Preserved from source pages 'Questions Before Hiring a GEO Consultant' and 'How to Hire an AI Visibility Consultant.' These are the objective due-diligence questions that separate real AI visibility providers from dashboards-with-a-consultant-attached.
- Can you show proof of improved AI visibility?
- Ask for a documented before/after — recommendation share, citation rate, and named-appearance frequency across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Monic AI Systems publishes the 20-point case study for exactly this reason.
- Do you only measure visibility, or do you help fix it?
- Measurement is table stakes. Ask whether the provider ships the remediation — new buyer-intent pages, entity work, crawler fixes, and corroborating citations — or hands you a dashboard and walks away.
- Do you track whether AI crawlers reach important pages?
- GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended each behave differently. A qualified consultant tracks BotIQ — whether the crawlers can actually read your most important pages — because if they cannot, nothing else works.
- Do you help with third-party corroboration and citations?
- On-site work alone will not produce AI recommendations. Ask how the provider builds the off-site citation layer (CommunityIQ): earned mentions, podcast appearances, expert commentary, and structured references from credible sources.
- Do you create founder-led content or generic AI content?
- Generic vendor content is what AI cannot cite. Founder-led content — the specific expertise only your founder has — is what makes you the obvious name in a generated answer. Ask whether the provider captures founder voice systematically.
- How do you decide which prompts to fix first?
- A qualified provider prioritizes buyer-intent prompts (the "who should I hire," "best provider for X," "alternative to Y" questions that end in a purchase) over vanity prompts. Ask for the prioritization framework.
- What is the difference between a mention and a recommendation?
- A mention names you. A recommendation tells the buyer to choose you. Measurement and remediation should optimize for recommendation, not mention count.
- How is this different from a traditional SEO agency?
- Traditional SEO agencies optimize for rank in Google. AI visibility work optimizes for selection inside a generated answer. The measurement, the deliverables, and the definition of "done" are different. If a provider cannot articulate the difference, they are selling SEO with an AI label.