How To Choose An AI SEO Agency You Can Trust
This matters because the prompt set is built from it, and a prompt set written from segment language measures your positioning rather than your market. If your brief says mid market operations leaders, the prompts will use that phrase and no buyer ever will.
Vague answers about digital PR are a warning sign. Good answers are concrete: they have read your baseline source list, they know which platforms allow corrections, they have a view on which comparison articles are worth approaching, and they will tell you which ones are out of reach.
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.
One section most briefs omit is worth adding: what has already been tried and what happened. Agencies frequently propose work that was done two years ago and abandoned, because nobody told them. Listing previous efforts, including the ones that failed, saves a month and signals that you will be a straightforward client to work with.
The honest position is that attribution in this channel is harder than in any other you are currently running, and the field has responded to that difficulty mostly by inventing numbers. Confident figures circulate widely, and a surprising share of them trace back to a vendor's own sample or to a study far smaller than the claim implies.
Crawler access restored on a date. Listings claimed and corrected, with a count. Factual errors fixed on third party sources, with a count. Pages published that answer prompts your baseline showed were being answered badly. Reviews responded to.
A weak brief produces a generic proposal, and a generic proposal produces a generic engagement that spends the first two months discovering things you already knew. The brief is the cheapest lever you have over the quality of the work.
These names go directly into the prompt set and into any comparison content, and getting them wrong sends the entire measurement effort in the wrong direction. If you lose to a low cost regional operator rather than to the market leader, say so.
Then listen for language. When prospects begin describing your business using phrasing you did not write and your competitors do not use, that phrasing came from somewhere, and generated answers are an increasingly likely source. It is anecdotal, it is not a number, and it is often the earliest indication that anything is working.
Ask to See Their Own Position This one is unfair and revealing. Ask an assistant to recommend an agency for this kind of work, using a prompt a buyer would write, and see whether the company sitting in front of you appears.
What can legitimately be committed to is process: the prompt set will be run on a schedule, the raw answers will be kept, specific technical fixes will be made by a date, a defined number of third party listings will be corrected. Commitments about inputs are honest. Commitments about outputs are not.
Define Success and Define Failure Most briefs specify what good looks like and never specify what would count as this not working. The second is more useful, because it is the one nobody wants to discuss in month eight.
Assume the pitch is good. Everyone's pitch is good, and the vocabulary in this field is easy enough that a competent salesperson can hold a convincing conversation without anyone behind them who can do the work.
Those recurring domains are the pages your category's answers are being built from. Visit each one, look for yourself, and note whether you are absent, listed with stale details, or filed under the wrong category. That list is your task list, and you did not have to guess at it.
A reasonable formulation: after two quarters, we expect movement in mention rate on buying intent prompts, improvement in the accuracy of how we are described, and new citations from the sources our baseline showed matter. If none of those move, we will treat the approach as unsuccessful.
There is a defensible way to measure this. It produces less certainty than a paid media report and considerably more than a visibility score, and it has the advantage of surviving scrutiny. generative engine optimization
Say What You Will and Will Not Approve Publishing constraints kill more engagements than capability gaps. If every page needs legal review with a three week turnaround, say so, because it changes what is realistic and what should be prioritised.
State who signs off, how fast, and what is off limits. An agency that knows the constraints will build a plan that fits them. One that finds out gradually will spend the retainer producing work that never ships. generative engine optimization
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.