Resist the temptation to interpret a single run. Competitors move around between runs, and a rival appearing above you once is not a finding. Run the same prompt several times, count how often each company appears, and only then decide whether there is a gap worth spending a quarter on. Reacting to one answer is the most common way effort gets spent on a problem that does not exist.
Three to Nine Months: Earned Coverage The slowest and most valuable part. Getting into the comparison articles, trade publications and community discussions that assistants actually cite depends on other organisations deciding to write about you, which no amount of budget reliably accelerates.
Alongside it, the first rewritten pages. Not a volume of new content, but your most commercially important existing pages restructured to answer directly and to carry specifics. You should be asked to confirm figures, since nobody outside your business can verify a lead time or a price range.
Set those checkpoints at the start. An engagement without agreed intermediate measures gets judged entirely on the final one, which arrives too late to act on and encourages everyone involved to keep reporting motion instead of progress. ai seo company
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.
Run each one across the assistants your customers use, and write down the answers verbatim. Do this from a signed out session so your own history does not colour the result. What you want at the end is a simple table: which prompts named you, which named competitors, and which sources got cited.
If nothing has moved on any of the three, that is real information and a legitimate reason to scale back or change supplier. Set that review date at the start, while everyone is still optimistic, because it is much harder to set fairly once money has been spent. ai seo company
Keeping It Honest Two disciplines keep this from decaying. First, the answers have to be checked by somebody who knows the business, because a writer working from notes will approximate a figure and an approximation published as fact is a liability you carry rather than they do.
How to Judge It at Day Ninety Re-run the original fifty prompts, the same number of times, under the same conditions. Compare against the baseline on three measures: how often you are named, whether the description of you is accurate, and which sources are being cited.
What needs you: factual accuracy. Somebody inside the business has to confirm the numbers, limits and claims before publication, because you carry the consequence of anything untrue being published about your own products.
The output is a spreadsheet and it is the most important document in the project. It tells you whether you are named, whether what is said about you is true, who is named instead, and which pages your category’s answers are actually built from.
Then re-run the same ten prompts a month later and compare. Attributing improvement to a specific fix is only possible because you recorded the starting point, which is the argument for doing the teardown before the work rather than after it.
Statistics without sources. This field circulates figures faster than it checks them, and a number arriving without a publisher, a sample size and a date should be discounted rather than repeated to your board.
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 being clear with yourself about what would make you stop. Businesses rarely cancel marketing programmes because the results are bad, they cancel them because attention moved elsewhere, which means good programmes get dropped and poor ones survive on inertia. Writing down the review date and the criteria at the start is a small discipline that mostly protects you from your own future distraction.
The test is simple. If somebody on your sales team reads a question and does not recognise it, delete it. The value of this entire approach rests on the questions being real, and a set half filled with invented ones is barely better than a keyword list. ai seo company
Days Thirty to Sixty: Correct the Record Take the ranked list of cited sources from phase one and go through it. On each source, check whether you appear, whether the details are right and whether the platform accepts corrections.
Month Two: Corrections and the First Rewrites The work should now be concentrated on the recurring sources from the baseline. Expect a list of listings claimed, details corrected and errors submitted, with names and dates attached.
Ask sales to note the question asked on every call for a month, in the prospect’s words rather than paraphrased. Export support tickets and sort by frequency. Pull the query report from Search Console. And read the first message from inbound enquiries before anyone has reshaped it.
