What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company

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.

You Are Blocking the Crawlers The most common cause is also the least interesting. Your robots.txt disallows the user agents that feed AI systems, or a firewall rule is rejecting them, or a bot management product is serving them a challenge page they cannot pass.

Check your robots file, then check your server logs for the relevant agents and see what status codes they receive. A site that returns a challenge to every non-browser request is invisible to this entire channel, and nobody involved will have thought of it as a marketing decision.

There is almost always a specific, findable reason for this, and it is rarely that the model dislikes you. Here are the causes worth checking, roughly in the order that they tend to be responsible. web site

You Have No Stable Identity Models need to connect scattered mentions to a single entity. If your company appears under three different spellings, lists two different founding years, and gives an address on your site that does not match your directory listings, those mentions may never be joined up.

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.

The Rendering Question This is the one real technical constraint. Content that only exists after JavaScript executes may be invisible to a retrieval fetch, which is not a browsing session and does not always run scripts.

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.

Weeks: Your Own Pages A rewritten page that answers a question directly can be retrieved and cited within weeks, sometimes faster. Freshness carries real weight here because retrieval is live, so a page updated this month competes on current terms rather than waiting to accumulate authority.

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.

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.

There is a variant of this worth checking separately. Sometimes you appear and the competitor appears above you, which is a different problem from being absent. In that case compare the specificity of the two descriptions rather than the sources: the company described in concrete terms tends to be listed first, because a specific description is easier to justify than a general one.

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. web site

Fragmented identity produces a specific symptom worth recognising: an assistant knows facts about you but attributes them vaguely, or confuses you with a similarly named business. The fix is dull consistency work across every place your name appears.

The truthful answer is that different parts of the work move at very different speeds, and knowing which is which lets you judge an engagement at the right moment instead of the convenient one. web site

Nobody Independent Talks About You This is the cause most brands resist hearing. Assistants lean heavily on third party sources when making recommendations, because a company describing itself is a weak signal. If no review platform, directory, forum thread, comparison article or publication mentions you, there is nothing to corroborate your claims.

One warning about testing. If you fix something and immediately re-run a prompt in the same session, the assistant may repeat its earlier answer from context rather than retrieving afresh. Start a new session, and run the prompt several times, before concluding that nothing changed. web site

The most citable content most businesses could publish already exists, unwritten, in sales calls and support tickets. It is the set of questions people actually ask, with the answers your team gives verbally every week and has never put on a page.

Second, the questions have to keep coming from customers rather than from the content calendar. Within a few months the temptation appears to invent questions to fill a schedule, and invented questions produce exactly the marketing-in-disguise sections that get ignored.