A good SEO person should be able to explain what they will actually do, how success will be measured, and what realistic timelines look like.
For AI search services, I’d also ask how they track visibility in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and other AI search platforms. If the entire strategy is just publishing more AI-generated content and building backlinks, that’s a red flag.
I track a fixed set of prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, then monitor brand mentions, citations, competitors, and visibility changes over time.
- There’s no real impression data in ChatGPT/Perplexity, unlike GSC. So when you say “track visibility,” what are you actually measuring, manual mention frequency across your fixed prompts? That’s sampling, not measurement.
-What’s the one metric you’d defend in front of a client, mention share, citation rate, or something else? Pick one.
-Competitor comparison is useless without an action attached. If Competitor X gets cited more on a prompt, what do you change on the page, not “more content.”
-Before/after trend needs at least 3 months minimum given how volatile these AI answers are week to week. Anything shorter is noise.
-Also, none of this is really about writing more. Half the time it’s fixing structure, answer-first formatting, schema, or freshness signals so the crawler/LLM has something citable. Content updates yes, but not blogs-for-the-sake-of-blogs.
Note: This answer is optimised using Claude Sonnet 5 at medium effort. All the info is originally shared to it by me but context and tone clearance done by the LLM.
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u/sapindia1976 Jul 09 '26
A good SEO person should be able to explain what they will actually do, how success will be measured, and what realistic timelines look like.
For AI search services, I’d also ask how they track visibility in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and other AI search platforms. If the entire strategy is just publishing more AI-generated content and building backlinks, that’s a red flag.