The First Ninety Days With An AI SEO Agency
Acquisitions deserve particular care. An acquired brand carries its own accumulated record, and both merging it into yours and keeping it separate are defensible choices. What fails is doing neither, leaving two partly overlapping records that each dilute the other, which is the most common outcome because nobody owns the decision.
Show the Cheap Failures First Before asking for a programme, perplexity seo ask for permission to check whether you are readable. Crawler access, rendering without JavaScript, listing accuracy on the sources your prompts cited.
Generative Engine Optimization The broadest of the three in common use. It refers to being visible in systems that generate an answer rather than returning a list, which covers assistants, AI summaries on results pages and any interface that synthesises rather than links.
The third question matters most. A good answer names a cause, attaches a number and admits an alternative explanation. A weak answer describes activity in the language of effort without connecting it to anything observable.
Most engagements are judged too late, on a final outcome that arrives after the point where anything could have been corrected. The first quarter has its own deliverables, and knowing what they are lets you tell early whether you have hired the right people.
What Should Not Have Happened Yet A large volume of new content. Twenty published articles by month three usually means the baseline was not used to direct the work, and the pages were commissioned before anyone knew which questions mattered.
Answer Engine Optimization Older and broader in origin. It predates the current generation of assistants and originally covered any surface that answers directly, including featured snippets, knowledge panels and voice assistants.
How to Run the Ninety Day Review Ask three questions. Can you show me the prompt set is unchanged. Can you show me the raw answers. What specifically did you do, and which of the changes do you believe caused which movement.
Weeks Three and Four: The Access Findings A technical report covering crawler permissions, what the relevant agents actually receive from your server, whether bot management is interfering, and what survives on your key pages with JavaScript disabled.
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.
Pair your name with your sector and location consistently, rather than letting it appear alone. Correct third party listings that conflate you with the other business. Where the confusion is entrenched, consider whether a consistent descriptive phrase used alongside the name in all coverage is worth adopting.
The terms are used almost interchangeably. Generative engine optimization usually emphasises assistants that write an answer, while answer engine optimization is sometimes used more broadly. Ask any agency what they mean by their term.
Why Ranking Stopped Guaranteeing Visibility The assumption underneath two decades of search marketing was that position and visibility were the same thing. Retrieval based answering breaks that link, because the pages a model reads to compose an answer are not necessarily the pages that rank for the question.
Stage Two: The Comparison Moves Inside the Machine The current stage is more consequential. A generated answer does not just supply a fact, it performs the comparison the user would previously have done themselves by reading three results and forming a view.
What Changed For twenty years, finding a supplier meant typing a query and being handed a list. You compared a few results, formed your own opinion and chose. The businesses that appeared near the top of that list got most of the attention, which is why an entire industry grew up around getting there.
Where you do name people, make the association reciprocal. Your site names the profile, the profile links back, and ideally some independent source associates the two without either of you arranging it.
How You Will Know It Is Working Ask for the raw answers, not a score. A credible report shows you the exact prompts, the exact text an assistant returned, and which pages were cited. You should be able to read it and form your own judgement without trusting anyone's index.
Whether It Is Worth Doing Yet That depends on your category. If your buyers research before they commit, the exposure is already there and waiting is a choice with a cost. If people buy from you on price or proximity without research, this can safely sit lower on your list.
Beyond that, watch for referral traffic arriving from assistant domains in your analytics, and watch for the phrasing customers use when they contact you. When people start repeating a description of your business that you did not write, something has shifted.