What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company
One Claim Per Sentence Compound sentences that bundle three ideas cannot be lifted without dragging in material that may not apply. A model faced with a passage where only part is relevant will often skip it in favour of a cleaner source.
One final question is worth reserving for the end of the meeting. Ask what they think you should stop doing. An agency with a real diagnosis always has an answer, and an agency that only wants to add work to your existing spend usually does not. ai seo agency
You Are Blocking the Crawlers The most common cause is also the least interesting. Your robots.txt disallows the user agents that feed AI systems, or a firewall rule is rejecting them, or a bot management product is serving them a challenge page they cannot pass.
Nobody Independent Talks About You This is the cause most brands resist hearing. Assistants lean heavily on third party sources when making recommendations, because a company describing itself is a weak signal. If no review platform, directory, forum thread, comparison article or publication mentions you, there is nothing to corroborate your claims.
The Baseline Is Worth More the Earlier You Take It A baseline taken today lets you attribute change later. Without one, when something moves you will be reduced to guessing whether it was the assistants, a search update, a competitor's campaign, seasonality or your own site changes.
Include Something Worth Attributing A citation needs something to point at. Passages that contain only sentiment give a model nothing, which is why brand pages full of adjectives are passed over in favour of a competitor's specification table.
Absence is not disqualifying on its own, since their category is crowded and they may serve a niche. But they should have an interesting answer, and the answer should not be defensive. A practitioner who has run this test on themselves will have thought about it and will tell you what they found.
Keep a dated note of what you observed each quarter, including behaviour that later turned out to be temporary. The value is not in the individual observations, most of which expire, but in noticing how fast they expire. A team that has watched three of its confident conclusions become wrong within a year develops the right amount of scepticism about the fourth.
The practical response to that uncertainty is to work on the things that are robust to it. Accessible pages, coherent identity, quotable writing and honest third party coverage have helped under every configuration observed so far, and they are the parts you would want anyway. ai seo agency
What We Genuinely Do Not Know Several things are worth admitting rather than papering over. We do not know how the systems weight their signals against each other. We do not know how much residual influence training data has once retrieval is involved. We cannot reliably distinguish a change in your visibility from a change in the model's behaviour.
One practical consequence of the variation between systems is worth planning for. If your customers are split across two assistants that behave differently, resist building separate programmes for each. The shared requirements account for most of the achievable outcome, and the effort spent on system specific tactics is usually better spent widening the number of third party sources that describe you correctly.
Ask What Happens in Month One A proposal that opens with content production has skipped the diagnosis. There is no way to know what to write before you know which questions matter, which assistants answer them badly and which sources they draw on.
Answer the Question That Was Asked Content briefs generated from keyword tools produce pages that orbit a topic without answering anything. A page titled around a question should contain a paragraph that answers that question directly, early, without conditions attached to reading further.
Observed behaviour leans toward breadth, pulling from a wider set of sources per answer than the others, and it cites forums, documentation and niche trade sources readily. It also appears comparatively responsive to freshness.
The answer you want describes a baseline: a prompt set built from how your customers actually speak, run across the assistants that matter, with raw answers and cited sources recorded. Everything after that should be justified by reference to what the baseline showed.
Be wary of pricing tied to a proprietary visibility score, since the vendor controls both the number and the prompt set that produces it. Be equally wary of performance pricing tied to mentions, which sounds aligned and creates pressure to game the measurement rather than improve the business.
It also appears more conservative in commercial categories, hedging or declining to make a direct recommendation more often than the others. Where it does recommend, established entity signals seem to matter, which favours brands with consistent details and long records over newer entrants.