# AI visibility audit for SaaS founders: measure before you subscribe

> When a buyer asks an AI assistant for "the best tool for X", the answer is a shortlist of about 5 names. If you are not on it, you are not in the consideration set. A one-time diagnosis tells you whether you have that problem before you pay USD 95 to 499 a month to watch it.

Canonical page: https://askedthrice.com/for/saas

## Audit before you subscribe: see where ChatGPT and Claude put your SaaS, once, for free

## The shortlist is the new first page

OpenAI and Claude answer a buyer question with a short list of tools. Across 4,500 answers in our study the mean list was 5.4 brands long. A buyer who asks "which CRM for a 10-person startup" reads those names, opens two or three, and rarely asks again.

Most SaaS founders find out they are missing from that list when a churned customer mentions how they found the competitor. Monitoring platforms sell a dashboard that watches the list every week for USD 95 to 499 a month. The first question is cheaper than that: are you on the list today, for the questions your buyers actually ask, and who is there instead of you?

## Four numbers before any subscription

The audit reads your own site to derive the questions, then asks each model and keeps the raw answers as evidence. Measure these first; everything else is a dashboard around them.

1. **The buyer questions, derived from your own site.** Up to 12 questions read from your own pages, in the language your site is written in ("best [category] for small teams", "[you] vs [competitor]", "alternatives to [competitor]", "[category] for [use case]").
2. **Recommendation counts with their N.** For each question, whether each model named you, shown as "named in X of N answers" per provider, never as a single score. The verdict is one of three bands and comes from those counts.
3. **The competitors named instead of you.** The brands that fill the slots you are missing, counted across the measured answers, so you know who you are actually losing the shortlist to, per model.
4. **The pages you are missing.** Which questions have no page on your site that could answer them, which is usually the reason a model cannot name you. This is the list the publishing plan is built from.

## What the free audit returns, and what the paid pieces add

The first run is free, with no signup and no card, and takes about a minute. The two paid pieces are one-time; there is no subscription.

### Free audit (USD 0)

- The verdict across OpenAI and Claude
- Your buyer questions, read from your own site (up to 12)
- One live measurement of those questions per model, as a map: where you appear, where a competitor does, where nobody does
- The raw answers as evidence, and a public link to the measured map

### Full report (USD 9 one time, for one audit)

- The 14-day publishing plan: which pages to ship first, with blueprints
- The evidence read from your site, organized by question
- A shareable report link without login, and print to PDF

### Lifetime pass (USD 29.99 one time)

- Every report and every re-measurement you ever run, for every brand on your account
- Re-run after you publish, on your own rhythm, with the history kept
- Cheaper than single reports from the fourth one; if you will only ever measure one brand once, buy the single report

## Same job once, or a dashboard every month

The platform facts below were read from each vendor's pricing page on 2026-08-23; prices change, so re-check before buying. Asked Thrice's column comes from our own pricing.

| Tool | Entry price | Engines | Free tier or trial | Best for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Asked Thrice (the one-time audit option) | Free first run, no signup; USD 9 one-time report; USD 29.99 lifetime pass for every report and re-run after that | OpenAI and Claude model APIs (budget-tier models, named on the methodology page), no web browsing; the paid report also measures Google Gemini | Free first run, no signup, no card | A diagnosis once, before or instead of a monitoring subscription |
| Otterly.AI | Lite USD 29/mo (15 prompts); Standard USD 189/mo (100 prompts); Premium USD 489/mo (400 prompts); Enterprise from USD 1,000/mo | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot; add-ons per month by tier: Google AI Mode USD 9/59/149, Gemini USD 9/59/149, Claude USD 29/109/439 | 7-day trial with 50 prompts, no card; no permanent free plan; 12 free GEO tools on its site | The lowest-priced entry into recurring tracking, paying per engine |
| Peec AI | Starter USD 95/mo (50 prompts, 3 AI models, 1 project); Pro USD 245/mo; Advanced USD 495/mo; Enterprise custom; annual minus 15 percent; extra AI model USD 35 to 165/mo by tier | 3 AI models on Starter, more as paid add-ons; Claude and GPT-5 Search reported as enterprise-only | 7-day trial, no card; no free tier | Teams that want ongoing dashboards with unlimited seats |
| Profound | Starter USD 99/mo billed yearly (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 1 seat); Growth USD 399/mo billed yearly (100 prompts, 3 seats); Enterprise custom; no monthly billing shown | Starter: ChatGPT only; Growth: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews; Enterprise: 9 engines | Free email-gated AEO Report snapshot; 7-day free trial on Growth | Teams heading toward an enterprise platform with governance |

The honest difference: a platform watches a fixed prompt set every week and charges for the weeks you do nothing; the audit measures once, gives you the plan, and lets you re-run when you have published something. Checked 2026-08-23.

Sources: [Otterly.AI](https://otterly.ai/pricing), [Peec AI](https://peec.ai/pricing), [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/pricing)

## Buy the subscription when these are true

A monitoring platform is the right buy for some SaaS teams. The audit is not a replacement for it in these cases; it is the diagnosis you run first so the subscription starts with a baseline.

- Someone on the team acts on the data every week: publishes, measures, adjusts. A dashboard nobody opens is a cost.
- You need to track more than 12 questions, or 100 or more prompts across several product lines.
- You sell in several countries or languages and need the same prompt set measured per market.
- You need seats, roles and alerts for a marketing team, or a reporting cadence a client or a board expects.

## One run is a sample, so the audit shows counts with their N

In our repeatability study (4,500 calls, 30 categories, three model APIs) the same buyer question asked 5 times to the same model returned the same set of brands in 15 percent of cases. The first-named brand held in 75 percent of runs; the rest of the list moved. So a single run is a sample, not the answer: read every count with its N, re-run before you call a change real, and treat any tool that reports a 0-100 score from one run as printing noise.

That is also why there is no score on any screen: the verdict is three bands plus counts ("named in X of N answers"), and the methodology page lists the exact models, temperatures and run counts behind every number.

- [How repeatable are AI recommendations (the study, raw answers downloadable)](https://askedthrice.com/research/how-repeatable-are-ai-recommendations)
- [Methodology: models, parameters, what we do not claim](https://askedthrice.com/methodology)
- [How many runs does a measurement need](https://askedthrice.com/learn/how-many-runs)

## Questions SaaS founders ask before running it

### How long does the free audit take and what do I need?

About a minute for the first measurement. You enter your site, your category and the competitors you know about; the questions are derived from your own pages. No signup, no card. The models measured are OpenAI and Claude, through their APIs.

### Is this the same as what the monitoring platforms measure?

Same kind of question (does a model name you), different scope and price. Peec AI Starter is USD 95/mo for 50 prompts and 3 AI models; Profound Starter is USD 99/mo billed yearly and ChatGPT only; Otterly Lite is USD 29/mo for 15 prompts (all as of 2026-08-23). The audit measures up to 12 questions from your site across 2 model APIs, once, for free, and the full report is USD 9 one time.

### Why no 0-100 score?

Because the same question to the same model returned the same set of brands in 15 percent of cases in our 4,500-call study. A score to one decimal from one run is noise. You get counts with their N and a three-band verdict, and you can re-run to see whether a count holds.

### Does the audit read the consumer ChatGPT app?

No. It measures the model APIs (budget-tier models, named on the methodology page), with no web browsing. Other people have measured gaps between the logged-in app and the API; we measure the API and say so.

### What do I do with the result?

Ship the pages the plan lists first, then re-run the audit. The lifetime pass at USD 29.99 covers every re-run, so measuring again after publishing costs nothing extra. If you find you want someone watching it weekly, that is the moment a platform earns its subscription.

## Next step

Run the free audit on your SaaS: https://askedthrice.com/

Free first run in about a minute, no signup, no card. Full report USD 9 one time; lifetime pass USD 29.99.

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