How do you measure AEO ROI, or is it just a monthly PDF?

This lane attracts vague reporting because almost nothing in it is externally verifiable. That is exactly why the measurement question deserves a hard answer.

The problem with AI visibility scores

Assistants do not return consistent answers. Ask the same question twice and the sources can differ.

So any tool producing a single visibility score is sampling something unstable and presenting it with more confidence than the underlying data supports. That does not make these tools useless, but it does mean the number is soft in a way the dashboard will never admit.

What can actually be measured

Three things, none of them exotic.

Whether you are named. Write down the questions your customers genuinely ask, put each to the major assistants, record the result with the date. Repeat monthly. It is manual and it is reproducible, which is more than most reporting manages.

Whether branded search is rising. If more people search your business by name over time, something is putting you in front of them.

Whether enquiries change. The most reliable signal of all is somebody saying they were looking for someone and your name came up.

What to ask for

If somebody is charging you for this work, the report should contain the specific questions targeted, the dated record of whether you appeared, and what actually changed on the site.

That is checkable. You can run the same query yourself and see. A report with a score and no reproducible checks cannot be audited by anyone, including the person who wrote it.

Be suspicious of certainty

Nobody outside these companies knows the ranking mechanics, and they change without notice.

Confidence about precise causes is a warning sign rather than expertise. The defensible position is that certain work reliably makes a site easier to read, quote and corroborate, and that this is what appears to matter. That is also what separates the real work from the rebrand.