A reasonable definition: after two quarters, no increase in mentions on buying intent prompts, no improvement in the accuracy of how you are described, and no new citations from the sources your category's answers are built on. If all three are flat, the work is not landing.
Be wary of pricing tied to a proprietary visibility score, since the vendor controls both the number and the prompt set that produces it. Be equally wary of performance pricing tied to mentions, which sounds aligned and creates pressure to game the measurement rather than improve the business.
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.
How Measurement Differs Search measurement is mature. Impressions, positions, clicks and conversions are all available in tools most teams already run, and the numbers are reasonably stable between checks.
Ask specifically who checks factual accuracy before publication and what happens when the writer does not know the answer. A process that has no step for asking you is a process that will eventually publish something untrue about your business.
Say What You Will and Will Not Approve Publishing constraints kill more engagements than capability gaps. If every page needs legal review with a three week turnaround, say so, because it changes what is realistic and what should be prioritised.
The more useful signal is qualitative and free. Add one question to your enquiry form or your first sales call asking how the person came across you, and read the answers monthly. When people start saying an assistant recommended you, or start repeating a description of your business you did not write, something has changed in a way no dashboard captured.
Being named in answers to prompts with buying intent, as opposed to definitional prompts nobody purchases from. Being described accurately, since a confident recommendation containing a wrong price or a service you discontinued costs more than absence. And being cited on the third party sources that appear repeatedly in your category's answers.
Anything a client cannot argue with is not a report. If you cannot open the document, disagree with a conclusion and point at the evidence that contradicts it, generative engine optimization you have been sent a reassurance rather than an analysis.
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.
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.
The exception is a category where assistant use at the research stage is already heavy and where the incumbent comparison pages are weak. There the newer channel can be underpriced, and moving early is worth more than it will be in two years.
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.
If the only comparisons available are written by competitors and by review sites with incomplete information about you, that is the version being used. Publishing an honest one puts a source into circulation that at least contains your figures stated correctly, and honest treatment of where you lose makes the rest of the page more credible rather than less.
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.
Connect It to Something in the Business Referral traffic from assistant domains should be segmented in analytics and tracked, with the understanding that it undercounts. Some assistants strip referrer data and some visits arrive looking direct.
How to Split the Budget For most businesses, organic search still delivers the larger share of traffic, so the sensible default is to keep the majority of effort there and carve out a defined share for the newer channel rather than gambling the lot.
What Each One Is Trying to Win Traditional SEO competes for position in a ranked list. Success is a click, and the mechanism is well understood after two decades of study. You improve relevance and authority for a query, you move up, you get more visits.