Jun 13 • Open Discussion
I Sell AI Visibility Work. Here's How to Check People Like Me.
Quick disclosure before anything else: I do this work for a living. Which is exactly why I'm handing you the questions that filter operators from spam. If these questions would disqualify me, they should disqualify me.
The AEO pitch wave is in full swing. Agency listicles flooding Reddit. "LLM optimization" retainers. Vendors borrowing credibility from real mechanisms (RAG exists, retrieval is real) to sell unproven tactics. One enterprise SEO director I follow described a company that added FAQs site-wide because an agency said it helps LLMs extract answers. Their SEO dropped across multiple content types. The AI lift never came. Now they're paying a second time to rip it all out.
That's the failure mode: real mechanism, spam execution, no measurement. Here are the five questions that catch it before you sign.
1. "What do the engines currently say about my business?"
Ask this first because it's the cheapest test. A real operator captures a baseline before proposing anything — what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews actually return for your buying-intent prompts today. If they pitch tactics before they've documented your current state, they're selling a package, not solving your problem. You can't measure a change against a baseline nobody took.
2. "Can you show me before/after data on a site that isn't your own case study?"
Stolen directly from an enterprise SEO director, because it's the best filter in the industry right now. Fair warning: almost nobody can fully answer it — controlled third-party proof barely exists in this space yet. That's fine. What you're listening for is whether they admit that. "Here's our internal data, here are its limits, here's what we can't claim" is an operator. "We dominate AI search for our clients" is a walk-away.
3. "Is this reversible?"
Every structural change should have an undo path. The FAQ-everywhere company is paying twice because nobody asked this. Site-wide content injections, separate machine-readable sites, mass schema changes — if it can't be rolled back cleanly, the downside isn't zero results. It's site debt plus a cleanup project.
4. "What number moves if you're right?"
This one got easier this year. GA4 now has a native AI Assistant channel — traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude classified automatically, free, in every property. So make them commit: which metric, by when, measured where? AI Assistant sessions? Citation rate on a documented prompt set? Branded search lift? A vendor who won't name the number is planning to point at any graph that goes up and claim it.
5. "Will you label test work honestly?"
Proof-of-concept is not a client win. Baseline evidence is not ranking proof. An internal experiment is not a case study. Ask how they label their own evidence. The ones who blur those lines in their marketing will blur them in your reporting.
The pattern under all five:
Good operators sell instrumented experiments. Bad ones sell outcomes in a space where causal data barely exists. Anyone guaranteeing AI visibility is telling you, in advance, exactly how they'll handle your budget.
Assignment: if you're currently being pitched — or you ARE the vendor pitching — run the five questions and post what happened. Vendor answers, prospect reactions, your own honest gaps. We learn faster from the uncomfortable ones.
0
0 comments
I Sell AI Visibility Work. Here's How to Check People Like Me.
skool.com/alex-rodriguez-seo
A practical AI visibility lab for business owners, marketers, and operators who want to get found, trusted, cited, and selected.
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
+1
Powered by