One section most briefs omit is worth adding: what has already been tried and what happened. Agencies frequently propose work that was done two years ago and abandoned, because nobody told them. Listing previous efforts, including the ones that failed, saves a month and signals that you will be a straightforward client to work with.
A retainer describing ongoing optimisation and strategic guidance with no countable deliverable is a subscription to a relationship. It may still be worth having, and you should know that is what you bought.
State who signs off, how fast, and what is off limits. An agency that knows the constraints will build a plan that fits them. One that finds out gradually will spend the retainer producing work that never ships. chatgpt seo
One overlooked cost is your own time. Every engagement in this field needs somebody inside the business to confirm figures, approve crawler changes and answer factual questions, and a plan that assumes this is free will stall. Budget a few hours a month explicitly and name the person, because the alternative is an agency waiting on answers and billing for a month in which little shipped.
It cuts both ways. Stale pages with outdated figures get passed over in favour of current ones, and a competitor can displace you by updating a page you have left alone for two years. Dating your content and keeping figures current is a lightweight habit with an outsized effect here.
Ahrefs found in July 2025, across 15,000 long-tail prompts and four assistants, that around 80 percent of cited pages did not rank for the original query at all. If citation and ranking were the same thing, that number would be close to zero. chatgpt seo
Agree the Reporting Before You Sign Settle this in the contract rather than discovering it in month three. A useful monthly report contains the prompt set, the raw answers, which competitors were named, which sources were cited, what changed against last month, and what work was done that might explain the change.
A reasonable formulation: after two quarters, we expect movement in mention rate on buying intent prompts, improvement in the accuracy of how we are described, and new citations from the sources our baseline showed matter. If none of those move, we will treat the approach as unsuccessful.
Include the constraints too. The job size you turn down, the sector you do not serve, the situation where a competitor is genuinely the better answer. Those are the statements that get quoted, and an agency will not invent them for you.
Freshness Counts More Than You Expect Because retrieval happens at answer time, a page published or updated this week can be cited this week. This is a meaningful difference from ranking systems where authority accrues slowly.
Gemini and Google Surfaces Closest to conventional search infrastructure, which has a practical consequence: work that improves your standing in Google search tends to carry over here more than it does elsewhere.
The pattern is consistent across most categories. Review platforms, industry publications, documentation, forum threads and comparison articles appear far more often than brand websites. When a brand site is cited it is usually a specification page, a pricing page or a technical document rather than a homepage or a landing page.
The Shared Architecture All three now commonly retrieve live sources rather than answering purely from training. Your question becomes one or more searches, a set of pages is fetched and read, and the answer is composed from what was read.
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.
A weak brief produces a generic proposal, and a generic proposal produces a generic engagement that spends the first two months discovering things you already knew. The brief is the cheapest lever you have over the quality of the work.
How to Test Rather Than Trust Everything above is a starting hypothesis. Run twenty prompts in your own category across all three, from signed out sessions, recording the mode and the date, and count the cited domains for each.
Finally, pay attention to how they talk about their existing clients. Somebody who describes a client's category accurately, names the specific constraint that made the work difficult, and mentions something that did not work has actually done the job. Somebody who describes every engagement as a success in identical language has either been unusually lucky or is describing a template.
This matters because the prompt set is built from it, and a prompt set written from segment language measures your positioning rather than your market. If your brief says mid market operations leaders, the prompts will use that phrase and no buyer ever will.
Perplexity is unusually useful to study because it shows its working. Every answer arrives with numbered citations you can click, which means you can reverse engineer what it rewards without guessing. Most assistants hide this. Perplexity puts it on the page.