What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company

One caution about narrowing. Defining your category narrowly is the core advantage here, and it has to be a narrowing customers recognise rather than an invented segment. Claiming to be the leading provider of a category you named yourself impresses nobody and gets cited by nothing, because no buyer asks a question using that phrase.

Where the Small Brand Genuinely Loses Being honest about this matters, since a plan built on ignoring it will fail. Large brands have accumulated press coverage, review volume and a settled entity record that took years to build, and those carry real weight.

Move next to sources that accept corrections, which costs an email each and has a better acceptance rate than most people believe. Only then invest in earning genuinely new coverage, which is the expensive part and should be aimed at the specific publications your baseline showed are already being cited.

Finally, pay attention to how they talk about their existing clients. Somebody who describes a client's category accurately, names the specific constraint that made the work difficult, and mentions something that did not work has actually done the job. Somebody who describes every engagement as a success in identical language has either been unusually lucky or is describing a template.

Run each prompt at least three times. Assistants vary their answers between runs, and a single result is a sample rather than a finding. Record the full text of each answer and every source cited, not a summary.

Visibility in this channel is not a number you can look up. There is no console that reports how often an assistant named your company last month, and the tools that claim to supply one are sampling rather than counting. That does not make measurement impossible. It makes it manual, and manual is fine as long as you are honest about what you are measuring.

The sources column is the one people skip and the one that generates the actual work. It tells you which third party pages your category's answers are built from, which is a target list you did not have to guess at. get recommended by ai

Ask to See a Prompt Set The first question is the most revealing. Ask them to show you the prompt set from a current or recent client, with the client's name removed. A team doing real work has this and will show it, because the prompts are craft rather than secret sauce.

Publish one honest comparison page naming your real competitors, including where they are the better choice. And start asking every satisfied customer for a review, at the moment they are satisfied rather than a month later.

Look at What They Do About Third Party Sources This is where the real work lives and where weak proposals are thinnest. Ask specifically what they will do about the review platforms, directories, forums and comparison articles that assistants actually cite in your category.

Check How They Handle Numbers Statistics circulate in this field faster than anyone checks them. A widely repeated claim about referral traffic growth turned out to rest on a sample of nineteen analytics properties. A frequently cited conversion comparison came from a vendor that sells the service.

Ask who specifically will do the work, and ask to meet them. Capability in this field is thinly distributed and frequently sits with one or two people inside an agency of any size. A pitch delivered by a strategist who then hands the account to a junior is common enough to be worth checking for directly, and the question is easy to ask without giving offence.

They also appear in the roundups by default, because journalists writing about a category name the companies everyone knows. You cannot short circuit that, and pretending otherwise wastes the effort that should be going into a narrower position where the incumbents are absent.

Fix the Access Problems You Find While the baseline runs, check the mechanical side in parallel. Confirm your robots.txt permits the crawlers that feed assistants. Look at server logs for those agents and see what status codes they receive, since a bot management product returning challenges will make you invisible without anyone noticing.

Ask specifically who checks factual accuracy before publication and what happens when the writer does not know the answer. A process that has no step for asking you is a process that will eventually publish something untrue about your business.

Ask How They Price It Retainers dominate this field and mostly make sense, because the work is continuous and the third party portion is slow. What matters is what the retainer covers and whether the scope is written down in units you can count.

Days One to Fourteen: Find Out Where You Stand Somebody writes fifty questions your buyers would ask, in their words. They run each one three times across the two or three assistants your customers use, from a signed out session, and record the full answers and every source cited.

Ask What They Cannot Measure A competent practitioner will volunteer limitations before you ask. Assistant answers vary between sessions. Referral attribution is inconsistent. Some assistants cannot be measured reliably at all. Sample sizes in the published research are small.