What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company
Citation happens at the level of a passage, not a page. A model attaches a source to a specific claim it lifted, which means the real unit of work is a paragraph that stays true and useful once it has been removed from everything around it.
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.
Ask Who Writes and Who Reviews Find out whether the writing is done by somebody with subject knowledge or generated and lightly edited. Both happen, and the second is not automatically disqualifying, but you need to know because you are the one who carries the liability for inaccurate claims about your own products.
Two asking who to hire or buy from for the thing you sell. Two describing the problem your product solves without naming the category. Two comparing named competitors. Two asking about a specific situation your best customers are in. One asking directly who your company is. One asking whether your company is any good.
Then load your most important page with JavaScript disabled in your browser settings. If what remains is a navigation bar and no substance, that is roughly what a retrieval system reads, and it explains a great deal on its own.
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.
A practical editing pass makes this concrete. Take a published page and highlight every sentence that could be quoted on its own and still be both true and useful. On most brand pages the highlighted portion is under a tenth of the text. Getting it to a third, without adding length, is usually achievable by moving conclusions forward and replacing three vague sentences with one specific one.
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.
Put someone's name against this. Crawler rules sit between marketing, development and whoever administers the content delivery network, which in most organisations means nobody checks them. The failures documented here are not difficult to find, they are simply nobody's job, and a quarterly review taking half an hour prevents the most complete form of invisibility available.
The practical result is that a claim appearing only on your website is treated as a claim, while the same claim appearing in a trade publication, a review platform and a forum thread starts being treated as a fact about the world.
Structure So the Boundaries Are Clear Headings that state what the section answers, short paragraphs, lists where the content is genuinely a list, and tables where the content is genuinely tabular. This is ordinary good structure, and it matters more than usual because it marks the edges of each self contained unit.
This is the mechanism behind the most common complaint in the field, which is watching a competitor with an inferior website get recommended. They are usually not better optimised. They are better corroborated.
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.
Save the document and the date. In three months you will run the same ten prompts again, and the comparison is the only thing that will tell you whether anything you did in between mattered. generative engine optimization
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.
The test is whether a customer would use the words. If people ring you saying they need somebody who handles a particular awkward situation, that is the narrow position and it is already validated. If the phrase only appears in your own marketing documents, it is positioning rather than a category, and building visibility work on it will produce movement on prompts nobody types.
Niches Have Thin Coverage Broad categories have been fought over for years. Narrow ones frequently have two mediocre comparison articles and a directory listing, and influencing that is a matter of weeks rather than a matter of budget.
Give journalists and analysts accurate material to work from, in a form they can use without rewriting. Where an independent comparison exists and gets your details wrong, a polite factual correction is accepted far more often than people expect, because publishers generally do not want to be wrong.