Watch the quality of enquiries as well as the count. A common early signal is that conversations start further along, with the prospect already aware of your price band, your typical timeline and what you do not do, because a machine told them before they arrived. That shows up in sales cycle length and in fewer wasted calls long before it shows up in any dashboard.
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.
Then load your most important page with JavaScript disabled in your browser settings. If what remains is a navigation bar and no substance, that is roughly what a retrieval system reads, and it explains a great deal on its own.
Define Success and Define Failure Most briefs specify what good looks like and never specify what would count as this not working. The second is more useful, because it is the one nobody wants to discuss in month eight.
Two asking who to hire or buy from for the thing you sell. Two describing the problem your product solves without naming the category. Two comparing named competitors. Two asking about a specific situation your best customers are in. One asking directly who your company is. One asking whether your company is any good.
The last of these is the most common and the hardest to see, because it produces no error anyone internally encounters. Your site works perfectly in every browser while returning a challenge page to every legitimate retrieval agent.
The problem is not that the tools are dishonest. It is that the vendor controls both the number and the prompt set that produces it, so the score can improve without anything happening to your business, and a client has no way to audit the difference.
It is also worth recording the reason for every rule you keep. A disallow line with no explanation gets preserved indefinitely through migrations and redesigns because nobody dares remove something they do not understand. A one line comment saying who added it and why turns a permanent mystery into a decision that can be revisited.
This entire area usually amounts to a day of work. It is routinely the difference between a brand that appears in answers and one that does not, and it is worth doing before anybody writes a single word of new content. ai search optimization
Read the Source List Before the Prose Where citations are shown, list every domain and count how often each appears. This is the single most useful output of the whole exercise, and most people skip it because the prose is more interesting.
Do this yourself at least once even if you intend to hire somebody. Reading twenty raw answers about your own market teaches you more about this channel in half an hour than any proposal will, and it makes you a considerably harder client to mislead. You will recognise immediately whether an agency's baseline resembles what you found.
This is a plan rather than an explanation. It assumes you have already accepted that some of your buyers are asking an assistant for recommendations before they contact anybody, and that you would prefer to be named.
Deciding Whether to Block Anything There is a legitimate argument for restricting training crawlers, particularly for publishers whose archive is the product. That is a commercial and editorial decision and it deserves a real discussion rather than a default.
If you will not name competitors, say that too, and understand it removes the highest performing content format from the plan. Better to have that argument in the brief than to have a comparison page written and then killed.
The output is a spreadsheet and it is the most important document in the project. It tells you whether you are named, whether what is said about you is true, who is named instead, and which pages your category's answers are actually built from.
One thing worth deciding before you start is who inside the business will answer factual questions. This work generates a steady trickle of small queries about lead times, price ranges and what you will and will not take on, and an agency that cannot get answers will either stall or guess. Naming one person and giving them twenty minutes a week removes the most common cause of these projects drifting.
What robots.txt Controls It is a request, honoured by mainstream crawlers, that certain user agents avoid certain paths. It has no enforcement behind it and it does not secure anything, but the major providers respect it.
One practical consequence of the variation between systems is worth planning for. If your customers are split across two assistants that behave differently, resist building separate programmes for each. The shared requirements account for most of the achievable outcome, and the effort spent on system specific tactics is usually better spent widening the number of third party sources that describe you correctly.