How I Evaluate an Enterprise SEO Platform in a Week
The five-day test I ran as a buyer at Uber, Zendesk and Williams-Sonoma, and the one I now hold our own platform to. It is the method behind every comparison page on this site.
- Why a Week, and Why Not a Demo?
- Day One: Which Question Is the Platform Answering?
- Day Two: How Does It Measure, and Can I Check the Method?
- Day Three: Who Executes, and Who Approves?
- Day Four: Governance, Access and Getting My Data Back
- Day Five: What Does It Cost at Twice My Scale?
- How I Score It, and the Two Rules I Keep
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why a Week, and Why Not a Demo?
I have bought enterprise SEO platforms three times as the person whose budget they came out of: at Uber, where I ran Conductor; at Zendesk; and at Williams-Sonoma, where I ran Botify and Lumar. Before that I ran BrightEdge at RingCentral, and Semrush, Ahrefs and Screaming Frog have been on my desk everywhere. Every one of those purchases started with a demo that looked excellent. The ones I regretted were the ones where the demo was the whole evaluation.
A demo shows you the vendor's best account on the vendor's best day. What I needed to know was different: what the platform would do with my site, my prompt list and my approval process, and what it would cost once my team actually used it. That takes about a week, one question per day, and it does not need a pilot contract. It needs the vendor's own live pages, a trial or sandbox where one exists, and a short list of things I ask to see rather than hear.
This is the method behind every comparison page on this site. Indexable AI is our platform, and we hold it to the same five days. Where we fall short on one of them, the comparison page says so.
Day One: Which Question Is the Platform Answering?
Enterprise SEO software answers one of four questions. What is happening to my visibility (measurement). What is wrong with my site (audit). What should we do next (recommendation). What got shipped (execution). Most platforms answer the first three well and leave the fourth to your team. A smaller group acts on the site.
Day one is deciding which question I am buying an answer to, before I look at a single feature. At Zendesk the question was measurement and reporting into the CMO. At Williams-Sonoma, with a catalog that changed daily, the question was execution, because the audit findings outran the engineering time to fix them every quarter. The same platform can be the right buy for one of those and the wrong buy for the other.
What I ask to see: the vendor's own description of what the product does, on the vendor's own site. If it says it recommends, I score it as a recommendation platform, however good the demo looked. If it says it deploys, I ask on day three to see a change it deployed.
The judgment line I use: in my experience the constraint at a company with revenue above fifty million dollars and no SEO department is rarely data. It is that nothing ships. If that is your situation, the measurement platforms are necessary but not sufficient, and I would score execution first.
Day Two: How Does It Measure, and Can I Check the Method?
Any platform that reports AI visibility, citations or share of voice gets the same five questions, and I want the answers in writing, because the numbers will go into a board deck with my name on them.
- Prompt sampling. How are prompts chosen, how many, and who owns the list? Can I see it, edit it and keep it if I leave?
- Frequency and runs. How often is each prompt run, and how many runs sit behind one score? AI answers vary run to run, so a score from one run is a sample of one.
- Collection. Does the data come through official APIs or through scraping, and which engines are covered? The answer changes what the vendor can promise about continuity.
- Citation sources. Does it show which pages the engines cite, not only whether my brand was mentioned? Mentions without the cited page tell me nothing I can act on.
- Export. Can I export all of it, and does API or MCP access cost extra?
I learned to ask the second question first. A visibility trend without the run count under it can be sampling noise as easily as performance, and once a chart has been presented upward it is very hard to take back. Now I do not accept a trend without the run count.
What I ask to see: one prompt, one engine, one week of raw runs. If the vendor cannot show that, the dashboard is a summary of something I am not allowed to inspect.
Day Three: Who Executes, and Who Approves?
This is the day that separates the two groups, and it is the day most evaluations skip because the demo already answered it with a slide.
For a platform that recommends, I ask who on my side will do the work, and I write that person's name next to each recommendation type. If the name is the same engineer who is already behind on the roadmap, I have just bought a longer backlog. For a platform that executes, I ask three things: show me a change you deployed on a customer's site, show me who approved it and how, and show me how it was rolled back when one went wrong.
The approval question matters more than the deployment question. At every company I ran search for, the approval process was the real governor of speed, and a platform that bypasses it will be switched off by legal or engineering within a quarter. The one I want shows the change, waits for a person to approve it, and keeps the record.
What I ask to see: a deployed change with its approval record, not a recommendation report. On our own site that record is public: customer zero lists what the agents changed on indexableai.com, who approved it, and what happened next.
Day Four: Governance, Access and Getting My Data Back
Day four is the day procurement and security would have asked about anyway, so I ask first and save a month.
- Identity and roles. Single sign-on and role-based access, as the vendor states them on its own site. I record what is published and do not infer what is not.
- Certifications. SOC 2 and ISO certifications as vendor-stated. An absent claim is not a missing certification, so the cell reads "not published", never "no".
- Data ownership. Who owns the prompt list, the historical data and the change log, and what leaves with me on the last day of the contract.
- Access. Whether API and MCP access are included or priced separately, because my analysts will want the data in their own tools within a month.
At Zendesk, search sat inside Growth Engineering and reported to the CMO, so every tool I bought had to pass an engineering security review as well as a marketing budget review. In my experience the tools with their governance answers already published clear that review far faster than the ones that answer by email.
What I ask to see: the security page and the data-export path, both live on the vendor's site.
Day Five: What Does It Cost at Twice My Scale?
The quote I am given on day one is for today's scale. The quote that matters is for the scale I will be at when the renewal arrives. So on day five I rerun every quote at twice today's domains, pages and prompts, and I ask the vendor in writing what drives the price: domains, pages, prompts, engines or seats.
Then I add the line that decided every budget review I sat in, which was never the software line. It was the fully loaded headcount needed to operate the platform and act on what it found. A measurement platform plus the people to act on it is one number. An execution platform plus the person to approve its work is a different number. The enterprise SEO pricing guide works through both.
What I ask to see: published pricing where it exists, and where it does not, a written quote at today's scale and at twice today's scale. On our comparison pages a vendor with no public price gets "not published", with the date we checked.
How I Score It, and the Two Rules I Keep
At the end of the week I have five answers per platform and a short list of things I was shown rather than told. I do not turn that into a star rating. Ratings hide the question from day one, and a platform that is excellent at measurement should not lose points for not deploying changes if measurement is what I am buying. Instead the comparison pages on this site record, per vendor, the group it belongs to, who it is best for, its published pricing, and what we could verify on its own pages.
Two rules keep that usable, and they apply to our own platform first.
- Not published is not no. Where a vendor publishes no claim, the cell reads "not published". An absent claim is not evidence of a missing capability, and I have been on the vendor side of that mistake.
- The vendor's own pages, dated. Where a capability matters, we quote the vendor's live page and record the date we checked it. Where we could not re-verify a figure, we removed it, which is why the old review-site ratings column came off the platforms guide.
If you want the questions in a form you can send to a shortlist, the pilot page carries ten of them as a copy-ready RFP block. If you want to see the week applied, start with the enterprise SEO platforms comparison and the comparison hub, where every page was built this way.
Run the week before the demo, not after it. The demo will still be excellent. You will just know which question it answered.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should an enterprise SEO platform evaluation take?
In my experience five working days is enough to answer the questions that decide the purchase, provided you ask to see things rather than hear them: a deployed change with its approval record, one prompt's raw runs for a week, the security page, the export path and a quote at twice your scale. Longer evaluations usually add demos, not evidence.
Do I need a paid pilot to evaluate a platform properly?
Not for the five days described here. A pilot answers a different question, which is what the platform does with your site over months. Run the week first, then pilot the one or two platforms that passed it. The pilot page describes how we structure ours.
What is the difference between a measurement platform and an execution platform?
A measurement platform tells you what is happening to your visibility and what to fix; your team does the work. An execution platform acts on the site, with a person approving each change. Most enterprise SEO software is in the first group. Indexable AI is in the second, and we score it on the same five days as everyone else.
Why do the comparison pages say "not published" instead of "no"?
Because an absent claim on a vendor's site is not evidence that the capability is missing. We record what the vendor publishes, with the date we checked, and leave the cell at "not published" otherwise. It is the first of the two rules above.
Which platforms have you actually run?
Conductor at Uber, BrightEdge at RingCentral, Botify and Lumar at Williams-Sonoma, and Semrush, Ahrefs and Screaming Frog at every company. Where a comparison page describes one of those from first-hand use, it says so. Where it describes a platform I have not run, it relies on the vendor's own published pages only.
Key takeaway: evaluate an enterprise SEO platform in five days by asking one question a day: which question it answers, how it measures, who executes and approves, what governance is published, and what it costs at twice your scale. Ask to see, not hear, and hold your own platform to the same week.
Written by Vijay Vasu, Founder of Indexable AI, who ran SEO at Uber Eats, Zendesk and Williams-Sonoma and bought enterprise SEO platforms at each. First-person tool experience is limited to the platforms named above. No figures on this page are market statistics.