How to Choose a ChatGPT and Google AI Visibility Provider: What They Must Be Able to Measure

You Are Buying a Service That Does Not Yet Have an Established Name

A service that almost nobody sold two years ago is now appearing in proposals: visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI answers. It goes by acronyms such as GEO, AEO, or AIO, ranges from a one-off audit to a monthly retainer, and varies enormously in price between providers — partly because each one sells something slightly different under the same label.

The difficulty lies in verification. With SEO, you can Google your ranking on your phone in ten seconds. An assistant’s answer, however, varies from person to person, day to day, and tool to tool: ask the same question twice in a row and you may get a different order and different names. A screenshot of a single answer therefore proves nothing — neither a provider’s success nor its failure.

That narrows the selection process down to one question: what exactly will you show us each month, and where do those numbers come from? “It cannot be measured” is not an acceptable answer. Some of it can be substantiated — just not everything, and not from a single source.

The general rules — a fair contract, the notice period, and ownership of deliverables — are the same for this service as they are for SEO and are covered in how to choose an SEO agency and what to watch out for. This article addresses something you do not deal with in traditional SEO: how to obtain evidence that your company appeared in an AI answer.

Three Data Sources — and What They Cannot Tell You

You do not have to work blindly. There are three places from which you can obtain data about your own website, and each provides only a partial view. A provider you are considering should know what each source can do — and, more importantly, what it cannot do.

The names of individual reports and the range of metrics available in these tools change from month to month: new breakdowns for AI answers are added, terminology changes, and so do the countries and products covered. For every figure in a report, therefore, ask two questions: which report did it come from, and what does the official documentation say that report measures? Anyone who follows the field will provide a documentation link without hesitation. Also ask from what date the data in that report is available at all — new reports do not populate historical data retrospectively, so there may be no basis for compiling a “year-long trend in AI visibility.”

This leads to three checks that require no technical expertise:

• Every metric should have a definition. If a report shows “clicks from AI overviews,” ask which report they came from and how that report is described in the documentation. The distinction between an impression, a citation, and a click is fundamental; they cannot be merged into a single number.
• A sudden drop or spike. Before anyone presents it as a trend, check whether Google or Microsoft recorded an outage or data collection error during that period — the Search Console documentation maintains a list of such anomalies. Anyone who spins a decline into evidence of their own success (“the market is falling, but we are holding steady”) either does not read that list or assumes you do not.
• ChatGPT in Search Console. You will never find it there because Search Console measures Google Search exclusively. Visits from ChatGPT only become visible in analytics, and the process is explained step by step in are you getting visits from ChatGPT?.

One-Off Articles, SEO, and Ongoing Management: Three Different Purchases

Three very different services are now sold under the heading “content for AI.” Before comparing prices, decide which one you actually need.

These three services are not mutually exclusive. Paying for the third while receiving the first, however, is the most common way to waste money in this category.

What Actually Gets Cited from a Website

An assistant is not searching for the best company in the industry. It is looking for a safe, usable piece of text from which it can construct an answer. The most citable material is often information a company already has at hand but its competitors do not publish:

• A side-by-side comparison of two or three options explaining who each is suitable for — repair versus replacement versus trade-in, rather than generic “advantages and disadvantages.”
• Pricing with actual figures and the factors that affect the price. A from–to range with an explanation of variables such as travel, weekend surcharges, disk capacity, or the number of users is easy to cite. “Price on request” offers nothing to cite.
• Your own data that nobody else has. How many of last year’s jobs fell into each category, how long a typical intervention takes, or the most common cause of failure. This is the only content your competitors cannot copy from you.
• The answer in the very first sentence, not after an introductory paragraph.

The writing techniques are covered in detail in how to write content that AI will cite. When choosing a provider, one rule is enough: ask to see a finished example containing specific figures and decision criteria. Anyone delivering articles of the “why it is important to…” variety will not provide material that can be cited. We also write and maintain such pages — but whoever does the work, specificity is the hallmark, not character count.

How to Prove That a Citation Actually Occurred

A screenshot of a single answer is not evidence. Anyone can produce one in ten minutes, and the answer may be different the next day. Useful evidence has four parts:

1. A set of queries agreed in advance and in writing. Ten to twenty phrases a customer might use before making a purchase — not your company name, because nobody asks for that. The set must remain unchanged throughout the process; otherwise, there is no meaningful basis for comparison.
2. More than one tool. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity regularly give different answers. Measuring in one tool gives you a sample size of one.
3. A consistent schedule. For example, always on the first working day of the month. Each record should include the date, the full answer, and a link to the page the assistant cited as its source.
4. A connection to official data sources. If a provider claims that Google has started citing you, the change should also be visible for that specific URL in Search Console.

The final point is the most important because you can verify it yourself. You control access to Search Console, not the provider.

First, Check That You Have Not Shut the Door on Bots

Before anyone starts writing, there is a basic technical issue that proposals often overlook: whether your website allows the right bots to read its content at all. OpenAI has three, and they are easy to confuse:

• OAI-SearchBot — gathers material for search in ChatGPT and for the links cited in answers. If you block it, you will not appear among the cited sources, no matter how good your content is.
• GPTBot — downloads content for model training. Blocking it is a legitimate decision and has no bearing on citations in ChatGPT search.
• ChatGPT-User — accesses a website only when a specific user requests it, such as when they paste a link into a chat and ask for a summary of the page.

Google uses a different system, which causes even more confusion. AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Google Search, so they are served by the standard Googlebot. The Google-Extended token in robots.txt is unrelated to them — it controls the use of content for Gemini and other models. Anyone who blocks Googlebot because they “do not want to appear in AI” will disappear from search results altogether. Copilot relies on Bing’s index, so blocking Bingbot affects visibility there as well.

A single “block AI bots” button — in a plugin, hosting control panel, or Cloudflare — can therefore close the exact route you are paying someone to open. Cloudflare offers AI bot blocking when new domains are set up and distinguishes between bots that collect training data and those that access websites for search; do not expect simpler plugins to make that distinction.

Ask the provider which of these bots are currently allowed to access your website. The answer is in the /robots.txt file on your domain and takes a minute to determine. If they cannot answer by the next day, they either lack access to the website or do not know where the setting is configured. Neither is a good start.

Six Questions to Ask Before You Sign

Before signing a contract with an AI visibility agency, go through this list. Write down the answers — you will return to them in three months.

• Which three customer queries will we monitor, and why those particular ones? A good answer discusses what people consider before making a purchase. A bad answer focuses on your company.
• Will you show me a report from another project — including one that did not perform well? Anyone with nothing but winning charts is cherry-picking.
• Where does every individual figure in the report come from? Each metric should have a source from the table above and a link to its official documentation.
• What do we keep when the engagement ends? The content, query set, measurement history, and access credentials belong to you.
• What will you do if nothing changes for three months? An honest answer includes a deadline and a plan B, not reassurance that it simply takes time.
• Who writes the content, and how do they verify the facts? In a technical field, this is the difference between material that AI cites and material that embarrasses you in front of customers.

Watch out for two claims that frequently appear in proposals. The first is presenting an llms.txt file as the solution to visibility: Google representatives have repeatedly said that their systems do not use it, and no major assistant has officially confirmed that it reads the file. On its own, therefore, it changes nothing; this is discussed in detail in llms.txt: does a small business website need it?. The second is “first place in ChatGPT.” No such position exists; an answer mentions a handful of names, and that selection changes over time and between tools.

A Small First Step Instead of an Annual Contract

Do not buy an annual retainer for something you cannot yet verify. A sensible approach is both cheaper and faster:

1. Scan the current situation. See what answers the selected customer queries receive today, which bots the website allows in, and what is already visible in Search Console and Bing. The result is a baseline from which progress can be measured. If you do not feel confident doing this or do not have the time, we can perform the initial analysis for you — you will receive a baseline measurement, a query set, and a list of pages that assistants currently lack as source material.
2. Run a three-month pilot for one service or one city, with an agreed set of content formats and monthly measurement.
3. Decide based on data, not intuition. Either the answers and reports begin to show movement, or you part ways — having incurred three months of costs rather than twelve.

And one point needs to be said plainly: if you are not currently receiving enquiries from traditional search, AI visibility will not fix that. It is an additional layer built on content that already works, not a substitute for what is missing.