The First Ninety Days With An AI SEO Agency

Pick your moment as carefully as your argument. A proposal to investigate a new discovery channel lands very differently in a quarter where organic traffic is soft than in one where everything is comfortable. That is not cynicism, it is recognising that the case is fundamentally about attention, and the same evidence will be received quite differently depending on what else is competing for it.

They will not quote statistics without sources, and they will not present a tool's sampled estimate as a count of what happened. If none of these boundaries come up unprompted, ask directly and listen for whether the answer sounds rehearsed or considered.

One final practical check costs nothing. Ask for a client reference in a category structurally similar to yours rather than a famous name, and when you speak to them ask what the agency got wrong rather than what went well. References are chosen to be positive, so the useful information is in how candidly they describe the difficult parts.

Then listen for language. When prospects begin describing your business using phrasing you did not write and your competitors do not use, that phrasing came from somewhere, and generated answers are an increasingly likely source. It is anecdotal, it is not a number, and it is often the earliest indication that anything is working.

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.

Ask for a Small, Bounded Commitment Do not ask for a year. Ask for one quarter with a defined scope: run the baseline, fix access problems, correct the listings on the sources that appeared, publish two pages that answer the questions your baseline showed were answered badly.

Lead With Evidence Nobody Can Dismiss Do not open with market forecasts. Open by running three prompts in the meeting: the question your best customer would have asked before they found you, the comparison question naming your main competitor, and the question asking who your company is.

Show the Cheap Failures First Before asking for a programme, ask for permission to check whether you are readable. Crawler access, rendering without JavaScript, listing accuracy on the sources your prompts cited.

One organisational point is worth raising early, because it decides more outcomes than the tactics do. These two disciplines share a foundation, so splitting them between separate suppliers produces duplicated technical audits and occasionally contradictory instructions about the same pages. Whoever owns organic search should own this, with specialist help brought in for the parts they cannot do rather than a parallel programme running alongside.

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.

The Honest Uncertainty Anyone claiming precision about this channel is overselling. Retrieval behaviour changes without notice, published studies use small samples, and vendor research tends to flatter the vendor. Opollo's finding that AI referral traffic converted at 14.2 percent against 2.8 percent from search came from 312 business to business brands, and Opollo sells this service.

Why Local Is More Exposed The classic local query is a recommendation request with a geographic constraint, and that maps directly onto what a generated answer does well. Somebody asking who to call for a specific job in a specific town receives two or three names rather than a map and a list to work through.

A page worth having states what you do in that area specifically: which neighbourhoods, what travel time, what jobs are common there, what the local constraints are. If you cannot write anything genuinely local about a town, the honest answer is not to publish a page for it.

How to Handle Published Statistics Every figure you repeat should carry its publisher, sample size and date. This is not pedantry, it is self protection, because figures in this field get repeated until nobody remembers the sample.

One final question is worth reserving for the end of the meeting. Ask what they think you should stop doing. An agency with a real diagnosis always has an answer, and an agency that only wants to add work to your existing spend usually does not. ai search optimization

This frequently produces the first result of the engagement, because access failures are total and fixing them can change answers within days. It should also be short. A fifty page technical audit at this stage is usually padding drawn from a generic template.

Local businesses have an unusual position here. They are more exposed than most, because a large share of local intent queries are exactly the who should I use questions that assistants answer directly, and they also have a shorter route to fixing it than a national brand does.