Ask about: the measurement methodology (how many runs, from what environments), the brand/non-brand split, how they select competitors, and examples of content that has actually won citations. Red flags: guarantees of position, claimed partnerships with OpenAI or Google invoked to justify organic recommendations, reports built only on brand prompts.
Below: which deliverables you are entitled to ask for, why no position guarantee is honest, how many prompts and runs make a measurement credible, how benchmark competitors get picked, and when working in-house makes more sense.
Updated 2026-07-14 · Websem, AEO questions base
At minimum: a per-platform visibility audit with a brand/non-brand split, a documented prompt set, a fair competitive benchmark, a prioritized content and technical plan, a monthly report with the same metrics comparable over time, and access to the raw data. Without verifiable raw data, a report is just a story.
No — organic recommendations have no paid or guaranteed channel on any major platform, and non-determinism makes any position guarantee dishonest. Only the actions taken and their measurement can be guaranteed, not the models' behavior.
Order of magnitude: 30–50 prompts (at least 70% non-brand, phrased the way a real customer would ask), each run across all relevant platforms, repeated at a fixed cadence. Conclusions should be drawn from multi-week trends, not a single day's snapshot.
Not the ones from the physical market, but the ones actually winning the answers: you run the prompts and see who shows up and who gets cited. The resulting list is almost always surprising — often online players you weren't tracking at all.
A hybrid works most often: strategy and expert content stay in-house (you know your product best), while measurement methodology, the technical side, and digital PR get outsourced. Going fully in-house requires a dedicated person who keeps up with the platforms' monthly changes.
This question is part of a base of 124 answers about AEO across 12 categories — from how LLMs work to budget, measurement and deliverables.