Google AI Overviews And What They Did To Your Traffic
Include the constraints too. The job size you turn down, the sector you do not serve, the situation where a competitor is genuinely the better answer. Those are the statements that get quoted, and an agency will not invent them for you.
Write Passages That Can Be Lifted Citation happens at passage level, not page level. A model attaches a source to a specific claim, which means the unit of work is a self contained paragraph that remains true and useful when removed from its surroundings.
The sources column is the one people skip and the one that generates the actual work. It tells you which third party pages your category's answers are built from, which is a target list you did not have to guess at. brand mentions in ai answers
That matters most for the facts that establish identity, because those are the facts that let scattered mentions of you resolve into one record. It matters far less for content, where the model is going to read the prose anyway and is reasonably good at it.
Make Sure It Can Fetch You Check that your robots.txt permits the relevant crawler, and check your server logs for what it actually receives. Bot management products frequently serve challenge pages to legitimate retrieval agents, which produces total invisibility with no error anyone sees.
Keep the brief to something you would be willing to send to three suppliers unchanged. The temptation is to tailor each one, which feels attentive and makes the resulting proposals impossible to compare. Identical briefs produce differences that reflect the agencies rather than the instructions, which is the entire point of asking more than one.
Run the Baseline Properly Run each prompt in a signed out session, or in a fresh session with memory and personalisation disabled. Your own browsing history and past conversations will otherwise skew results toward showing you what you already know.
Run each prompt at least three times. Assistants vary their answers between runs, and a single result is a sample rather than a finding. Record the full text of each answer and every source cited, not a summary.
Freshness Counts More Than You Expect Because retrieval happens at answer time, a page published or updated this week can be cited this week. This is a meaningful difference from ranking systems where authority accrues slowly.
Where you do name people, make the association reciprocal. Your site names the profile, the profile links back, and ideally some independent source associates the two without either of you arranging it.
Fix the Access Problems You Find While the baseline runs, check the mechanical side in parallel. Confirm your robots.txt permits the crawlers that feed assistants. Look at server logs for those agents and see what status codes they receive, since a bot management product returning challenges will make you invisible without anyone noticing.
Then audit every place it appears: your website, structured data, social profiles, directory listings, marketplace accounts, email footers, invoices and any coverage you can influence. Correct what you control and request corrections where you do not.
Audit for contradiction before adding anything new. Run your key pages through a validator, then read the output against what the page actually says and against your main directory listings. Contradictions are more damaging than gaps, because they actively undermine confidence in the record.
Accuracy Beats Coverage The most common real defect is not missing markup, it is markup that disagrees with the page or with the rest of the web. A founding year in your schema that differs from your about page. A logo URL that returns a 404. A contact point nobody monitors.
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.
Two consequences follow immediately. Your page has to be findable by the underlying search step, and once fetched it has to contain a passage worth lifting. Failing either one keeps you out, and most brands fail the second.
State who signs off, how fast, and what is off limits. An agency that knows the constraints will build a plan that fits them. One that finds out gradually will spend the retainer producing work that never ships. brand mentions in ai answers
Acquisitions deserve particular care. An acquired brand carries its own accumulated record, and both merging it into yours and keeping it separate are defensible choices. What fails is doing neither, leaving two partly overlapping records that each dilute the other, which is the most common outcome because nobody owns the decision.
What It Is Doing Under the Hood Simplified, the sequence runs like this. Your question is rewritten into one or more search queries. Results come back. A subset of pages is fetched and read. The model composes an answer from what it read and attaches citations to the specific claims it lifted.
