Declared interest first: we sell one of the tools below. Read with that in mind. But the comparison is real, because the tools genuinely do different jobs, and the most common mistake isn't buying the wrong brand — it's buying the wrong type for your situation. There are four types on the UK market. Prices and features below are as published at the time of writing (July 2026) — check current pricing before you buy.
Type 1: free technical scanners
Tools that read your website and score its AI-readiness signals — crawler access, schema, llms.txt, content structure. Several UK agencies offer them as lead magnets (ai-visibility.org.uk, DoLocal, Tilio), the big SEO platforms (Semrush, Ahrefs) have free versions, and our own free check is this type too, scoring 40+ signals in about a minute.
What they tell you: whether AI can read and trust your site. What they can't: whether AI actually recommends you — that requires asking the models real questions, which costs real API money, which is why nobody gives it away. A technical scan is the right first step and the wrong final answer.
Type 2: one-off citation checkers (£5–£20)
Tools that put live questions to the AI models and report who gets named. In the UK this is a small field: seen-by.ai offers checks from £4.99–£9.99 (published pricing, covering four engines and topic-based checks), and our £19 citation audit sits at the top of the band. Since we're the expensive one, here's exactly what the £19 buys that cheaper checks don't, so you can judge whether it's worth it for you: twelve questions written from your actual site content the way UK buyers phrase them (methodology here), run across five engines including Grok — 60 answers, live, while you watch; a competitor share-of-voice table; a “why you're losing” gap report that reads the winning pages and tells you what to change; the full 137-signal technical report included; and locked questions so a rescan is a true before/after. If you just want a quick yes/no on one topic, a cheaper check may honestly be enough. If you're going to act on the result, the diagnosis is the product.
Type 3: monthly monitoring SaaS (~£25–£90/month)
Subscription platforms (Otterly, Peec, SE Visible and others) that track your AI mentions continuously. Built for marketers and agencies managing brands — powerful, but a subscription only earns its keep once your foundations are fixed and there's movement to monitor. For a single UK small business, a one-off audit repeated quarterly usually answers the same question for a tenth of the annual cost. When you genuinely need continuous multi-site monitoring, that's the enterprise end — Dyfyn runs ours.
Type 4: agency audits (£500–£1,500+, often monthly)
GEO agencies bundle the check inside a consulting engagement. You're paying for interpretation and done-for-you fixes, not better data — the models answer them the same way they answer a £19 tool. Right for brands with budgets; wrong as a way to find out where you stand, which is a £0–£19 question. Our plain-English cost guide breaks the whole price ladder down.
The honest buying order
- Start free — any technical scanner, including ours. If your site fails the basics, fix those before paying anyone for anything.
- Then buy one citation check — cheap or thorough, but insist on live queries against the real models, multiple engines, and questions that never use your brand name. A check that flatters you is worse than no check.
- Only then consider recurring spend — monitoring or agency help — and only with a before/after baseline in hand, because citations move two to four months behind fixes and you'll want proof of movement, not vibes.