Two free website scanners now promise to tell you how AI sees your site, and they measure different things. Dedica, which hit number one on Product Hunt this week, asks whether AI agents can actually use your site: find it, get in, complete a task, pay. UD's AEO Auditor asks whether AI answer engines can read, trust and cite your site when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity a question.
I ran the decision both ways for a typical practitioner: a marketer or freelancer who owns a business site, publishes content, and has maybe one developer on call. Below is what each tool checks, what it costs, where each one wins, and which to run first. Full disclosure: the AEO Auditor is UD's own product, so I have tried to be strict about where Dedica is the better choice.
What is the difference between agent readiness and AEO?
Agent readiness measures whether an AI agent acting for a user can discover, access and complete tasks on your site, such as signing up or paying. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) measures whether AI answer engines can read your content and quote it as the answer, so your brand appears in responses.
They overlap on the basics. Both care about whether AI crawlers are blocked, whether pages render without a browser, and whether structured data exists. They split on the goal. AEO is about being mentioned. Agent readiness is about being usable once an agent arrives. If you want the bigger picture of where agents are heading, our explainer on agentic browsers covers why more traffic will soon arrive through software rather than people.
What do Dedica and UD AEO Auditor actually check?
Dedica runs 125 checks across four layers, Discovery, Access, Usability and Payments, and returns a score out of 100 with a grade. UD AEO Auditor runs more than 170 AEO structure checks and returns an overall score, AI copy signals, 11 numeric structure checks and an action plan.
Dedica (from getdedica.com, checked 30 October 2026)
- Checks: 125, grouped into Discovery, Access, Usability and Payments.
- Typical failures it looks for: bot checks that block agents, pages that only render in a browser, and APIs with no public docs or OpenAPI spec.
- Speed and sign-up: under a minute, no sign-up for the free score.
- Free report contents: score, grade, layer split and up to 20 example findings with evidence.
- Output style: fixes written as instruction files for a developer or a coding assistant such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or GitHub Copilot.
UD AEO Auditor (from ai.ud.hk/aeo-auditor, checked 30 October 2026)
- Checks: 170+ AEO structure checks, including schema markup, AI crawler access, answerability and peer comparison.
- Engines covered: ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, including brand-mention monitoring.
- Speed and sign-up: under 30 seconds for most sites, up to 60 seconds for complex ones. No card and no account. An email unlocks the full dashboard.
- Report contents: overall score, AI copy signals, 11 numeric structure checks and a prioritised action plan with expected score impact.
How much do Dedica and UD AEO Auditor cost?
Both scans are free. Dedica sells a one-time fix kit for US$30 per domain until 30 November 2026, rising to US$50 afterwards, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. UD AEO Auditor's full report is free with no card; UD does not publish a price for paid AEO work, which is quoted on request.
The detail matters for budgeting, so here are the published terms from Dedica's pricing page:
- Free check: US$0. Score, grade, layer split and up to 20 example findings. It does not include every finding, the ready-to-run fix prompts or the downloadable fix pack.
- Fix kit: US$30 launch price through 30 November 2026, then US$50. One-time, per domain, no subscription.
- What the kit includes: every finding, one instruction file per fix, and the full unredacted report, delivered as a .zip.
- Re-runs: you pay again for a different domain or for an updated kit after your site changes.
- Refunds: 30-day money-back guarantee, no reason needed.
For UD AEO Auditor, the FAQ on the product page states the report is "100% free, no credit card, no account", with no auto-billing. UD recommends re-scanning monthly to track changes, and that costs nothing either.
Where does Dedica beat UD AEO Auditor?
Dedica is the better choice if your site has a sign-up, booking or checkout flow and you want to know whether an AI agent can complete it. Its Payments and Usability layers test things an AEO scan does not, and its fix kit is written for a coding assistant to apply directly.
- Task completion: AEO Auditor tells you whether AI can quote you. It does not test whether an agent can finish a purchase on your site. Dedica does.
- Developer hand-off: one instruction file per issue, each with how to verify the fix, is a clean format to give a developer or to paste into Claude Code or Cursor.
- Public example: Dedica publishes a full sample report for stripe.com, so you can judge the depth before scanning your own site.
- API: Dedica has a developer API, useful if you manage many client sites.
Where does UD AEO Auditor beat Dedica?
UD AEO Auditor is the better choice if your goal is to be recommended and cited in AI answers, which is where most content-led businesses lose visibility today. It checks content signals and monitors brand mentions across five AI engines, and the full report and action plan are free.
- Content focus: AI copy signals and answerability checks look at whether your paragraphs can be extracted as answers. Agent-readiness scans mostly look at site plumbing.
- Brand mentions: it scans whether AI engines mention you and how visible competitors are, which Dedica does not claim to do.
- Full report at no cost: Dedica's free tier caps findings at 20 and keeps the fix prompts behind the kit. AEO Auditor's action plan is included free.
- Local support: if you would rather not apply fixes yourself, UD's Hong Kong team can help apply them, which matters if you have no developer on call.
Which scan should you run first?
Run UD AEO Auditor first if you publish content and want to be cited. Run Dedica first if AI agents need to sign up, book or buy on your site. Most small businesses should run both, because each free scan takes about a minute and they catch different problems.
- Content creator, consultant or B2B service: AEO Auditor first. Your growth depends on being named in answers.
- E-commerce, booking or SaaS sign-up: Dedica first. A blocked checkout loses the sale even if AI recommends you.
- Agency managing client sites: both, then compare which layer is weakest per client.
Whichever you run, turn the report into a fix list your team will actually finish. Paste the findings into ChatGPT or Claude with this prompt:
You are a website consultant helping a non-technical marketer.
Below is an AI-readiness report for my site.
1. Group every finding into: CONTENT (I can fix in my CMS),
CONFIG (needs a settings change, e.g. robots.txt, CDN bot rules),
and CODE (needs a developer).
2. For each finding give: the problem in one plain sentence,
the fix, the effort (under 1 hour / half day / more),
and how I check that it worked.
3. Rank the top 5 fixes by impact divided by effort.
4. Flag anything that could break the site for human visitors.
Do not invent findings that are not in the report.
Report:
[paste the report text here]
What are the limitations of both tools?
Neither score is a neutral industry benchmark. Each tool uses its own rubric, so a 72 on one cannot be compared with a 72 on the other. Both measure readiness signals, not guaranteed outcomes, because AI answers and agent behaviour change from one query and one model update to the next.
- Self-graded rubrics: Dedica's claim that 6% of 115,752 scored business sites reach 70 or above is company-reported. UD's own marketing figures are also company-reported. Treat both as directional.
- Launch-week product: Dedica launched on Product Hunt in late October 2026. Its rubric and pricing may change after the launch price ends on 30 November.
- Bias disclosure: the AEO Auditor is UD's product. This comparison uses each vendor's published facts, checked on 30 October 2026.
- Fix ownership: Dedica's kit assumes someone can edit code. AEO fixes often include content rewrites that take editorial time.
- Third opinion: if you want a neutral reference, Cloudflare offers a free 0 to 100 agent-readiness rating at isitagentready.com. Scores will differ again, which is expected.
One more practical point: whichever tool you use, scan the same URLs each month and keep the reports. A trend on one rubric tells you far more than a single score compared across two different rubrics.
The practical answer is simple: two free scans, one prioritised fix list, and a re-scan a month later. That is cheaper than guessing which half of your AI visibility is broken. We know AI's cold edges. We know your real challenges. 28 years with UD, turning technology into a partnership with warmth.
Reviewed by the UD AI team. Facts for Dedica come from getdedica.com and its pricing page; facts for UD AEO Auditor come from its product page; both checked on 30 October 2026. Prices are in US dollars as published.
See how AI engines read your site today
Run UD's free AEO Auditor scan in about 30 seconds, with no card and no account, and get a full action plan. If you want help applying the fixes, we'll walk you through every step, from schema and crawler settings to rewriting key pages so AI can quote them.