A Practical Guide to Evaluating AISO Platforms: The 2025 Vendor Scorecard

Introduction: Why You Need a Standardized AISO Scorecard

The rapid adoption of AI-powered search is fundamentally changing how brands get discovered. This new landscape has given rise to a new marketing discipline: AI Search Optimization (AISO), also known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). According to marketing experts, GEO is the practice of ensuring your content is visible within AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews [1]. As a result, a new category of software has emerged to help businesses manage their visibility in this new channel.

With a growing number of AISO platforms entering the market, it can be challenging for marketing leaders and technical SEOs to compare vendors and make an informed choice. Each platform offers a different approach to data collection, analysis, and recommendations. Without a consistent evaluation method, you risk choosing a tool that is misaligned with your goals, team structure, or budget.

This post introduces a 10-point framework and a scorecard to provide a structured, objective method for evaluating AISO platforms. Using a standardized scorecard ensures you select a partner that aligns with your specific business goals for AI visibility and delivers a measurable return on investment.

How to Use This Scorecard

This guide is designed to be used during vendor demos and free trials. For each of the 10 criteria below, score potential vendors on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is poor and 5 is excellent. The objective is not simply to find the platform with the highest total score, but to identify the one that best fits your team's resources, strategic goals, and technical requirements.

We recommend using this framework to ask direct questions and guide your evaluation process.

Criterion 1: Breadth of LLM and AI Engine Coverage

Question: Does the platform monitor your brand's visibility across the most important AI models, such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot?

Why it matters: Your audience does not use a single AI tool. The AI chatbot market is fragmented, with ChatGPT holding a dominant but not exclusive market share. Other significant players include Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini, each with millions of users [2]. A comprehensive AISO platform must provide visibility across all major engines to ensure you are not blind to conversations happening on any one of them. Look for platforms that not only cover multiple models but also provide distinct insights for each, as their underlying retrieval mechanisms and user bases can vary significantly.

Criterion 2: Data Sampling and Simulation Realism

Question: How does the platform simulate user queries to gather data?

Why it matters: The value of an AISO platform depends entirely on the quality of its data. To get accurate insights, the platform must simulate realistic user questions that your target customers are actually asking. Generic or poorly constructed queries will yield misleading results. A strong platform will allow for the customization of queries and user personas to reflect different stages of the buyer's journey, from broad discovery questions to specific, purchase-intent queries. This ensures the visibility data you receive accurately reflects your performance with your most important customer segments.

Criterion 3: Competitor Identification and Tracking

Question: Does the platform automatically identify your true competitors in AI-generated responses, who may differ from your traditional SEO rivals?

Why it matters: Generative AI is redefining competitive analysis by surfacing a new set of competitors, including publications, forums, and indirect rivals that may not have appeared in traditional search results [3]. You need to know who you are actually up against in the AI space to build an effective strategy. A valuable AISO platform should automatically identify these competitors and provide metrics to benchmark your performance against them. Look for key metrics like an 'AI Visibility Score' and 'Citation Frequency' to understand your market share in AI answers and, as we detail in our guide to AI competitor analysis, track progress over time.

Criterion 4: Depth of Visibility Analysis

Question: Does the analysis go beyond simple brand mentions to evaluate the sentiment and context of your inclusion in an AI answer?

Why it matters: Being mentioned is not the same as being recommended. A simple mention count is a vanity metric; true performance is measured by how your brand is positioned within an answer. The platform should analyze if your brand is presented as a primary solution, a viable alternative, or just a passing reference. Furthermore, it should help you understand why you or a competitor was included by linking visibility to specific content, data points, or brand attributes. This level of analysis is what separates basic monitoring from strategic optimization.

Criterion 5: Citation and Source Analysis

Question: Does the tool analyze which specific content 'chunks' or pages are being cited by AI models?

Why it matters: AI engines do not retrieve and cite entire web pages. They use a process called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), where they break content into smaller passages or "chunks" and retrieve the most relevant ones to synthesize an answer [4]. Therefore, optimizing for 'citation-worthiness' at the chunk level is critical. An effective AISO platform must identify which specific passages from your website are being used in AI answers. This allows you to understand what makes your content easy for AI to retrieve and quote, helping you replicate that success across your entire site. You can learn more about how to optimize content for AI search in our detailed guide.

Criterion 6: Identification of Gaps and Opportunities

Question: Does the platform clearly highlight content gaps, technical website issues, and new questions your audience is asking?

Why it matters: A proactive AISO strategy is about finding and filling gaps before your competitors do. Your platform should function as a strategic advisor, not just a data repository. Look for features that identify where your brand underperforms against key competitors and for which specific topics. It should also surface technical website issues that may be hindering AI crawlers and highlight new questions your audience is asking, giving your content team a roadmap for what to create next. For example, as shown in this analysis example, a report might show that a competitor is frequently cited for questions about "sustainable materials," revealing a clear content opportunity.

Criterion 7: Actionability of Recommendations

Question: How clear, prioritized, and actionable are the platform's recommendations?

Why it matters: Data without action is useless. The primary output of an AISO platform should be a concrete to-do list that your marketing, content, and technical teams can execute. The recommendations should be prioritized based on potential impact and level of effort. Evaluate whether the platform translates its findings into specific tasks, such as "Update the product page to include details on X" or "Create a new blog post answering Y." A key feature to look for is a centralized dashboard, like Searchify's 'Action Center', that organizes these tasks and helps you track their completion.

Criterion 8: Reporting and Business Case Support

Question: Can you easily generate reports to demonstrate progress and ROI to stakeholders?

Why it matters: Securing budget and continued buy-in for AISO requires quantifying its business impact. A good platform should provide clear, intuitive reports that track your AI visibility over time and correlate it with business metrics. The basic formula for marketing ROI is (Marketing Value - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost [5]. The ideal AISO platform provides the data and tools needed to build a financial model, helping you project the potential revenue impact of your AISO strategy and build a business case for AISO to demonstrate its value to leadership.

Criterion 9: Scalability and Pricing

Question: Is the platform's pricing and feature set flexible enough to grow with your team?

Why it matters: Your AISO needs will likely evolve. You might start with simple brand monitoring but later move to a more aggressive, multi-brand optimization strategy. The platform you choose should be able to grow with you. Examine the pricing tiers and feature sets to ensure they align with your potential future needs. Look for different plans that cater to various team sizes and goals, like those on our pricing page, to ensure the platform remains a viable and cost-effective partner in the long term.

Criterion 10: Implementation Support and Services

Question: What level of customer support, expert guidance, and implementation help is available?

Why it matters: AI Search Optimization is a new field that involves both content strategy and technical execution. Having access to experts who can guide your strategy and help with implementation can significantly accelerate your success. Evaluate the level of customer support offered. Do they provide strategic guidance? Some platforms, like Searchify, also offer optional professional services to implement the recommended technical and content changes on your behalf, which is a valuable option for teams with limited resources or expertise.

Conclusion: Making Your Final Decision

Choosing the right AISO platform is a critical strategic decision that will impact your brand's visibility and growth for years to come. In a rapidly emerging software category, it is essential to move beyond vendor promises and conduct a thorough, data-driven evaluation.

Use this 10-point framework to structure your vendor trials, ask the right questions, and objectively score your options. By focusing on the criteria that matter most—from LLM coverage to the actionability of insights—you can select a partner that will help you navigate the new era of AI search successfully.

To see how Searchify stacks up against this scorecard, schedule a demo with one of our AI visibility experts today.