FAQ
Updated August 27, 2026
Frequently asked questions
Straight answers, including to the questions where the honest answer is “it depends” or “not yet.”
About AI search
Is AI search visibility actually worth investing in yet? The traffic share is still smaller than classic search, but two facts make it worth acting on now. First, the trend is one-directional: AI summaries and assistants keep absorbing question after question that used to produce clicks. Second, AI-referred visitors convert far better: sessions referred by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude convert at 9-17%, versus roughly 2% for classic organic search (Averi data, via Demand Local, as of mid-2026): fewer clicks, dramatically higher intent. Add the long lead time (presence in AI answers builds over months, not days) and waiting is the expensive option.
Do I still need SEO? Yes. AEO sits on top of a healthy search foundation, not in place of it. AI engines retrieve from search indexes, and Google’s AI surfaces lean heavily on organic results. That is why Answerworthy includes an SEO foundation layer instead of pretending the old substrate stopped mattering.
What’s the difference between AEO and GEO? Vocabulary, not substance. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) describe the same work. We say AEO; if your team says GEO, you will feel at home anyway. For the mechanism behind either name, start with What is AEO?
Can I just check ChatGPT myself? Once, sure, and it is educational. As measurement, it fails twice: engines answer differently run to run, so one answer is an anecdote, and your logged-in session carries personalization your buyers do not share. Real measurement needs repeated, controlled sampling across engines, which is precisely the boring work software should do.
About the measurement
Which engines does Answerworthy cover? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, measured through each engine’s native API with live search grounding, plus Google AI Overviews and AI Mode as additional, separately labeled surfaces. Paid measurement runs on every engine we have enabled.
Why replicates, when other tools track daily without them? Because engines are probabilistic, one answer is a sample, not a verdict. Answerworthy’s replicate count is a configuration value: runs currently execute single-shot per prompt-engine cell, every raw answer is stored, and every report states the count a run actually executed. When a cell runs with multiple replicates, a citation counts only when the majority of replicates agree. What never changes is that the sample size is reported, never implied. The full reasoning is on our methodology page.
Is this really what ChatGPT shows my customers? Honest answer: it is a rigorous proxy, and anyone claiming a perfect mirror is overclaiming. Consumer apps add personalization and memory on top of the same engine, so individual sessions vary. What API measurement gives you is stable, reproducible sampling of the engine that powers the surface, with the provenance stated on every number. We would rather give you a defensible proxy than an unreproducible screenshot.
What do OBSERVED and INFERRED mean in my reports? OBSERVED: the claim is backed by a stored, reproducible measurement (an engine response, a verified log line, a validator output) linked from the finding. INFERRED: it is a professional interpretation of the evidence, labeled as such. The tags are set at the database level and the two never mix unmarked. Ask your current tool which of its claims are which.
How does the crawler analytics work? It is not live yet, and this answer will say so until it is. The layer on our roadmap harvests AI-bot traffic from your CDN logs, matches user agents against a maintained registry, and verifies each visit against the vendor’s published IP ranges (the kind OpenAI and Perplexity publish for their crawlers), with unverifiable traffic quarantined as spoofed. What the scan gives you today is the reachability half: your pages fetched the way each AI bot fetches them.
What is the crawl-to-citation gap? The join of what AI bots read on your site against what engines actually cite. Pages crawled heavily but never cited are your best fix candidates; pages cited without recent crawls indicate your brand lives in the model’s memory. It requires owning both layers, which is why point tools do not have it, and it arrives with our crawler-log layer; it is not live yet.
About results
How fast will I see results? The scan gives findings in minutes and your first panel gives a baseline within days. Moving the numbers takes longer, and we will not pretend otherwise: retrieval-side fixes (reachability, extractability, schema) can show effects in weeks; presence-building in the models’ training data plays out over months. We do not draw trend conclusions from less than eight weeks of data, and any vendor promising instant AI-visibility wins is describing reporting, not results.
Will Answerworthy guarantee we get cited? No, and nobody honestly can; the engines decide. What we guarantee is the loop: rigorous measurement, evidence-ranked fixes, and verification of whether each fix moved anything. That is what “manageable” means in a probabilistic system.
Can Answerworthy fix what it finds? Substantially, yes. Every failed check ships with its evidence, a concrete fix recipe, and a copy-as-prompt version built for your detected stack: paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, or hand it to whoever ships. When the fix lands, the next scan shows that exact check flipping to passing, with the diff kept in your scan history. Done is a re-scan, not a checkbox.
Practical
How does pricing work? Free is genuinely free: the full readiness scan of your site, your buyers and their questions researched for you, and competitor tracking, with no card and no time limit. Measurement of what AI says about you unlocks with the one-time $50 baseline audit (which also starts a 14-day Pro trial with no automatic charge) or a paid plan: Pro at $97/mo for one brand, Agency at $78 per brand seat/mo with a 5-seat minimum (from $390/mo). Full details and the reasoning on the pricing page.
I run an agency. Can my clients see their data? Not yet, and we would rather tell you that here than surprise you in the app. Each client brand runs in its own workspace, so client data never mixes, and you operate the roster from one login. Client-facing read-only seats and branded reporting are on the roadmap.
What does the free scan actually check? Whether AI crawlers can reach your site, whether your content and schema survive in raw HTML, the state of your robots.txt and llms.txt, and structural extractability, with evidence per finding. No credit card; it is the first step of the audit layer, free.