How To Audit Whether AI Recommends Your Brand

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.

Keep the brief to something you would be willing to send to three suppliers unchanged. The temptation is to tailor each one, which feels attentive and makes the resulting proposals impossible to compare. Identical briefs produce differences that reflect the agencies rather than the instructions, which is the entire point of asking more than one.

The more useful signal is qualitative and free. Add one question to your enquiry form or your first sales call asking how the person came across you, and read the answers monthly. When people start saying an ai seo agency that gets you cited assistant recommended you, or start repeating a description of your business you did not write, something has changed in a way no dashboard captured.

Name the Buyer, Not the Segment Marketing documents describe segments. Briefs need people. Who specifically buys from you, what situation are they in when they start looking, and what have they already tried before they arrive.

What Honest Reporting Contains The prompt set, versioned and unchanged since last month. The raw answers, kept in full rather than summarised. Which competitors were named. Which sources were cited. What work was done. What moved, and the specific claim about which work caused it.

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.

The idea is reasonable and adoption is inconsistent. Support varies by provider and no major system currently treats it as required. Treat it as a cheap and speculative addition rather than a deliverable worth paying much for.

Run a commercial prompt in almost any category and look at what gets cited. Review platforms, roundups and comparison sites appear first and most often, and the brands being discussed appear well down the list if at all.

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.

It is also worth recording the reason for every rule you keep. A disallow line with no explanation gets preserved indefinitely through migrations and redesigns because nobody dares remove something they do not understand. A one line comment saying who added it and why turns a permanent mystery into a decision that can be revisited.

Decide What the Result Means Four outcomes, each pointing somewhere different. Absent everywhere with a clean robots file and no third party listings usually means an identity and coverage problem. Absent with a blocked crawler or an empty non-JavaScript page means a mechanical problem, which is the good news outcome because it is cheap.

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.

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.

When to Test More Often Three situations justify a tighter loop. During an active campaign where you need to attribute a specific change, weekly runs on a subset of prompts are reasonable, provided you accept the variance.

Being named in answers to prompts with buying intent, as opposed to definitional prompts nobody purchases from. Being described accurately, since a confident recommendation containing a wrong price or a service you discontinued costs more than absence. And being cited on the third party sources that appear repeatedly in your category's answers.

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.

Deciding Whether to Block Anything There is a legitimate argument for restricting training crawlers, particularly for publishers whose archive is the product. That is a commercial and editorial decision and it deserves a real discussion rather than a default.