# AirOps or OnlyAEO: Who Should Do Your AI Search Work?

> AirOps pairs a platform with strategists so your team can run its own AI search system. OnlyAEO is the AEO platform that tracks AI answers and creates the content to change them, and our team can run it for you. See who does what and how to pick.

URL: https://onlyaeo.com/compare/airops-vs-managed-aeo-service · Published: 2026-10-15 · Author: Tejas Patil

- **Same goal, different worker.** AirOps and OnlyAEO both aim to get your brand named in AI answers. They differ in who does the work.
- **AirOps builds a system with you.** It pairs its platform with its own strategists, while your team sets strategy and makes the review calls.
- **OnlyAEO can run it for you.** It is an AEO platform that tracks AI answers and creates the content to change them; on a managed plan our team researches, writes and publishes, and your team signs off each piece.
- **Pick by staffing.** AirOps suits a content team with someone to own the system. OnlyAEO suits a team with no spare hours that wants finished work.

We read the AirOps website and help docs quoted below on 15 October 2026, and AirOps can change its product and wording at any time.

## Should you build your own AI search system with AirOps or hire a team to run it?

Build with AirOps if someone on your team can own content operations as part of their job. Let our team run OnlyAEO for you if nobody has that time.

AirOps draws the line itself. On its [Why AirOps page](https://www.airops.com/why-airops), AirOps says working with it means building a system with you, while hiring an agency means paying an outside team to run campaigns for you. The same page says AirOps puts data, platform and expertise in one offering, so buyers do not have to pick between software and a service provider.

By that definition, AirOps is a third route between a tool and an agency. OnlyAEO is an AEO platform that tracks AI answers and creates the content to change them, and on a managed plan our team runs it for you, so the hours sit with us instead of your team.

If you are still weighing staff against outside help in general, our [in-house vs agency cost breakdown](/blog/in-house-vs-agency-aeo-the-real-cost-and-capability-tradeoff) covers that question on its own.

## What does AirOps include, according to its own site?

AirOps sells its software platform and its expert team together as a single engagement, not as two separate offerings. Its homepage says the platform combines agents, data, brand governance and expertise to research, publish and refresh content, in a system that learns from each run.

- **Workflow building blocks.** AirOps' plans page lists Playbooks & Workflows, Grids, Content Review & Quality Scores, and Human Review & Approvals among the platform's actions.
- **Brand data.** AirOps' top plan adds custom agent builds and unlimited knowledge bases and Brand Kits.
- **Bulk page work.** AirOps' help docs describe Grids as spreadsheet-style tables that create and refresh content, AEO work included, across hundreds of pages at once. Grids can push approved content straight to WordPress, Webflow and other CMS platforms, per the same docs.
- **Strategists.** The [AirOps homepage](https://airops.com) invites buyers to bring on a team of its experts to set and execute strategy. Its Why AirOps page says those strategists build on the AirOps platform, so their decisions become part of your operating model.
- **Engineering help.** AirOps lists a Forward Deployed Engineer as one of its support tiers.

How much strategist help you get varies: AirOps says its level of involvement differs from team to team.

## What work stays with your team if you choose AirOps?

Your team keeps the strategy and the review calls, and someone on it owns the system. AirOps' own guide to AEO tools splits it this way: "Your team sets the strategy," while its Quill agent runs execution.

On the Why AirOps page, AirOps describes itself as a close collaborator: it handles intelligence, execution and measurement, and brings your team in for reviews and the judgment calls only you can make. On effort, the tools guide says real setup is involved and that teams getting the most from AirOps usually have someone who owns the system.

Pieced together from AirOps' own descriptions, that owner's work runs in roughly this order:

1. **Connect the Brand Kit.** AirOps says Quill grounds its drafted refreshes in your Brand Kit, so it has to be set up first.
2. **Define the prompt universe.** AirOps lists this as part of setup: choosing the buyer prompts it should track and act on.
3. **Build the workflows.** Next comes setting up the workflows that turn what the tracking shows into published pages.
4. **Review each run.** Per AirOps' help docs, a workflow that reaches a Human Review step pauses in a pending state until someone reviews the content, and that person can validate and edit it before the run continues.
5. **Approve and publish.** Your team decides which approved pieces go to the CMS and which gaps to work on next.

AirOps also says who it is not built for. Its tools guide calls AirOps the wrong tool for a solo marketer or two-person team that wants a dashboard to log into and read. It adds that AirOps may not suit a team with no content strategy yet that still has to build its basic pages first.

## What does OnlyAEO do instead?

OnlyAEO is an AEO platform that tracks where AI names your brand and creates the content to change it. On a managed plan, our team runs it for you end to end, working with AI, so there is no system for you to maintain.

Each month a managed plan covers the following:

- **AI visibility analytics.** A monthly read of where AI assistants name your brand and which sources they cite (how we measure is below).
- **Articles on your site.** Researched, fact-checked pieces published in your voice and in your site's design.
- **Video.** Our team plans, scripts and packages a video series for your YouTube channel every month.
- **Other languages.** Articles in almost any language, run through the same research and checks as English.
- **Earned mentions.** An earn-citation list ranks the third-party sites AI cites in your space that do not mention you yet, each with a recommended play: guest post, partnership, listing or review.
- **Site health.** A check that every AI engine can read your website.

The assistants our team works on include Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI (Muse) and Instinct, among others. The monthly cycle is laid out step by step on [how it works](/how-it-works).

## How does OnlyAEO keep your team in control without running the system?

Control comes from two things: your approval, and the brand record we write from. Nothing goes live until someone on your side has signed it off.

First we build a Context Graph: a single record of your company and the source for each article, video and post we write. It pulls from Search Console, your Google Drive and Docs, Slack, Gmail, YouTube, WordPress, Framer and your decks, and it stores your voice, facts, buyers and competitors, plus which claims you may and may not make.

When something is not written down, our team asks you, and a change made once, such as a new price, carries into all new content. Before drafting, we put the buyer's own question to ChatGPT and Claude, read every cited page from start to end, and give each of their searches a section of its own.

Every piece then passes five checks before it reaches you:

1. **Claim check.** Each number must match an evidence row, and unsupported claims are cut.
2. **Humanizer.** The draft is reworked in your brand's voice.
3. **Link validator.** A dead link blocks publishing.
4. **Independent score.** A separate scorer has to rate it 85+.
5. **Human approval.** The sign-off described above.

AirOps also keeps a person in the loop, through the review step described above. The difference is what lands on your reviewer's desk: here it is a finished piece that has already cleared four checks.

## How do AirOps and OnlyAEO measure AI visibility?

Both track how AI answers treat your brand and connect the results to business outcomes. The gaps are in engine coverage and in what each one logs beyond the answers themselves.

### What AirOps tracks

- **Engines.** AirOps' AI search visibility page says it automates tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
- **Per-prompt records.** For every tracked prompt, AirOps says it records whether your brand was mentioned, whether your pages were cited, where in the answer you appeared and how that shifts over time.
- **Before and after.** When you publish or refresh a page, AirOps says it logs the update and follows that page's citation and mention rates in the weeks after.
- **Search and analytics data.** AirOps' Page360 view joins AI citation data with Google Search Console and GA4 metrics. Its Why AirOps page adds that it tracks how shipped work changes citations, traffic, engagement and pipeline.

### What OnlyAEO tracks

- **Engines.** Our platform offers ten engine models: Claude Sonnet and Opus, ChatGPT and ChatGPT mini, Gemini Flash and Pro, Grok, and DeepSeek Chat and Reasoner. By default, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini run with web search turned on, and each prompt goes to every engine twice.
- **Recommendations on their own line.** An answer that recommends you is counted apart from one that only mentions your name or links to your page as a source.
- **AI crawlers and referrals.** We log which pages AI bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read, and capture AI-referred visits that GA4 misses.
- **Pipeline.** LLM Attribution shows which AI answers send you pipeline.

## How do AirOps and OnlyAEO compare side by side?

The table covers points the sections above leave out.

| | AirOps | OnlyAEO |
|---|---|---|
| **Who drafts content** | AirOps agents such as Quill | Our team, working with AI |
| **Bulk changes across many pages** | Grids | Each piece checked one by one |
| **Security** | SOC 2 Type II since January 2023, per AirOps | SOC 2 Type II |
| **Works with existing tools** | Runs alongside your SEO and analytics tools, per AirOps | Yes, through the Context Graph |

## What results has OnlyAEO produced?

Our published case studies follow clients from their starting rank to where they stood later.

- **[FastTrackr AI](/case-studies/fasttrackr-ai).** It sat at #338 of 458 brands with 0.1% AI visibility; about 100 days later it was its category's #3 most-cited brand and #4 most-cited source.
- **[New York edibles retailer](/case-studies/new-york-edibles-retailer).** It moved from #50 with 1.5% AI visibility up to #4 of 374 brands at 25%, and by then its own website had become the source AI cited most in its category, ahead of even New York State's official site.

These are past results, not a forecast for your brand. We offer no results guarantee and promise no specific rankings or citations, and in our client work the first measurable results usually need 60 days or longer.

We left AirOps' customer stories out of this page on purpose, so ask AirOps for references in your own category. To read figures like these with care, see our articles on [AI visibility metrics](/blog/category/ai-visibility-metrics).

## How should you decide who does the work?

Write the weekly work down first, then put a name next to each task.

1. **List the work.** Prompt tracking, briefs, drafts, reviews, publishing, video, other languages and outreach for mentions on other sites.
2. **Name an owner for each line.** Count the lines with a real name against the lines that read "nobody"; the two fit sections below say what each pattern points to.
3. **Check where you start.** A team without a content strategy is the case AirOps itself flags, as covered above.
4. **Ask for a sample month.** Ask AirOps how much hands-on strategist time your engagement includes, since that varies (see above). Ask us to walk you through a month of approvals.
5. **Agree the scorecard before you sign.** Pick the measures, such as mentions, citations, recommendations or pipeline, so both routes are judged the same way.

## When AirOps fits better

Pick AirOps if you want to own your AI content system and have the people to run it.

- **A content team with a system owner.** That is the setup AirOps says gets the most from it.
- **Scale on current headcount.** AirOps names enterprise content teams moving from AI visibility monitoring to scaled content execution without adding headcount as its best fit.
- **You refresh many pages at once.** Grids and direct CMS publishing, both described above, suit bulk refresh work across a large site.
- **You want the know-how to stay in-house.** Its strategists' decisions stay in your operating model (see above).

## When OnlyAEO fits better

Pick OnlyAEO, run by our team, if you want the work done and have no wish to build a system first.

- **Nobody has hours to own a system.** That includes the solo marketers and two-person teams wanting a simple dashboard, for whom AirOps calls itself the wrong tool.
- **You want checked work to approve.** Each piece reaches your reviewer after the checks above.
- **More than articles.** Video, other languages and earned mentions come with the same managed plans (listed above).
- **People you can reach.** Each client gets a dedicated team, a regular review with its own people, and someone always a call or a message away.

## More questions about AirOps and OnlyAEO

### Can AirOps' strategists run the program for us?

Partly. AirOps' Why AirOps page says its experts build the strategy, run the programs and tie results back to pipeline. Ask which of those tasks would still sit with your team.

### Which engines does AirOps cover on each plan?

AirOps' plans page lists Insights across 7+ answer engines on its Pro plan, while its Solo plan for individuals covers ChatGPT only. Its tools guide says the Insights product tracks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode.

### How is AirOps usage counted?

AirOps' plans page says tasks are the currency used for actions such as generating content or extracting data. A team planning heavy bulk work should ask how its expected volume maps to tasks.

### Who leads the work at OnlyAEO?

Tejas Patil, our co-founder, leads the team that runs the platform for clients and works directly with them from the first audit to the monthly review.