Choosing an AEO supplier: five questions to ask

1. What is my number today, and how was it measured?

If the engagement does not open with a measurement, there is nothing to hold it to later. Ask how many questions, how many engines and how many times each question was asked. Ask whether the brand name was in the question.

Our answer: 50 purchase-intent questions, 4 engines, 3 runs each — 600 answers, stored raw with the URLs each one cited. The free audit runs a shorter version (8 questions, once) before you pay anything.

2. How many times do you ask each question?

Ask an engine the same thing twice and you can get two different lists. A single run cannot separate a real gain from noise, so a report built on one run per question cannot prove what it claims.

Our answer: three, on the full audit and every monthly run. The variance band is printed next to every question so you can see which results are stable and which are coin flips.

3. What will you show me that I could check myself?

Scores are easy to produce and impossible to audit. The raw answers and the cited URLs are the evidence; a supplier who will not hand them over is asking you to trust a dashboard.

Our answer: every answer verbatim, with its engine, timestamp and citation list, exportable whenever you like, including after you cancel.

4. How will we know whether the work worked?

Most retainers in this category report activity: pages written, schema added. Activity is not the outcome you are buying.

Our answer: each job carries the specific measurement that should move if it worked, and the next run checks it. The report says worked, no change yet, or backfired. Work that does not move the number stops being recommended.

5. What do you refuse to do?

The field is young enough that plenty of suppliers will do things that work briefly and then get patched, or that you would not want your name on in a regulated sector.

Our answer: no bought links, no invented reviews, no pages written to be read by machines and nobody else. Corrections to third parties go in your name with the true facts, which is slower and survives.

Two more worth asking

• What happens when the answer is “you are already named everywhere”? A supplier who will only ever recommend more work is selling hours, not results. Our free audit says so and tells you not to buy anything.
• Do you guarantee a mention? Nobody controls these engines. A guarantee is either a guess or something being gamed that will be patched. What can honestly be promised is a measurement you can audit, a diagnosis of each gap with its evidence, and work checked against the next measurement.