How To Brief An AI SEO Agency Properly

The same applies to limitations. Stating plainly what you do not do, what size of job you decline and which situations suit a competitor produces the constraint statements that models lift as impartial facts.

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.

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 Structural Reason A system composing a recommendation needs to weigh several options against each other. A review site has already done that. A brand site argues for one option and has an obvious interest in the conclusion.

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.

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.

Include one deliberately open question at the end, asking what they would do differently from what the brief proposes. A good supplier will disagree with something, and the disagreement is worth more than the rest of the proposal because it shows they read the situation rather than the request. A response that agrees with every assumption in your brief has told you nothing you did not already believe.

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.

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.

It is also worth asking for the report a day before the meeting rather than seeing it in the room. A document presented live is experienced as a narrative and approved on the strength of the delivery. The same document read beforehand is experienced as evidence, and the questions that occur to you reading it alone are usually the ones worth asking.

You are unlikely to read all of it, and its presence changes the incentives entirely. An agency that knows the raw evidence ships with the report writes a different summary than one that knows it will not be checked.

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.

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.

Establish What They Will Not Promise Nobody controls what a model says. There is no submission process, no ranking factor to buy, and no relationship with a provider that reserves you a place in an answer. Any guarantee of a specific position or mention is describing something the agency cannot deliver.

Where a platform lets you add structured business information alongside reviews, complete every field. These profiles are frequently cited as much for their factual details as for their ratings, and a half completed profile contributes far less than a full one even when the review count is identical. It is an hour of work per platform and it is repeatedly the cheapest improvement available.

What Brands Usually Get Wrong in Response The instinctive response is to publish more brand content, which addresses none of the above. The second instinct is to try to displace the review site, which is not achievable and would not help if it were.

What you are looking for is whether the questions sound like a buyer wrote them. If every prompt contains the client's category name phrased the way an internal marketing team would phrase it, they have tested how to get recommended by AI assistants the brand talks rather than how customers ask.

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.

Getting Into the Roundups Where a roundup already exists and omits you, most publishers will consider an addition if you make it easy. Send the specifics they need, in the format their existing entries use, without a pitch attached.