Tool,agency,orboth:howtochooseanAEO/GEOvendor

Question 1: who acts on the report?

Every vendor can show you a list of prompts where a competitor is cited. Ask the vendor to name the person, on their side or yours, who turns line 14 of that list into a published page. If the answer is "your content team," you are buying a tool, whatever the pricing page calls it. If the answer is "we do, and this is the approval flow," you are buying a service.

Question 2: what is the baseline and who signs it?

A baseline is a dated record of your AI Visibility Score, citation rate and prompts won across named engines, agreed before any work starts. Without it, every later number is a claim. Monitoring tools give you a day-one dashboard, which is a baseline if you export it. Services vary: Lean Labs offers a free baseline score; DoodleWeb locks the baseline in writing and ties the guarantee to it; Gushwork's public pages do not describe one.

Question 3: how many surfaces, and which ones?

Engine lists change. Peec moved Perplexity to Enterprise-only in September 2026. Otterly sells Gemini, Claude and AI Mode as add-ons. Profound tracks one to three engines on trial and up to nine on Enterprise. DoodleWeb tracks seven on every tier. Ask for the list in writing and check it against where your buyers are. For most B2B categories that is ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity and Copilot, in that order.

Question 4: does the fix get published, and where?

A draft in a dashboard is still a draft. Ask which CMSs the vendor publishes to directly and what the approval step looks like. WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Drupal and HubSpot CMS cover most sites; GitHub or a headless CMS over an API covers the rest. If the vendor's answer is "we send you the copy," budget for your developer's time on every page.

Question 5: what happens seven days after publishing?

The only way to know whether a page worked is to re-run the prompt it was written for. Trend tracking tells you the overall rate moved; a per-publish re-check tells you which page moved it. Ask whether the vendor re-runs the specific prompts after each publish and shows you the before and after per page.

Question 6: what is the off-site plan?

Engines cite Reddit, review directories, LinkedIn and YouTube. A vendor that only touches your website is working with half the sources. Lean Labs is strong on backlinks and citations. Gushwork runs an authority agent for backlinks. DoodleWeb drafts Reddit replies, LinkedIn posts and YouTube scripts from the prompts you are losing and aligns your facts across Clutch, G2 and Google Business Profile. Monitoring tools report off-site citations but do not act on them.

Question 7: what happens if nothing moves?

Ask for the guarantee terms in writing, including the measurement and the conditions. Most vendors on the market publish none. DoodleWeb's is a 90-day window with three thresholds (score up 10 points, citation rate up 15 percentage points, or five net-new prompts cited) and three conditions (approve the content, stay connected, attend one review). A vendor that will not define "improvement" in numbers is asking you to take the result on trust.

A scoring sheet you can copy

Both at once

Some teams run a tool and a service together: the tool for a second opinion on measurement, the service for execution. That is fine, and DoodleWeb will report against your existing tracker if you already have one. What does not work is a tool with nobody assigned to it. The dashboard will be accurate and the citation rate will not change.

Get your baseline first. The free AI search visibility check on this site takes about two minutes and needs no card. Bring the result to any vendor conversation, ours included.

*Related reading: AI visibility tools vs done-for-you AEO · What a done-for-you AEO engagement looks like week by week · DoodleWeb vs AI visibility tools*