Buyer’s guide
How to check an AI visibility tool before you buy it
Most tools in this category grade your homework. Far fewer check whether anyone read it. These are four tests you can run yourself, on any vendor including this one, in about ten minutes.
We have deliberately not named anyone here. Every specific below came from reading real products, but each artifact is one deploy away from changing, and a page accusing a named company of something they fixed last week is just wrong. The method outlasts the finding, so you get the method.
Does it ask the engines, or grade your markup?
Is this measuring an outcome, or a proxy for one?
- Run the tool and time it. A result that returns instantly did not query an AI engine, because querying one takes seconds.
- Look for a per-engine breakdown in the OUTPUT, not just engine logos on the marketing page. Logos are decoration; a result that names what each engine said is measurement.
- Read the score's explanation. If a score called AI Visibility resolves to something like schemas missing, it is counting your markup, not citations.
- Search their own copy for the phrase on-site. Tools that grade markup usually say so accurately somewhere, because it is true.
The tell
Engine names offered as a dropdown option are a parameter, not a measurement.
Grading markup is a legitimate thing to sell. Selling it as a measure of whether AI engines cite you is a different claim, and the whole category leans on the assumption that the first predicts the second without publishing the correlation.
Who actually built the tool?
Am I buying from the people who made the instrument?
- View source and read the CSS custom property names. Design tokens are usually namespaced to whoever wrote them, so a prefix that is not the brand you are buying from is a strong signal.
- Check the social share image filename. Assets named for the white-label product rather than the brand are common and rarely cleaned up.
- Look at where images and logos are served from. A shared bucket with a tenant identifier in the path means the site is one tenant of a platform, not the platform.
- Search the vendor name plus white label. Platforms that resell tell agencies so on their own marketing, because that is who they are selling to.
The tell
A brand on the page and a different brand throughout the code usually means a skin over a licensed platform.
White-labelling is legal and often sensible. But it changes what you are buying: a reseller cannot fix the measurement, cannot ship a differentiating feature, and cannot tell you how the instrument works because they did not build it. If the number is ever wrong, nobody you can call owns it.
Who profits from the fixes it recommends?
Is the same company grading the work and selling the work?
- Read the upsell after the scan. If the paid tier is a done-for-you fix service, the scan's job is to generate a list of billable work.
- Compare the fix list to their service list. Recommendations that map exactly onto what they sell are a sales funnel wearing a diagnosis.
- Check whether the score would go down if you did nothing and they did nothing. A score that only moves when you buy something is not tracking your visibility.
The tell
A scanner that grades your schema and citations, sold by a firm that sells schema work, directory listings and link building.
This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a structural conflict: when the instrument and the remedy have the same owner, there is no version of the scan that recommends doing nothing, and that is exactly the recommendation an honest instrument should sometimes produce.
Can you see a real result before creating an account?
Am I being shown a measurement, or a signup form?
- Open any page advertised as a free or instant checker and count the input fields. If the only field is an email address, the tool is a lead magnet.
- Look for a URL box and a run button on the public page. Their absence is the answer.
- If it does require signup, check whether that account is instant or needs manual approval.
The tell
Pages titled free and instant that contain a newsletter box and nothing else.
A vendor confident in the result shows you one. Gating it is a choice about conversion, and it is worth knowing you made a purchasing decision without having seen the product work.
Run the same four checks on us
A guide that exempts its author is an advertisement. So, in the same order:
- 1. We query Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Claude and store what came back. Results take seconds because the engines take seconds. Every figure carries its sample size, and where we have not measured something it says NOT MEASURED rather than showing a zero.
- 2. We built it. The measurement, the scoring and the storage are ours, and every threshold we use is published with the file that enforces it.
- 3. We sell no fixes. No done-for-you service, no link building, no directory submissions, no content packages. Nothing we recommend earns us anything, which is the only way the recommendation can be worth reading.
- 4. The free audit runs with no account, no card and no email. You see a real measured result before we know who you are.