How we make money
The business model, in plain words.
Answerable earns money four ways, all in Australian dollars: the AI visibility scan is free, a one-off audit is $495, monitoring is $199 per month, and fix work is quoted to the job. Nothing else earns the firm anything. No vendor pays to appear on this site, no ranking or list on it is for sale, and no payment changes a score. The same four prices are published as plain markdown at pricing.md so they can be read without parsing a styled page.
The four things we sell
Every way Answerable takes money
| Plan | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Scan | Your AI visibility score, plus one real quote from what AI actually said about your business today. No email required. | Free |
| Audit | All 12 AI answers in full, who gets named ahead of you, and a prioritised fix plan. | $495 one-off |
| Watch | The same questions re-scanned every month, change alerts when the answers move, and a live dashboard. Available after an audit or fix. | $199 / month |
| Fix | Done-for-you work, including website and search fixes, content and proof, and a re-scan on the same questions. | Custom |
That is the whole list. There is no setup fee, no platform licence, no minimum term and no commission on anything else you buy because we suggested it. Fix work is the only line quoted rather than published, because it is scoped to the gaps a specific business has, and a fixed price for unbounded work is either padded or a promise nobody can keep.
One thing worth saying on the page about money rather than leaving it for you to find elsewhere: our technology page records that the monitoring product behind Watch is built and verified in local runs rather than deployed. Until it is actually running on your questions, it is not something to be billed for.
The free tier
Why the scan is free, and what it costs us to run
The scan is free because the argument only works if you can check it. This firm sells the claim that AI assistants name some businesses and not others. A person can accept that in the abstract forever. Showing them their own result, with the answer AI actually gave, settles it in about a minute. Charging for that step would mean asking people to pay before they can tell whether there is anything to buy, which is the opposite of what the rest of this site argues for.
It is a real run, not a demonstration. The free scan on this site takes the expensive path deliberately: a full per-business run, with its own fresh questions and a fresh direct question to every configured engine. It is not the thin, shared-sweep version used for cold outreach, and the difference is written down on the technology page rather than glossed over, because a result assembled from somebody else's questions is not your result.
What that costs. Every scan is paid API calls to two providers, the OpenAI Responses API with web search and the Gemini Generative Language API with Google Search grounding, plus the compute to run them and store every answer word for word. We are ordinary paying customers of both, with no partnership and no privileged access.
We have not published a per-scan dollar figure, and the reason is the same rule that governs the research: a number without its date is not worth publishing. Provider pricing moves, the call count moves with how many engines are configured, and a cost we quoted today would be quietly wrong within a quarter. What we can say precisely is the shape of it: it is a per-question provider call, it is metered, and it is the reason the free tier is one scan of your business rather than an unlimited dashboard.
The honest limit on the free tier: it shows you the direct answer about your business and tells you how many other answers are withheld. The full set is what the audit unlocks. Nothing is blurred to look like more than it is, and the count of what is held back is always shown.
Not for sale
What money cannot buy here
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A place on this site
No vendor, tool or business pays to appear anywhere on answerable.com.au. Nothing in a ranking, a list, a glossary or an industry page is sponsored, exchanged or reserved. We also take no affiliate commission or referral fee for any tool named on this site.
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A better score
A score comes out of the published formula applied to stored answers. Paying for an audit buys the full set of those answers and a plan for what to do about them. It does not buy a different number, and no payment will raise, lower, withhold or delete one.
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A guarantee
Nobody can promise what an AI assistant will say about a business, and we do not sell one. Nothing in the scanner measures leads, revenue, traffic or rankings, so no claim is attached to any of them, and no timeframe or number is attached to an improvement.
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Silence
A correct result is not removed because someone would rather it were not published, at any price. The route for a result that is genuinely wrong is the corrections page, and it costs nothing.
The conflict underneath all of this is that Answerable sells the work it measures. That is set out in full, as a conflict, on the disclosures page, and the rules that govern what gets published are on the editorial standards page.
Prices are published for the same reason the scoring formula is published. A price you have to ask for is a price that can vary by what a buyer looks like they can pay, and a firm that publishes a formula and hides a rate card has only moved the black box. Everything here is in Australian dollars and is the same for everyone: pricing.md is the machine-readable copy, and what AI visibility costs in Australia puts these prices next to the rest of the market.
Keep reading
The rest of the trust cluster
Trust
Editorial standards
How we decide what to publish, and how the research sample is skewed.
Read more →Trust
Disclosures
We sell the work we measure. The conflicts, named as conflicts.
Read more →Trust
Corrections
How to report an error, and the dated log of the ones we have made.
Read more →The firm
About Answerable
Who we are, where we operate, and our own score of 29 out of 100.
Read more →See what AI says about your business.
Start with a free scan. It is the fastest way to find out whether AI recommends you or your competitor, and you keep the report.