Buyer's guide
How to choose the right tool
What to look for
- The engines your buyers use.
- Check which engines come in the base plan and which cost extra. Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are often add-ons.
- Prompts you control.
- Built-in prompt sets are fine for a first look, but you need to track the real questions your customers ask, in their words.
- Citations, not just mentions.
- Knowing which pages and third-party sites AI engines cite tells you where to publish, update or earn coverage.
- Enough runs to trust the trend.
- AI answers vary from one run to the next. Daily tracking across many prompts gives a steadier signal than a handful of weekly checks.
- A path to action.
- Prefer tools that point to specific content gaps, crawl problems or source sites, not just a visibility score.
Common mistakes
- Skipping the free data.
- Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools first. Their AI reports are free and come from the engines themselves.
- Tracking only branded prompts.
- Your brand will usually appear when someone types your name. Track the category and comparison questions where buyers have not decided yet.
- Reading one result as the truth.
- A single answer is a sample. Look at trends over weeks and across engines before you rewrite a page.
- Blocking AI crawlers by accident.
- Check your robots.txt, firewall and CDN bot settings. If an engine cannot fetch your pages, it cannot cite them.
