What should you ask a monitoring supplier before subscribing?

Request a specimen export and a collection-method explanation before treating the supplier’s score as evidence. Use this procurement checklist:

• Which exact consumer surfaces or API endpoints are observed?
• How are geography, account state, search mode and personalisation handled?
• How many observations occur per prompt, engine and day?
• Are unavailable results, refusals and no-AI-feature searches distinguished?
• Are full answer text, citation URLs, timestamps and raw-result identifiers exportable?
• What counts as a mention, citation and recommendation?
• Can you preserve a fixed prompt cohort and historical definitions?
• How are product, model and collection-method changes disclosed?
• What is the contractual basis for collection, including subcontractors?
• What are the retention, deletion, access and cancellation terms?
• Which engines, countries, projects and exports cost extra?
• Does the service implement changes, or only identify them?

Use a proposed one-week acceptance exercise: compare a small set of supplier results with your own permitted observations, investigate disagreements and test exports. Do not demand identical answers; require that differences and methods can be explained.