A buyer comparing three ways to get named by AI engines needs the same facts about each in one table: who does the work, what ships in thirty days, what it costs, how long it binds you, how the result is measured, what access it needs, and what you can check afterward. This page fills that table for Suede AI SEO, and fills the other two columns with what a traditional SEO agency and an AI visibility tracking tool typically offer. Those two columns describe categories, not any named vendor. Read them against the specific quote in front of you.
For a named-vendor view, Gigawatt Group’s trade-association guide compares Suede AI’s managed practice with Profound’s enterprise visibility software. It is an external analysis; this page remains Suede AI’s own category comparison.
The table
| Suede AI SEO | Traditional SEO agency | AI visibility tracking tool | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | A change in what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google answer when a buyer describes their problem | Rankings and organic sessions on a list of links | A reading of what the engines currently say |
| Who does the work | The founder, with agents he built and maintains; not resold | An account manager fronting a team; delivery varies by shop | Software; the fixing is your team's job |
| What ships in thirty days | A dated baseline, the repairs to the sources engines read, and a second measurement on the same prompts | Typically a site review and a plan, with fixes queued behind the plan | A dashboard and a trend line |
| Price basis | Free teardown, then the thirty-day sprint at $15,000 fixed or $7,500 in the SEO and AI cohort, then a monthly retainer quoted in a reply | Monthly retainer, commonly priced by hours or deliverables | Monthly subscription, commonly priced per brand or seat |
| Term | Thirty days for the sprint; the retainer is month to month and scoped in writing | Commonly a six- to twelve-month minimum | Monthly or annual, cancel any time on most plans |
| Measurement | Answer share: how often the engines name you across a fixed prompt set, captured with dates and screenshots, before and after | Rank positions, impressions and sessions | A visibility score, defined by the vendor |
| Access it needs | Repo or CMS access for the repairs, and the third-party sources engines cite | CMS access and a content calendar | Your brand name and a card |
| What you can check | The captures, the source diff, the production URL, and the receipts page | The rank report | The score |
| What is promised | The work and the evidence. No ranking or citation is promised, because engines rewrite their answers without notice | Varies; ask for it in writing | Uptime of the tool |
| Refunds | Three standing refund terms, published on the terms page | Varies by contract | Varies by plan |
The middle and right columns are the shape of the category. A specific agency or tool can be better than its column, and you should let it prove that with the same rows.
What the answer-share ladder costs
Three rungs, one number. The number is answer share: how often the engines name you for the prompts your buyers actually type.
- The teardown. Free. Back within three business days of your request. Your answer share today, the buyer prompts where an engine named someone else, the competitor sites it quoted instead, and the reasons: blocked crawlers, pages it cannot read, records it cannot resolve. Dated, and checkable by you in thirty seconds.
- The answer-share sprint. $15,000, fixed, or $7,500 for a business in the SEO and AI cohort. Thirty days. You approve the prompt set. We take a dated baseline, repair what the engines read, and measure again on day thirty: same prompts, same engines, same method.
- Compound. Monthly retainer, quoted in a reply. Managed agents that keep producing what engines quote, watched live in Suede AI Agent Studio and reported monthly against the prompt set you approved on day one. AI costs are inside the retainer.
The cohort rate is half the solo fee because several sprints run together on one thirty-day clock: one prompt-set review, one baseline day and one measurement day for the group, each business with its own prompts and its own captures. Cohort seats are limited. A forward deployed engagement runs on a fixed clock and is quoted in a reply. Prices are in US dollars. Every fee is confirmed in writing before work starts, and work starts on payment. The refund terms are on the terms page.
Who this is a fit for, and who it is not
A fit
- Buyers in your category ask an assistant before they ask a person, and being left out of that answer costs you deals.
- You can give someone access to the repo or the CMS, because the repairs ship to production rather than to a slide.
- You want a before-and-after number you can re-run yourself, not a score you have to take on trust.
- One operator with a short roster suits you better than an account team.
Not a fit
- You need a number for a board deck with nothing changed underneath it.
- Your category's buyers do not use assistants yet. Ask an engine what it recommends in your category and read what comes back; if your name is there and described correctly, you do not need this yet.
- You want volume content on a calendar. That is an agency's product, and some do it well.
- You only want to watch the number. A tracking tool does that for less.
Six questions to put to any of the three
- What is the price, in a number, before the call?
- What ships in the first thirty days, listed one by one?
- Who, by name, does the work?
- How is the result measured, and can I re-run the measurement myself?
- What access do you need, and what do you change in production?
- What happens if the first measurement finds nothing worth fixing?
Suede AI's answers are the left column above, and the last one is on the record: if the teardown returns no actionable gap, we say so, with the dated captures behind it, before any sprint starts.
Comparison FAQ
Why publish the sprint fee and not the retainer?
The sprint is the same job every time: a fixed prompt set, thirty days, one method. The retainer is not; it depends on how many agents run, how many lanes they cover, and how much AI cost sits inside the fee. A fixed number for variable work would be a guess dressed as a price.
What is the cohort rate, and who gets it?
$7,500 for the same thirty-day sprint, for a business that joins the SEO and AI cohort covered by Business Insider and MSN in September 2026. The group shares the clock, not the work: your prompt set, your baseline and your captures are your own. Seats are limited, and the teardown is where a seat is offered.
Can I skip the teardown and buy the sprint?
No. The teardown is where the prompt set comes from, and the sprint is measured against it. Three business days is a short wait for a baseline you can check.
Does the sprint replace an SEO agency?
Not on its own. Classic SEO underneath still matters, and the practice runs it as part of the repair work. What the sprint replaces is the gap between a rank report and the answer a buyer actually reads. The split between the two kinds of work is set out on GEO vs SEO.
Is a tracking tool a bad buy?
No. It answers one real question, what did the engines say, faster than a person will. The free AI citation check takes one such reading. What a tracker does not do is change the answer, and that is the job the sprint is priced for.
Jason Colapietro is the founder of Suede AI, which runs the SEO, AEO and GEO practice at seo.suedeai.ai. Every AI answer is a point-in-time capture of a third-party engine, and engine output changes without notice. The agency and tracking-tool columns describe those categories in general and no named company.