How we compile our market reports

Every price is read from the vendor’s own published pricing page and recorded against the plan it belongs to. Pages are read in a real browser, because pricing is routinely held behind a tab, a currency selector, a region switcher or a collapsed panel, and a page that has merely been fetched is not a page that has been read.

We do not take pricing from review sites, directories or aggregators. Where a vendor publishes only a “from” figure with no rate card behind it, we record that as a floor and treat the provider as quote-only rather than inventing the rungs above it.

Prices that a vendor bills in another currency are stored in that currency with the conversion rate and its date kept alongside, so a figure can always be traced back to what the vendor actually charges.

A provider counts as publishing a price when a business can establish what it would pay without contacting sales. That is a per-market judgement rather than a global one: a vendor can publish a full rate card in one category and quote on request in another, and it is recorded separately in each.

A provider that advertises a headline rate but quotes for everything else is counted as quote-only, and reports say so where it matters, because a single published rate is not a price a business can budget from.

Estimated costs are produced by the same cost engine that powers our public comparison tables and calculators, so a figure in a report and the same figure on a comparison page cannot disagree.

Each market is costed at three business profiles, defined per market and stated in the report. Providers that quote on request are reported as quote-only and are never costed as zero, because an unknown price is not a free one.

Every figure in a report is frozen at the data as at date on the page. The report is a record of what the market looked like on that date and is deliberately not updated afterwards, because editing the figures would destroy the only thing the format is for.

For current prices, use the comparison pages, which read the live record. Where a report and a comparison page differ, the comparison page is current and the report is history.

Reports carry two separate measurements of AI visibility, and they are never combined because they measure different things by different means.

The first is first-party grounding data from Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools, which reports the queries where Copilot cited this site in its answer, across whatever real people asked it.

The second is our own sampling panel. Each month a fixed set of buyer questions per market is put to several leading AI assistants through their APIs, and every brand each answer names and every source it cites is recorded. It is a sample taken on a stated date, not a census of what every assistant tells every buyer, and provider APIs approximate but do not perfectly mirror the consumer apps.

The questions are fixed once asked and never edited, because a changed question would make a later comparison measure the edit rather than the market.

A published figure moves for two different reasons: a vendor reprices, or we correct something we recorded wrongly. Since 28 August 2026 every change to a stored price is logged with a cause by a database trigger no write path can bypass, so the two are separable going forward.

No such record exists for earlier periods and none can be reconstructed, so reports covering a window before that date do not attribute any price movement to a vendor. Where we find our own error we fix it and leave the change visible rather than quietly restating it.

Rankings and cost calculations are determined by published rates and nothing else. No provider pays for a position, and a commercial relationship never changes where a provider appears in a report or a comparison table.

Where a report measures which sources AI assistants cite, this site appears in that data like any other domain, at whatever position the measurement puts it. We do not remove ourselves from it, because doing so would misrepresent what the assistants actually did.

Reports may be quoted with attribution to MerchantCompare and a link to the report. Please include the data as at date, since the figures are frozen at that point and prices change.