What An AI SEO Agency Should Report Every Month
Your Pages Contain Nothing Quotable Look at your homepage and count the sentences that could be lifted, attributed to you and remain true and useful out of context. On most brand sites the count is close to zero, because the copy is written to persuade rather than to inform.
One warning about testing. If you fix something and immediately re-run a prompt in the same session, the assistant may repeat its earlier answer from context rather than retrieving afresh. Start a new session, and run the prompt several times, before concluding that nothing changed. get your brand recommended by ChatGPT
When to Test More Often Three situations justify a tighter loop. During an active campaign where you need to attribute a specific change, weekly runs on a subset of prompts are reasonable, provided you accept the variance.
The Signals That Mean Something Four things are hard to fake and worth watching closely. Your own pages beginning to appear in cited sources, which is directly observable in any assistant that shows citations.
This section sounds procedural and it is the foundation of everything after it. A prompt set quietly edited between runs makes every trend line in the document meaningless, and it is the easiest way to manufacture improvement without doing anything.
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.
If you must change the prompt set, add new prompts as a separate cohort and keep the original series running unchanged. Editing the instrument retrospectively destroys the comparison you have been building.
This means a single answer is a sample. Being absent once is not evidence of a problem and being named once is not evidence of success, and treating either as a result is the most common analytical error in this field.
Why One Snapshot Proves Almost Nothing Generation involves randomness, and retrieval can return different pages between runs. The same prompt asked twice in a row can produce different companies in different orders.
It is also worth checking whether you are being confused with somebody else rather than ignored. Short names, generic names and names that begin with a number collide with other organisations more often than distinctive ones. Where that is happening, the answer will contain facts that are true about a different company, which reads as a hallucination and is usually an identity collision with a specific fixable cause.
The Assumption That Broke Twenty years of practice rested on a simple chain: rank higher, get seen more, get clicked more. Every tool, every report and every agency pitch was built on it, and for most of that period it held.
Refusals matter. A report that only contains successes is either describing a suspiciously easy month or omitting the parts that did not work, and the omitted parts are usually where the useful information is.
The Broader Lesson Every stage of this has punished the same thing, which is dependence on a single channel whose terms you do not set. Featured snippets did it, each core update did it, and this is doing it again with more force.
Present but described wrongly means a source problem, and the source list tells you which page to correct. Present and accurate on definitional prompts but absent on the who should I hire prompts means your category presence is fine and your commercial positioning is not corroborated anywhere independent.
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.
There is almost always a specific, findable reason for this, and it is rarely that the model dislikes you. Here are the causes worth checking, roughly in the order that they tend to be responsible. get your brand recommended by ChatGPT
Because there is no independent scoreboard in this channel, an engagement can run for a year on the strength of a number the supplier produces. That is an unusual amount of trust to extend, and it makes knowing what to check more important here than in any other marketing channel.
You asked it to recommend a supplier in your category. It named four companies, two of which you consider inferior to yours, and one you had never heard of. Your name did not come up, and it did not come up on the follow up question either.
Descriptions of your business moving from hedged to definite, which you can read yourself in the raw answers. Third party sources that previously described you wrongly now describing you correctly. And an increase in the fraction of runs naming you on buying intent prompts specifically, reported with run counts visible.