The First Ninety Days With An AI SEO Agency
Use the first quarter to learn how they handle bad news, because there will be some. A rendering problem nobody anticipated, a correction request refused, a rewritten page that earns nothing. How those get reported in month two predicts how a flat quarter will be reported in month eight, and it is far easier to change supplier at ninety days than at a year.
This is why marketplace listings, review sites and roundups dominate product citations while brand product pages appear less often. It is also why a product page that states what it is worse at is unusually valuable, since it can be quoted as an impartial constraint rather than a claim.
Good versions read like this: mention rate on evaluation prompts rose from two in fifteen to six in fifteen, which we attribute to the three directory corrections completed in week two, though a competitor also stopped publishing during the same period.
Then load your key pages with scripts disabled. Whatever remains is roughly what a retrieval system sees. If your product specifications, pricing or service areas vanish, that content needs to exist in the server rendered HTML.
A retrieval fetch reads text present in the response. If your dimensions, materials, compatibility and price are not there as text, they do not exist for this purpose, however clearly they display in a browser.
Ask for one change and see what happens: request the raw answers and the run counts. An agency doing the work sends them the same day, since they already exist. One that does not will explain why the format makes that difficult. entity seo
How to Run the Ninety Day Review Ask three questions. Can you show me the prompt set is unchanged. Can you show me the raw answers. What specifically did you do, and which of the changes do you believe caused which movement.
One thing to establish in week one is where everything lives. The prompt set, the baseline archive, the raw answers and the correction log should sit somewhere you control from the beginning rather than in the agency's systems. Retrieving them later is a negotiation. Having them from the start is an administrative decision nobody objects to at the outset.
What Transfers to an Ordinary Business Three things, and they are the three that most small operators skip. Check that you are readable before assuming you have a content problem, since on a small site an access failure is total rather than partial.
A Claim About Causation, Stated as a Claim The most valuable paragraph in the report is the one that says what moved and why the agency believes their work caused it, phrased as a judgement rather than a fact.
Most engagements are judged too late, on a final outcome that arrives after the point where anything could have been corrected. The first quarter has its own deliverables, and knowing what they are lets you tell early whether you have hired the right people.
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.
In practice it is used to mean roughly the same thing as generative engine optimization, occasionally with a stronger emphasis on training data and brand presence in the underlying corpus rather than on live retrieval.
A Numeric Name Is an Entity Problem Names beginning with digits behave differently across the web than names beginning with letters. They get written several ways, they sort strangely in directories, and they collide with unrelated numeric strings in ways that letter based names do not.
The weakness is that corroboration is scarce, so a system has little to work with beyond what the site itself says, and self description carries limited weight. The opportunity is that influencing a small number of sources changes the whole picture, where a crowded category would require displacing established coverage.
After that, the work is ordinary: accurate structured data, honest comparison content, a steady flow of detailed reviews, and marketplace listings maintained as carefully as your own pages. entity seo
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.
Expect the vocabulary to keep shifting, and expect new terms to arrive with each wave of positioning. The underlying work has been stable since these systems started retrieving live sources, and it is the work rather than the name that you are buying. entity seo
Long sections on activity that produced nothing, described in the language of effort rather than outcome. And the most reliable indicator, a report you cannot disagree with, because it contains no specific claim to test.
This is a working method you can run yourself in an afternoon, repeat monthly, and hand to an agency as a brief. It produces a record you can argue with, which is more than most reporting in this field manages. entity seo