How to choose someone for AI search visibility work
This is a new enough category that a lot of people are selling it and not many are doing it. Here is how to tell the difference, including the questions that are uncomfortable for me to answer too.
What to ask before you hire anyone
Which prompts will you track, in my category and my town?
A real answer names them. Emergency plumber Brunswick GA. Best marina service near St. Simons. Estate planning attorney in Glynn County. If the answer stays general, nobody has looked at your market yet, and the work has not started.
Will you show me what the tools say about me today, before I pay anything?
Anyone can claim improvement without a starting point. Ask for a baseline in writing: whether you are named right now, who is named instead, and which sources those answers cite. If they cannot produce a before, they cannot show you an after.
Will you report calls and booked work, or a visibility score?
A score out of 100 is not a result. It is a number a tool produced. Ask what they will report at month three, and listen for calls, form fills, quote requests, and booked jobs. If the reporting is only mentions and scores, you are buying a dashboard.
What happens off my website?
This is the question that separates the two halves of the job. Schema, structured data, and content rewriting are the on-site half, and they are table stakes. The off-site half is your Google Business Profile, your listings, your directory records, and getting named in places the models actually read. If the whole plan lives on your own site, it is half the work.
Who actually does the work?
Ask whether the person auditing your site is the person rewriting your pages and building your schema. In a small engagement a handoff usually means the audit was the sales call.
Who owns the accounts and the content if we stop?
Your website content, your Google Business Profile, your analytics, and your directory logins should be yours, in your name, on your email. Get that answer before anything is created on your behalf.
Can you show me your own numbers?
Anyone selling visibility should be able to show you theirs, including the parts that are not flattering. I publish mine, updated monthly, at my own AI visibility check. Ask everyone you talk to for the same thing. I also published an audit of every HVAC company serving Glynn County, so you can see the kind of findings this work produces before you pay anyone for them.
Promises nobody can keep
Walk away from guaranteed placement or a guaranteed citation in ChatGPT. The platforms control their own outputs and change them often, and no provider has a switch.
Be equally careful with a promised position in AI Overviews, results inside a week, or any hint of a relationship with OpenAI, Google, or Perplexity that produces preferential treatment. None of that exists.
What can honestly be promised is the work itself, a baseline you can check, and tracking over time so you can see whether it moved.
What a real engagement includes
- A baseline audit of how often you come up for the specific prompts your customers would use.
- Google Business Profile work and one exact version of your name, address, and phone across your profile, your site, your schema, and the directories carrying your information.
- Schema markup and the technical fixes that let a machine tell what your business is, what it does, and where it works.
- Service and location pages that answer real customer questions in language a tool can quote without rewriting.
- Review generation that follows the platforms’ own rules rather than working around them.
- Off-site citation work, which is the half most providers skip.
- Reporting tied to calls, leads, and booked revenue, not only to mentions.
When you do not need this yet
Some businesses should spend this money somewhere else, and a provider worth hiring will tell you so.
- Your website does not work properly yet, or your Google Business Profile is unclaimed or incomplete. Fix the foundation first. It is cheaper and it is what the AI tools read anyway.
- A new customer is worth too little to cover the work. If one job is worth $80, this math does not close.
- You cannot reliably answer the phone, return leads, or take on more work. More demand will cost you reputation rather than build it.
- Your work comes through long-standing contracts or closed procurement rather than people searching.
- You are in a category where customers do not compare providers online before calling.
If two or more of those describe you, tell whoever you are talking to. If they still want to sell you an AI visibility package, you have learned what you needed to know about them.
Start with a baseline, even if it is not mine
Whoever you hire, get the before picture in writing first. I will do that part free. Send your business name and your website and I run it by hand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Google Search the way a customer would ask, then tell you whether you show up, who shows up instead of you, and which sources those tools are citing. No charge and no call required, and you are welcome to take the findings to somebody else.