They are mostly not competitors, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. BirdEye manages what people say about you across the internet. Nearby Now turns the jobs your crew finishes into pages on your own website. There is now exactly one lane where both of us sell the same thing — watching what the answer engines say — and it is the sixth question below.
Two taps at the door. The technician drops a check-in where the job happened, with a photo or video and a description of the work. It is geotagged to the address, marked up with schema, and published to the city page on your own website.
Auto check-ins can trigger it from a geofence, with a daily cap, a minimum interval and a minimum distance, so the content arrives even when a technician forgets.
It does not do this. BirdEye's review product describes review generation, response, review marketing, monitoring across 200+ sites, reputation scoring, competitor tracking and issue routing. Field check-ins from a job site are not part of it.
Source: birdeye.com/reviews — checked 16 September 2026On your domain, on a page for each city you actually serve, carrying that city's jobs, photos, videos, customers and reviews. You own it. If you cancel, you export it and keep it.
That matters because it is the asset that ranks and the asset an answer engine can cite. A review that lives only on a review site is working on that site's behalf.
Reviews are collected and monitored across third-party sites, and BirdEye's review marketing turns your best ones into branded social posts. The content's home is the review platform and your social profiles rather than per-city pages on your own site.
Source: birdeye.com/reviews — checked 16 September 2026The destination is decided before the customer rates anything — from whether their email is a Google account, whether you have asked for Google specifically, and which of your locations is nearest. Sentiment is never an input, because at that point nobody knows it.
A one-star review publishes exactly like a five-star one. We wrote the whole decision tree out: how we collect reviews.
BirdEye is against review gating too, and says so publicly — it had, then removed sentiment pre-check from all its surveys and does not allow new surveys that screen by sentiment.
We are noting that rather than glossing it, because it is true and because a comparison page that hid it would not deserve to be believed on anything else.
Source: birdeye.com/updates/prohibiting-review-gating-on-birdeye-surveys — checked 16 September 2026AI Visibility Tracking, a paid add-on to the account. A fixed set of questions — the ones a customer would actually type, in the cities that business actually works in — put to six answer engines on a weekly schedule: Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok. Through each engine's API rather than a logged-in session, because a logged-in session carries your history and answers you rather than a homeowner in the city you are asking about.
Every reply is kept, and four things are read out of it: whether the business was named, where it fell inside that answer, which other businesses were named alongside it, and which model said so on which day. An outage, a refusal or a timeout is recorded as “could not check” and kept out of the denominator, because somebody else's bad afternoon is not your client's bad month.
And it prints no score, no grade and no ranking — not on a screen, not in an export, not in an email. What it prints instead is a citation rate, always beside the two counts it was calculated from, and the sampling caveat in full next to the figures rather than in a footnote at the end. The competitor names in each answer are kept too, which is the part agencies end up using most.
This is the sentence the product prints beside every figure — on the dashboard, in the export and inside the monthly scorecard, unabbreviated in all three:
Each figure is a sample: one question put once to one model through its API on the date shown. Answer engines reply differently to different people, in different sessions and as their models change, so this is evidence of what an engine said when it was asked — not a position, a ranking or a score.How AI Visibility Tracking works →
BirdEye sells this, under the name Search AI, and it is the one place on this page where we are selling the same thing. Their engine list is essentially ours — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Grok — and in several respects the product is bigger: it works location by location across a large estate, connects what it finds to listings and content, and recommends fixes. If you run four hundred branches, that is a different and more useful shape than ours.
Where the two part company is what the measurement is allowed to claim. Their page tracks a “Visibility Score and Share of Voice” at brand and location level, and “Ranking trends across prompt clusters”. We print no such figure, on purpose, and the reason is the paragraph beside this one.
Their free checker is the clearest illustration of the difference, because it publishes its recipe. It describes an AI Visibility Score reflecting “how often and how prominently your business appears in AI-generated responses”, and lists what the number takes in: AI mentions, online authority and citation strength, review volume and ratings, customer sentiment, and data consistency. Review volume, star ratings, customer sentiment and data consistency are not things an answer engine said. A figure built that way can move in a month when no answer changed at all — and can hold still in a month when every answer did.
We also looked for the caveat. On their Search AI page and on the checker page, read on 16 September 2026, we found nothing about sampling, about the same question returning different answers to different people, or about model versions changing underneath a figure. Every one of those is true of their product exactly as it is true of ours. Two companies can read the same facts and make different calls about what to print; this is ours, printed above, where you can hold us to it.
Source: birdeye.com/search-ai and birdeye.com/ai-visibility-checker — both checked 16 September 2026$155 to $239 per location per month, printed on the pricing page. Unlimited users. No setup fee, no per-seat charge, no long-term contract, 14-day trial.
You can compare us to anything without speaking to us first, which is the entire reason the number is published.
No dollar figures are published. The pricing page presents tiers by number of locations — 1–3, 4–9, 10–39, 40–249, 250–999, 1000+ — and a form asking for your phone number to get pricing.
Source: birdeye.com/pricing — checked 16 September 2026Built for it. If your trucks cover thirty cities and your office sits in one of them, the problem is that you rank in one and serve thirty. Per-city pages built from real jobs are the answer to that specific problem.
Photos get face and licence-plate blurring before they publish, which is a homeowner privacy question you will eventually be asked.
Built for multi-location brands managing reputation at scale — retail, healthcare, franchises with fixed addresses. If your locations are the places customers come to, that shape fits. If your locations are wherever the van stopped this morning, it does not.
Source: birdeye.com/pricing — checked 16 September 2026| Capability | Nearby Now | BirdEye |
|---|---|---|
| Geotagged field check-ins | Yes | No |
| Check-ins published to your own site with schema | Yes | No |
| Auto check-ins from a geofence, with caps | Yes | No |
| Unlimited per-city pages on your domain | Yes | No |
| Face and licence-plate blurring on job photos | Yes | No |
| GeoGrid map rank tracking | Yes | No |
| Tracking what answer engines say about you | Yes — add-on, six engines | Yes — Search AI |
| A single published visibility figure for it | None, deliberately | “Visibility Score and Share of Voice” |
| Review requests by SMS and email | Yes | Yes |
| Routing that never screens by sentiment | Yes | Yes |
| AI-drafted review responses | Yes | Yes |
| Review site monitoring breadth | 27+ destinations | 200+ sites |
| Unified inbox across channels | No | Yes |
| Listings and citation management | No | Yes |
| Published pricing | Yes | No |
BirdEye rows describe that company's own public material — their reviews product page, their pricing page, their published position on review gating, and for the two answer-engine rows their Search AI and AI Visibility Checker pages, all read on 16 September 2026 and linked above. BirdEye is a large platform and these rows are not the whole of it. Products change and ours is not the last word on theirs; if something here has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.
200+ review sites watched in one place beats our 27+ destinations if your reputation is spread across a long tail of industry directories.
SMS, social, email and voicemail in a single queue is a real product we do not have. Our messaging is LeadSMS on your website, and that is the whole of it.
Fixed-location retail, clinics, franchise storefronts. When the customer comes to you, per-city job content has much less to do.
Citation sync and text-to-pay are not on our roadmap. If those are the reason you are shopping, we are not the answer.
Search AI does not stop at recording what the engines said: it ties that back to listings and content and tells you what to change, location by location, across an estate far larger than ours is built for. Our add-on measures and reports; it does not act. If what you want is somebody to move the needle rather than to show you the needle honestly, they are further down that road than we are.
No card, no setup fee, and everything you create is yours to keep. Faster than any comparison page.
