What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company

What to Do About llms.txt and Similar Files Proposals for machine readable files aimed specifically at language model consumers appear periodically. Adoption is inconsistent and support varies by provider, so treat these as low cost and speculative rather than as a requirement.

Why Real Questions Beat Generated Ones Questions produced by keyword tools are smoothed. They use category vocabulary, they avoid awkward specifics, and they tend to be the questions everyone has already answered.

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.

Real questions are messy, specific and frequently uncomfortable. They ask about price, about limitations, about whether you can handle a particular awkward situation. That specificity is exactly what makes an answer quotable, because it matches the shape of a real query rather than a generic one.

Structured data attracts a particular kind of over-investment. Teams implement a dozen schema types, validate them all, and conclude the job is done, having spent most of their effort on markup that changes nothing about how a machine understands the business.

One organisational habit makes this sustainable. Give the sales and support teams a single place to drop questions as they hear them, with no process attached beyond writing down the question in the customer's words. Anything more elaborate stops being used within a month, and a shared document with fifty verbatim questions in it is worth more than a formal intake process nobody completes.

One structural decision saves a lot of trouble later. Keep the raw answers in plain text files named by date, assistant and run number, rather than pasting them into a document that gets reformatted. Six months in you will want to ai search visibility across every run for the first appearance of a competitor or a source, and a folder of plain files supports that while a slide deck does not.

Fix the Prompt Set and Never Casually Change It Your prompt set is the instrument. If you adjust it between runs you are measuring your own edits, and any trend line you draw afterwards is meaningless.

The discipline is in how you report their output. Every one of them samples: their own prompt set, their own infrastructure, their own run frequency. Their number is an estimate from a particular vantage point, not a count of what happened.

Run Each Prompt Multiple Times Generation involves randomness and retrieval can return different pages between runs, so a single answer is a sample. Three runs per prompt is the practical minimum and five is better where the stakes are high.

The defensible position is to spend an hour on it if you like, and to spend the rest of the week on the things every system already reads: accessible pages, accurate Organization markup, consistent identity and content a machine can quote.

A page asking how much something costs that says pricing depends on your requirements has answered nothing, and it will not be cited because there is nothing to cite. A range with the variables named is a real answer and gets quoted.

Assertions with nothing behind them are weaker than silence, because they introduce a detail that fails verification. The pattern that works is reciprocal: your site names the profile, the profile links to your site, and some independent source associates the two without either of you being involved.

Assume the pitch is good. Everyone's pitch is good, and the vocabulary in this field is easy enough that a competent salesperson can hold a convincing conversation without anyone behind them who can do the work.

Ask specifically who checks factual accuracy before publication and what happens when the writer does not know the answer. A process that has no step for asking you is a process that will eventually publish something untrue about your business.

What Has Not Changed It is worth being clear about the continuities, because the change is regularly oversold. Organic search still delivers the larger share of traffic for most businesses. Crawlable, fast, well structured sites still win. Content that genuinely answers a question still outperforms content that does not.

Ask How They Price It Retainers dominate this field and mostly make sense, because the work is continuous and the third party portion is slow. What matters is what the retainer covers and whether the scope is written down in units you can count.

Ask What They Will Not Do Good practitioners have a list. They will not guarantee a position in an answer, because nobody controls that. They will not fabricate reviews or seed forum threads under false identities, because it is detectable, damaging and increasingly enforced against.

Control the Session Conditions Personalisation quietly corrupts this. Run from a signed out session, or a fresh session with memory and history disabled, and do not use an account that has been researching your own company all week.