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.
Weeks One and Two: The Baseline You should receive a prompt set for review, built from your sales notes, support tickets and search queries rather than from your website copy. Read it and check that it sounds like your customers.
One thing to establish in week one is where everything lives. The prompt set, the baseline archive, the raw answers and the correction log should sit somewhere you control from the beginning rather than in the agency's systems. Retrieving them later is a negotiation. Having them from the start is an administrative decision nobody objects to at the outset.
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.
Be wary of proposals where the largest line is content production. It is the easiest work to scale, the easiest to bill and the least likely to be the constraint, particularly before a baseline exists. A proposal weighted toward diagnosis, technical fixes and third party corrections is usually cheaper and almost always sequenced better.
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.
Pricing in this field is unusually opaque, partly because the work is new and partly because the absence of an independent scoreboard makes it hard for a buyer to tell whether they are getting value. That combination invites vague scoping.
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.
Lead With Evidence Nobody Can Dismiss Do not open with market forecasts. Open by running three prompts in the meeting: the question your best customer would have asked before they found you, the comparison question naming your main competitor, and the question asking who your company is.
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.
You will find your own category's pattern, which frequently contradicts the general one. Some industries are dominated by a single trade directory. Others are dominated by one forum. That specific finding is worth more than any general description of how these systems behave.
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.
Overclaiming here is the main risk to your own standing. A proposal that promises a channel shift and delivers a corrected directory listing will be remembered. One that promised a baseline and delivered a baseline plus some unexpected fixes will be renewed. answer Engine Optimization
Show the Cheap Failures First Before asking for a programme, ask for permission to check whether you are readable. Crawler access, rendering without JavaScript, listing accuracy on the sources your prompts cited.
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.
The Broader Lesson Every stage of this has punished the same thing, which is dependence on a single channel whose terms you do not set. Featured snippets did it, each core update did it, and this is doing it again with more force.
Use the first quarter to learn how they handle bad news, because there will be some. A rendering problem nobody anticipated, a correction request refused, a rewritten page that earns nothing. How those get reported in month two predicts how a flat quarter will be reported in month eight, and it is far easier to change supplier at ninety days than at a year.
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.