Short answer: Choose a tool that crawls your whole site with a deterministic, explainable score, reports SEO separately from AI visibility, tracks the prompts your buyers actually use across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, shows competitors cited in your place, and helps you ship and verify fixes. A single blended score with no evidence behind it will not survive your first meeting with engineering.
We build ProvenVisible, one of the tools in this category. The criteria below are the ones we would use to evaluate any tool, including ours.
Why do SaaS teams need AI visibility specifically?
Software buyers increasingly ask AI assistants for shortlists: "best project management tool for agencies", "alternatives to X", "X vs Y for a 20-person team". Those answers name a few vendors and link to a few sources. If you are not in them, you are not in the consideration set, however well your blog ranks. And unlike a results page, you cannot buy an ad inside the answer.
What criteria should you compare tools on?
| Criterion | What good looks like | Why it matters for SaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Full-site crawl, not one page | Docs, pricing and comparison pages all matter |
| Determinism | Same site, same score | Scores must survive a re-run in front of stakeholders |
| Evidence | Every finding shows the page and value | Engineering will ask "where exactly?" |
| Separation | SEO, AEO and GEO reported apart | One number hides which layer fails |
| Prompt tracking | Your buyers' prompts, across engines | Shortlist prompts are where deals start |
| Competitors | Who is cited instead of you | Tells you which page to beat |
| Fixes | Written changes, then verified live | A problem list alone does not ship |
| Cost control | Predictable runs and quotas | AI answer tracking costs real money per query |
Ask each vendor to show a finding end to end: the check, the evidence, the recommended change and how you would know the finding is wrong.
Which SaaS pages matter most in AI answers?
- Pricing page. Engines are asked about cost constantly. Put plan names and prices in the server HTML and mark them up with
Offerdata. Prices loaded only by JavaScript are invisible to many AI crawlers. - Comparison and alternatives pages. "X vs Y" and "alternatives to Y" pages are exactly what shortlist prompts retrieve. Write them honestly, with trade-offs.
- Use-case pages. "For agencies", "for finance teams": engines match these to "best X for Y" questions.
- Documentation. Clear docs get cited for how-to questions and signal that the product is real. An llms.txt file can help AI tools find them.
- Integrations. "Does X integrate with Salesforce?" is a common buyer question; one page per integration answers it.
What should the team check before buying anything?
A few free checks tell you whether the problem is basic:
- Is OAI-SearchBot allowed in robots.txt? Blocking it removes you from ChatGPT search. Our free checker shows this in seconds, and the crawler list explains each agent.
- Are your pricing and comparison pages indexed in Google Search Console?
- Does your main content appear in the page source without JavaScript?
- What happens when you ask ChatGPT and Perplexity your top five shortlist questions today?
If the answers reveal access or indexing problems, fix those first. No tool's tracking will look good until they are fixed.
How does ProvenVisible fit these criteria?
Honestly, with limits. ProvenVisible crawls the site and runs 126 deterministic checks, all published on our check list, and reports SEO, AEO and GEO as three separate scoreboards with the evidence for every finding. A language model never decides a score. Paid plans track a fixed set of prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, record competitors cited instead of you, and write fixes that are checked against the live page after they are published.
What it does not do: tracking runs when you start it rather than on an automatic schedule, and the free plan covers one site and one audit a month without AI answer tracking. Plans start at $29 a month; see pricing for what each includes.
What is the classic SEO counterpart?
Everything that makes a SaaS site strong in Google still applies: technical health, fast pages, clear information architecture, and links from reputable sites. AI visibility adds two things on top: prompt-level measurement across several engines, and content written so that its best passages can be quoted directly.
Frequently asked questions
How many prompts should a SaaS team track?
Start with 20 to 30 real buyer questions covering category, comparison, alternative and use-case intent. Keep the set stable so changes are comparable.
How often should prompts be run?
Monthly is enough for most teams, plus a run after major content or site changes.
Can one score summarise AI visibility?
It can summarise, but it should be decomposable. If a tool cannot show you which checks produced the score, you cannot act on it.
Should marketing or engineering own this?
Both. Marketing owns prompts and content; engineering owns crawler access, rendering and structured data. A tool with clear evidence makes that split easier.