- Is any of these actually built for NDIS?
- None of them is. Every product examined was built for general brand visibility, mostly for United States markets, and the NDIS specifics of registration groups, plan management types and service areas are invisible to all of them. What they do is track whether you were named for questions you define, which is genuinely useful and is not the same as understanding the market.
- Do we need a tool at all?
- Not necessarily, and for a small provider the honest answer is often no. Putting twenty real questions to an assistant by hand, once a month, and writing down who was named costs nothing and answers the same question. A tool earns its price when the set gets large enough that doing it by hand stops being reliable.
- Why do directories keep getting named instead of us?
- Directories are structured, list many providers against searchable attributes, and are updated constantly, which makes them an efficient source for a model answering a who-provides-what question. A provider site typically has better information about its own supports and states it in prose that is harder to extract. The gap is usually structure rather than substance.
- Does our registration status affect what assistants say?
- Registration is a checkable, published fact about a provider, which is exactly the kind of thing a model will repeat when it can find it. Making registration status and the supports it covers explicit on your own site, and consistent with the register, gives an assistant something specific to say rather than leaving it to infer.
- What should we spend?
- Less than most proposals suggest. The prompt set here is small, the entry tiers cover it, and the meaningful work is on the site and the listings rather than in a dashboard. Anyone quoting a large monthly figure for tracking a bounded suburb and support list should be asked to show the prompt set that justifies it.