Month Two: Corrections and the First Rewrites The work should now be concentrated on the recurring sources from the baseline. Expect a list of listings claimed, details corrected and errors submitted, with names and dates attached.
One cultural obstacle deserves naming. This work asks a marketing team to publish figures, limits and honest comparisons, which is the opposite of what most of them have been trained and rewarded to do. Expect resistance that presents as a debate about brand consistency and is really about control. The fastest way through it is showing the team a raw answer where a competitor is quoted stating a price and the brand is not mentioned at all.
The volumes will be small, so avoid drawing conclusions from a handful of sessions and let it accumulate over a quarter or two. Also compare against your branded organic traffic rather than all organic, since branded search is closer in intent and makes for a fairer comparison.
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.
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.
Fair Reasons for Flat Results Not every flat quarter is a failure, and being unfair about this loses good suppliers. A saturated category takes longer. A site that needed substantial technical work will have spent the first months on it. Earned coverage depends on other organisations publishing, which nobody can schedule.
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.
Before leaving, make sure you take the prompt set, the baseline archive and everything published. If those were not yours under the contract, that is a lesson for the next agreement rather than something to negotiate at the exit.
An agency doing the work sends these the same day, because they already exist as a by-product of the measurement. One that does not will explain that the platform does not export in that format, or that the data is summarised in the dashboard.
Buy the technical audit if nobody on the team reads server logs, and buy the third party source work unless you already have a functioning public relations capability. Those are the two areas where the learning curve is steep and the cost of getting it wrong is highest.
Search traffic includes everybody at every stage, including a large volume of people gathering background information with no intention of buying anything. Assistant referrals skip most of that, because the informational portion was satisfied before the click.
This claim circulates constantly and it is usually presented with more confidence than the evidence supports. It is also probably directionally true, for reasons that are structural rather than mysterious.
Ask what was done, not what happened. If listings were corrected, pages rewritten and outreach attempted, and the numbers are still flat, that is information about the market. If none of it happened, the numbers were never going to move.
So attribute it by name every time it appears in a report. A visibility figure presented without saying which tool produced it and how it was sampled will eventually be quoted back at you as fact by somebody who did not know it was an estimate, and that is a difficult correction to make in front of a board. ai search optimization
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.
One structural decision saves a lot of trouble later. Keep the raw answers in plain text files named by date, assistant and run number, rather than pasting them into a document that gets reformatted. Six months in you will want to search across every run for the first appearance of a competitor or a source, and a folder of plain files supports that while a slide deck does not.
This frequently produces the first result of the engagement, because access failures are total and fixing them can change answers within days. It should also be short. A fifty page technical audit at this stage is usually padding drawn from a generic template.
Record the conditions alongside the results: which assistant, which model version if visible, whether web access was on, the date and the run number. When a result changes sharply, the conditions log is usually what tells you whether the world changed or your setup did.