AI visibility audit companies: who actually does the work

Ask an AI who to hire for this and you get handed software. That is the first thing worth knowing about this market: almost everyone selling AI visibility is selling you a dashboard, and a dashboard has never fixed anything.

The distinction the market does not make

Search this space and you will find a dozen products that all promise AI visibility. Nearly all of them do the same thing: they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini a set of questions on a schedule, count how often your brand comes up, and draw you a line chart.

That is measurement. Measurement is useful. It is not the job.

A monitoring subscription tells you every month that you are still not being recommended. Knowing the number moves nothing on its own, in the same way that owning a set of scales has never made anyone lighter. The work is what changes the answer, and the work is unglamorous: server settings, page structure, schema, and months of earning mentions on other people's websites.

The five questions to ask before you pay anyone

These are the questions we would ask, and we are happy to be asked them back.

1. "What is your own score?" Anyone selling AI visibility can measure themselves. If they will not tell you, or the number is bad and they have no public plan, you have your answer. This one question sorts the market faster than anything else on the list.
2. "Do you do the work, or do you report on it?" Get it in plain terms. Will they edit the site, or send you a PDF and an invoice?
3. "Which engines, and how do you handle the differences?" ChatGPT and Perplexity overlap only around 11% in the sources they cite. A vendor with one plan for all of them is covering roughly a tenth of the ground they implied.
4. "How much of the plan is off-site?" Around 85% of the sources AI engines cite are third-party pages, not your own site. A proposal that is entirely on-page work has a ceiling built into it, and they should say so up front.
5. "What happens in the first week, and what will not move for three months?" Technical fixes show up within weeks of a re-crawl. Being named in answers takes longer, because it depends on other people's pages. A vendor who promises the second thing on a thirty-day timeline is selling you something else.

Who operates in this space

Named honestly, and grouped by what they actually are. We compete with several of these and still think you should know they exist.

• Monitoring platforms such as Profound, Peec AI, Otterly and Scrunch. Built to track brand mentions across answer engines over time. Genuinely good at that. Buy one if your problem is that you cannot see what is happening.
• Established SEO suites adding AI features, including Semrush and HubSpot. Sensible if you already pay for the suite. AI visibility is a module in a much larger product rather than the thing they were built to do.
• Content tools with an AI-visibility angle, such as Writesonic and Frase. Aimed at producing content rather than fixing the technical and off-site layers underneath it.
• Specialist service companies, including us. Fewer of these, because the work does not scale the way software does.

We have written a fuller comparison of the tools in this market on the best AI visibility tools page, including where each one is genuinely the right buy.

What this should cost

Monitoring platforms typically run as a monthly subscription and price on how many prompts and brands you track. Agency AEO audits are commonly quoted at four figures. Our own full report is 39 pounds. That is a founding price and it is going up.

The number that matters is not the price. It is what arrives. A report you cannot act on is expensive at any price, and a cheap one that lists the exact pages to change pays for itself the same week.

The test we apply to ourselves

We built the scanner, so the honest thing to do was run it on ourselves first. The first time we ran it, showuplabs.com scored 0 out of 100. AI named Semrush and Ahrefs instead of us. Worse, our own firewall was returning a 403 to every AI crawler on the internet, which is the exact failure we sell the fix for.

We publish the number every day, whatever it says, on our live proof page. It updates automatically and we do not get a vote. If you are choosing between vendors in this market, ask each of them for the same thing.

How to start without paying anyone

Run a scan on your own domain first. You will find out in about a minute whether AI engines can even reach your site, whether they name you for the questions your buyers actually ask, and who they name instead. That is enough to tell whether you have a technical problem, a content problem or an authority problem, and those three need very different help.

If it turns out you need the detail, the full report lists every failed check with the exact fix, in the order that moves the score fastest.

Questions, answered

Hiring an individual rather than a firm? The same tests apply, set out at hiring an AI visibility consultant.

Whoever you hire, walk in with your own baseline. The free checker gives you one in about a minute.