ChecklistUpdated 2026-09-21
Seven questions to ask an AI visibility vendor
Ask these before buying AI visibility monitoring or optimisation. Each one separates a measurement from a claim: which step of the evidence ladder a number comes from, which models and dates it covers, and whether anything it reports was verified.
- When you report AI crawler traffic, are the requests verified? A good answer names the check — published IP ranges or reverse DNS — and says what happens to requests that fail it. "We detect AI bots by user agent" means unverified.
- Which exact models, and on which dates? "ChatGPT" is not a model. A usable report names the provider, the model and the date of every answer, because behaviour changes under a stable name.
- Do you count mentions, citations or links to the product page? These differ by orders of magnitude. Ask which one the headline number is.
- How do you separate a citation from use of a fact? A model can link a page and state something the page does not say. Ask whether they check the value, not only the link.
- What would your report look like if nothing changed? Answers drift on their own. A vendor who cannot show a baseline and its noise cannot tell you whether their work moved anything.
- Can you show a controlled result — one change, one comparison? If every result is a before-and-after screenshot, none of them is evidence of cause.
- What do you not claim? A serious vendor has a list: no ranking guarantees, no causation from a crawl, no revenue figures from a mention. If there is no such list, the report will not have one either.
Why each item is on the list
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