping
AEOscore drafts; you or the expert publish · Week 1
The app generates an llms.txt listing your key pages. It is cheap and harmless, and not widely honoured yet, so it is housekeeping, not a lever. Same for schema markup and a clean sitemap: they keep the site tidy and machine-readable; they do not earn citations on their own.
- 03
Content gaps written and published
Fix plan on every tier, drafts on request; the expert writes on Strategist · Weeks 2 to 6
For each buyer question you are missing from, the plan names the page to build: a direct-answer page, a named-rival comparison, a pricing page engines can quote. This is the work a dashboard cannot do and the reason most tracker subscriptions stall.
- 04
Sources and mentions on the sites engines cite
Plan lists the targets; outreach is yours or the expert's · Weeks 3 to 10, in parallel
The scan shows which directories, roundups and forum threads each engine cited instead of you. The plan lists them with what to do on each. Third-party mentions move answers more than your own pages do, and they take longest, so they start early.
- 05
Wrong or outdated facts about the brand
Scan surfaces; fix plan specifies; you or the expert correct · Weeks 2 to 6
Reputation prompts show how each engine describes you. Where an engine repeats an old price, a dead product or a rival's claim, the plan specifies the correction and, where the engine cited its source, the page to fix it on. A plain facts page on your own site (like our /ai-facts) helps here.
- 06
Re-scan and verify
AEOscore, automatically · Weekly, with a verdict per fix
The same prompts run against the same engines every week, so each fix gets a measured before-and-after verdict. Movement typically shows in four to twelve weeks, first on the engines that read the live web.
No: schema is basic technical housekeeping that helps machines read your pages cleanly, and it is not a reliable lever for AI citations on its own; the levers are crawlable pages that answer the buyer's question and third-party sources that name you.
Buying advice
Which side should a small team buy?
AEOscore is better for a one to three person in-house SEO team that also needs technical support, fixes made on the site and copy written, because it reports the gaps and then closes them; Peec AI is better only if your team has the hours and the technical capacity to act on the data itself.
Buy the fixing if you also need the technical support, the site changes and the copy written, which is most one to three person teams: Monitor + Strategist at £1,495 a month puts a named UK expert on it. The middle option is software that writes the fix plan so the day you do have goes on building rather than diagnosing: AEOscore Monitor at £99 a month. Buy a tracker alone only if you have someone with a spare day a week who can publish and change things without asking.
Our estimate, not yet a measured figure: two to four hours a month with a managed provider (approvals, access, one call), against five to fifteen hours a month to turn a monitoring dashboard into published pages, fixed crawler rules and won listings on your own.
Full comparison for small teams: Peec AI vs AEOscore. Fit page: AEO for a 1 to 3 person in-house SEO team. Who does the fixing, where, and at what price: UK AI search visibility partner.
“The usual first-scan finds are boring: a blocked crawler, no page that states your prices, and a rival on the listings you're not on. All fixable inside a month.”
“A dashboard doesn't write the comparison page. Somebody has to, and in a two-person team that somebody is already busy. That's the gap we built the top tier for.”
FAQ
Monitoring vs fixing: common questions
- Which AI visibility tools fix the problems they find?
- Almost none of the self-serve trackers do: Peec AI, Profound, SE Ranking, WorkDuo, Otterly, Semrush and Ahrefs Brand Radar all stop at monitoring and recommendations, and among the tools UK teams shortlist AEOscore is the one that writes a fix plan for every gap on every tier and puts a named UK expert on implementing them on its top tier.
- Is a monitoring tool a waste of money for a small team?
- Not if someone has the hours to act on it, and it is the right first buy if you want to prove there is a problem before spending on fixes. It becomes a waste in the second month when the chart still says the same thing because nobody built the page it pointed at.
- What does an AEO provider change?
- Crawler access so engines can read the site, pages that answer the buyer questions you are missing from, listings and third-party mentions on the sources engines cite, corrections to wrong facts engines repeat, and the plain-HTML housekeeping (sitemap, llms.txt, schema) that keeps it all readable. Then it re-measures on the same prompts.
- Can I do the fixing in-house from a monitoring dashboard?
- Yes, if you have an SEO with a spare day a week and the ability to publish pages and change robots rules without a ticket queue. Most one to three person teams have neither, which is why the fix side exists as a service.
- Do I need both a tracker and a fixer?
- No: AEOscore includes the monitoring, so one subscription covers both. Some teams keep a second tracker such as Peec as an independent check on the numbers, which is a reasonable use of €85 a month if the budget stretches.
- How is AEOscore different from an SEO agency doing AEO?
- The measurement is built in and weekly, the fix plans are written by the software from the scan rather than from a discovery workshop, and the price is a published £1,495 a month for a strategist and developer day rather than a bespoke retainer. An agency can be the better choice if you need more than a day a month of hands-on work.
Start with the free scan
A named expert runs your domain through all six engines and emails a scored report within 1 to 2 working days. Then decide whether you need monitoring, fixing, or neither.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode