An AirOps alternative for teams who want the outcome owned

What AirOps is, stated fairly

AirOps positions itself as the growth platform for AI search, covering Google, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT. The product tracks prompts and pages, reports multi-engine visibility, generates opportunity reports, and runs content creation and refresh workflows with a large set of models, data providers, and CMS integrations behind it. It has a free insights tier, paid self-serve tiers, and custom enterprise pricing, metered by seats, tasks, and tracked prompts.

That is a genuinely useful product, and the measurement rigor is real. If your constraint is visibility into what answer engines say about you, and you have someone whose job is to act on it, software is the efficient purchase. Our position is not that the tool is weak. It is that a tool cannot be accountable, and that most software companies asking about AI search also need a website, an off-site corpus program, and paid media that nobody owns yet.

We are a competitor writing about a competitor, so treat the AirOps facts here as a starting point and verify the current product and pricing on their site.

Scope comparison: what each one covers

The single largest difference is not measurement quality. It is surface area. A visibility platform covers the tracking and part of the content workflow. A managed growth program covers the surfaces that decide whether the tracking numbers ever move.

Cost of ownership, with the operator counted

Licence price is not the comparison. A visibility platform only produces output when someone drives it, which in practice means a growth or content hire at a $110K to $140K US base, roughly $12K to $16K per month once you load employer taxes, benefits, and tooling. Add the licence and you are usually between $13K and $19K per month for one person's depth, before anyone has touched the website or the ad accounts.

Our published retainers are $7.5K per month plus a one-time $4,500 implementation fee for Ignite, $15K per month for Momentum, and $30K per month for Dominate, all on a 6-month minimum, with custom pods from $50K per month. Momentum sits inside the same band as licence plus operator, and covers the website, content production, off-site GEO, and paid media that the software plus hire model leaves out.

The honest counterpoint: an internal operator accumulates product knowledge that no external partner fully replicates, and once your program is stable, in-house plus tooling is the cheaper steady state. The break-even is usually a function of how much of the growth layer is already built.

Where we are genuinely different

Two of these are structural rather than a matter of effort, which is why we lead with them.

• Accountability, not access: one strategist owns the plan and reports on pipeline, rather than handing you a dashboard and a task quota
• Off-site GEO: reviews, roundups, directories, comparison pages, and entity consistency, which a tool can measure but cannot change
• Whole growth layer: website, SEO, AEO, GEO, content, and paid run by people who talk to each other
• No metering: no seats, no task credits, no tracked-prompt overages, no annual prepay games
• Published pricing on every tier, including the custom entry point, so nothing is gated behind a sales call
• No borrowed proof: we publish original research and methodology rather than logos we have not earned

Choose AirOps, or another platform, if

We would rather you buy the right thing than the thing we sell. Software is the better purchase in several common situations, and saying so is the only way this page is useful.

• You already employ a growth, content, or SEO operator with capacity to run the work
• Your website converts and you are not planning a rebuild
• You want measurement and workflow, and your team will handle strategy and publishing
• Your budget is under roughly $7K per month all in, where a licence plus internal time is the only viable shape
• Procurement requires software rather than services, which is common in regulated enterprises
• You want to keep everything in-house and simply need better instrumentation

How we measure, so the comparison is like for like

A managed program should be held to the same instrumentation standard as a platform. Every Momentence tier runs a fixed prompt set against ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude on a schedule, with verbatim answers and cited sources archived so month-over-month change is auditable. Tracked prompt sets run from 5 on Ignite to 50 or more on Dominate, sized per statement of work on Custom.

Reporting is a weekly written update plus a monthly scorecard covering citation share, share of voice against a named competitor set, prompt coverage, description accuracy, per-engine splits, and the pipeline endpoint reconciled to your analytics and CRM. The metric definitions we use are published, so you can hold any vendor to the same wording.

Pricing, in public

Every engagement is published pricing on a 6-month minimum: Ignite at $7.5K/mo plus a one-time $4,500 implementation fee, Momentum at $15K/mo, Dominate at $30K/mo, and Custom starting at $50K/mo for a fractional multidisciplinary pod. You will know what this costs before you ever get on a call.