What An AI SEO Agency Should Report Every Month

Bring one other person from the business, ideally from sales. They will spot inaccuracies in how you are described that a marketing reader skims past, and they will tell you within minutes whether the prompts sound like real customers. That second opinion costs half an hour and prevents the most common flaw in a self run audit, which is a set of questions written in the company's own language.

Set Up So You Do Not Fool Yourself Open a signed out session, or a fresh one with memory and personalisation disabled. This matters more than anything else in the method. An account that has spent the week researching your own company will show you a flattering picture that has nothing to do with what a stranger sees.

The Details That Get Quoted Locally Local recommendations turn on practical specifics, and most local sites omit all of them. Your actual coverage radius. Whether you handle emergency call outs and at what hours. Typical price range for a common job. Whether you are licensed, insured and to what level.

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.

The monthly report is where an engagement is either accountable or theatrical, and the difference is visible from the first page. A useful report can be argued with. A padded one cannot, because there is nothing in it specific enough to disagree about.

Getting onto that list is not luck and it is not a trick. It is a sequence of fairly unglamorous steps that make it easy for a model to find you, understand you and feel safe naming you. This is what that sequence looks like in practice. get recommended by ai

The version that fails is the vendor comparison where every row favours the publisher. It is transparent to readers and useless as an impartial source, which is why it appears in citation lists far less often than its authors expect.

Refusals matter. A report that only contains successes is either describing a suspiciously easy month or omitting the parts that did not work, and the omitted parts are usually where the useful information is.

That is a month of intermittent effort, it costs almost nothing, and in most local categories it is enough to change what an assistant says. Local is one of the few places where the whole discipline is genuinely accessible without an agency. get recommended by ai

Make Sure the Crawlers Can Actually Read You A surprising number of brands are invisible for the dullest possible reason. Their robots.txt blocks the crawlers that feed AI systems, or their content only appears after JavaScript executes, or their key pages sit behind a form.

Run each one across the assistants your customers use, and write down the answers verbatim. Do this from a signed out session so your own history does not colour the result. What you want at the end is a simple table: which prompts named you, which named competitors, and which sources got cited.

What Ranking Does and Does Not Buy You Ranking still helps, because the retrieval step usually starts with a search. But it buys far less than people assume. Ahrefs examined 15,000 long-tail prompts across four assistants in July 2025 and found roughly 80 percent of cited pages did not rank for the original query at all, with about 12 percent in the top ten.

The caveat is that most published question sections are marketing in disguise, containing questions no customer has ever asked, phrased to permit a favourable answer. Those get ignored, and they are easy to spot.

What Matters More Than Format Two things outrank format choice entirely. The first is whether the content can be fetched and read at all, since a page behind a broken crawler rule or dependent on JavaScript is invisible whatever shape it takes.

This explains the most common frustration brands report, which is watching a competitor with a worse website get recommended instead. That competitor is usually not better optimised. They are more written about, and the system is weighing the difference.

Preference is the wrong word, strictly. These systems do not have taste. They reach for sources that match the shape of the answer being written and that contain claims which can be lifted without distortion, and certain formats do that reliably.

Corroboration Beats Assertion The single clearest pattern in observed behaviour is that independent agreement outweighs self description. A claim made only on your own site is treated as a claim. The same claim appearing on a review platform, in a trade publication and in a forum thread is treated as a fact about the world.

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.