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.
The weakness is that corroboration is scarce, so a system has little to work with beyond what the site itself says, and self description carries limited weight. The opportunity is that influencing a small number of sources changes the whole picture, where a crowded category would require displacing established coverage.
The better approach is to keep them, correct the facts, date them honestly, and make clear how they relate to the present. A page that says plainly what it documents and when is more useful than one quietly rewritten to look current.
Give the Machine a Stable Identity to Attach To Models build a picture of your company from scattered mentions. That picture holds together only if the details are consistent. Your legal name, trading name, founding year, location, leadership and product names should read the same on your website, your structured data, your social profiles and every directory that lists you.
Broad sites are forgiving. A blocked section or a badly rendered template still leaves a hundred other pages describing the organisation. A small site with five pages has no such buffer, which makes the mechanical checks disproportionately important.
Make Sure the Crawlers Can Actually Read You A surprising number of brands are invisible for the dullest possible reason. Their robots.txt blocks the crawlers that feed ai seo agency systems, or their content only appears after JavaScript executes, or their key pages sit behind a form.
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.
One to Three Months: Listings and Corrections Claiming a directory profile, correcting an address, fixing a miscategorisation and responding to reviews all take effect once the platform publishes the change and the page is re-crawled.
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.
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.
The lesson generalises to any brand whose name is short, generic or ambiguous. The correction is not clever, it is repetitive: pick one written form, use it everywhere, and pair it with a descriptive phrase so that a mention alone is never the only clue about what it refers to.
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.
Alongside it, the first rewritten pages. Not a volume of new content, but your most commercially important existing pages restructured to answer directly and to carry specifics. You should be asked to confirm figures, since nobody outside your business can verify a lead time or a price range.
Distinguish between a supplier who is failing and one who is reporting badly, because the remedies differ entirely. Ask for the raw answers and read them yourself before deciding. It is not unusual to find that sound work has been buried under a dashboard nobody understands, and fixing the reporting is far cheaper and less disruptive than replacing a team that is actually doing the job.
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.
Because there is no independent scoreboard in this channel, an engagement can run for a year on the strength of a number the supplier produces. That is an unusual amount of trust to extend, and it makes knowing what to check more important here than in any other marketing channel.
Check which agents you allow, confirm your important pages render meaningful content without scripts, and make sure nothing critical is trapped in a PDF or an image. This is the cheapest work in the whole discipline and it is routinely skipped.
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.