The First Ninety Days With An AI SEO Agency

The Mechanism Has Changed A link passed authority through a graph. A mention in a generated answer works differently: the publication's text is retrieved, read and used as evidence about what your company is and whether it is worth recommending.

Expect the timeline to be uneven. Crawler access can change what an assistant sees within days, because retrieval happens at answer time. Identity consistency takes longer, since scattered mentions have to be re-crawled before they join up. Third party coverage is slowest of all and is the part you control least directly, which is exactly why it is worth starting on it before you need the result.

It also means the wording of the coverage matters in a way it previously did not. A sentence describing what you do, for whom, in what geography, is directly usable. A sentence that mentions your name in a list of attendees is not.

What llms.txt Proposes It is a proposed convention: a file at your root offering a curated, plain text guide to your site for language model consumers, pointing at the documents you consider authoritative.

Get Represented Accurately Off Your Own Site This is the step most brands underestimate. Assistants frequently cite review platforms, industry directories, forum threads and journalism rather than the brand itself, because independent sources read as less self interested.

Fragmented identity produces a specific symptom worth recognising: an assistant knows facts about you but attributes them vaguely, or confuses you with a similarly named business. The fix is dull consistency work across every place your name appears.

What robots.txt Controls It is a request, honoured by mainstream crawlers, that certain user agents avoid certain paths. It has no enforcement behind it and it does not secure anything, but the major providers respect it.

Then Measure Again, and Keep Measuring A single snapshot tells you very little. Assistants vary their answers between sessions, between accounts and between model versions, so one run is a sample and not a verdict. Re-run the same prompt set on a fixed schedule and watch the trend rather than any individual answer.

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.

Ask how they will handle being wrong. Every engagement in this field produces at least one confident recommendation that does not work, because the systems change and the published research is thin. What matters is whether that gets reported or quietly dropped from the next deck, and asking the question directly at the outset makes it considerably more likely to be reported.

Which to Fix First Work in that order, because the sequence is roughly cheapest to most expensive and each step is wasted without the one before it. There is no value in earning press coverage if the crawler cannot reach the page it points at.

Marketing copy does not get quoted. A paragraph of adjectives about your commitment to excellence contains nothing a model can attribute, so it is skipped in favour of a competitor who wrote a plain answer. Write the plain answer. ai seo services

One thing to establish in week one is where everything lives. The prompt set, the baseline archive, the raw answers and the correction log should sit somewhere you control from the beginning rather than in the agency's systems. Retrieving them later is a negotiation. Having them from the start is an administrative decision nobody objects to at the outset.

They will not quote statistics without sources, and they will not present a tool's sampled estimate as a count of what happened. If none of these boundaries come up unprompted, ask directly and listen for whether the answer sounds rehearsed or considered.

Check which agents you allow, confirm your important pages render meaningful content without scripts, and make sure nothing critical is trapped in a PDF or an image. This is the cheapest work in the whole discipline and it is routinely skipped.

Weeks One and Two: The Baseline You should receive a prompt set for review, built from your sales notes, support tickets and search queries rather than from your website copy. Read it and check that it sounds like your customers.

It is also worth recording the reason for every rule you keep. A disallow line with no explanation gets preserved indefinitely through migrations and redesigns because nobody dares remove something they do not understand. A one line comment saying who added it and why turns a permanent mystery into a decision that can be revisited.

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 services