Frequently Asked Questions

Create an account and verify your email, choose a plan, then add your business — name, category, city, and ideally the street address. Press Scan now and your first report arrives in a few minutes rather than waiting for the weekly run.

Yes. Monitoring runs on a subscription, so after verifying your email you choose a plan before the dashboard unlocks. Every scan spends real API calls and sends real email, so there is no free tier to hide that cost in.

Every plan can be billed monthly or as a 12-month subscription, and every plan is cheaper yearly: Starter is $100 instead of $108, Pro saves 10%, Agency 16%. You are charged once for the twelve months.

You keep everything until the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancel on day three of a month and you still have the other twenty-seven days: scans keep running, reports keep arriving, and the dashboard stays unlocked. What stops is the next payment. Your account page shows the exact date access ends, and you can resume before then without losing anything. Reports already generated stay in your account permanently, and anything you have downloaded is yours regardless.

You pay up front, then we set it up with you by hand rather than automatically. We email you within one business day to collect your client list, scan days and report recipients, and configure white-label branding. Nothing is scanned until that is agreed — and if you would rather not wait, reply to the receipt for a full refund.

Today, Google Gemini. It is the engine wired most directly into Google local results, which is where local intent concentrates. A second engine is the top item on the roadmap.

No, and be sceptical of anyone who claims they can. We have no relationship with Google, OpenAI or Anthropic and no ability to edit their answers. What we do is tell you what is being said, with evidence, so you can fix the underlying sources — usually your Google Business Profile, your website, and recent reviews.

A finding is only reported when there is something trustworthy to check it against: either the engine answered from live search, or we independently verified the fact on the web. If neither is available we report nothing and say why. An engine will confidently invent a phone number for a small business, and reporting that as a defect in your listing would be worse than staying quiet.

It pins the scan to one location. Plenty of businesses share a name or have several branches, and without an address an answer about a different site is indistinguishable from an error about yours. It also gives us something real to compare any address the engine states against.

Once a week, on the weekday you pick per business. You can also run one manual scan per business to get started immediately; after that it moves onto the weekly schedule automatically.

A claim that your business has closed, gone out of business or shut down while your account says you are active. That costs you customers immediately, so it emails you separately rather than waiting for the weekly report.

That is itself the finding, and an important one. It scores your visibility at 25 and appears in the report. Being absent from AI answers is quieter than being described wrongly, and usually more expensive.

Yes — "Continue with Google" is on both the sign-in and sign-up pages. We ask Google for your email address and name and nothing else: no Drive, no Calendar, no Business Profile access. If you first signed up with a password and later use Google with the same verified address, it signs you into the same account rather than making a second one.

Three ways, in Account then Security. An authenticator app (Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy) is the one we recommend: it is free, works without signal, and is the strongest of the three. A text message to your mobile is available where enabled. An emailed 6-digit code is the simplest, and the one that cannot lock you out — though it is worth knowing it protects you against a stolen password rather than against someone who already has your email, since your password reset goes to that same inbox.

This is why the Security page asks you to keep two methods rather than one — if you hold an authenticator app and emailed codes, losing a device is an inconvenience instead of a lockout. Add a backup email and phone on the same page as well; those can never sign anyone in, they exist so we can confirm who you are. If you are stuck, email hello@aibusinessmonitor.com from an address on the account and we will verify you by hand and remove the factor.

Your business details, the questions asked, the answers returned, the reviews we find and the generated PDFs. No customer data of yours, and no card numbers — payment happens on Stripe. The privacy policy has the full list.