Observed behaviour leans toward breadth, pulling from a wider set of sources per answer than the others, and it cites forums, documentation and niche trade sources readily. It also appears comparatively responsive to freshness.
What you are looking for is whether the questions sound like a buyer wrote them. If every prompt contains the client's category name phrased the way an internal marketing team would phrase it, they have tested how the brand talks rather than how customers ask.
What to Build and What to Buy Build the prompt set and the measurement habit internally. They are cheap, they depend on knowledge of your customers that no agency has, and owning them means you can audit anyone you hire.
One cultural obstacle deserves naming. This work asks a marketing team to publish figures, limits and honest comparisons, which is the opposite of what most of them have been trained and rewarded to do. Expect resistance that presents as a debate about brand consistency and is really about control. The fastest way through it is showing the team a raw answer where a competitor is quoted stating a price and the brand is not mentioned at all.
The honest framing first: nobody outside these organisations knows the selection logic, and the systems change without announcement. What follows is drawn from observable behaviour, visible citations and published research, which supports useful generalisations and does not support precision.
They will not quote statistics without sources, and they will not present a tool's sampled estimate as a count of what happened. If none of these boundaries come up unprompted, ask directly and listen for whether the answer sounds rehearsed or considered.
Marketing teams are unusually bad at this, because years of positioning work trains people to describe the product the way the company wants it described. A prompt set written by the people who wrote the positioning tends to measure the positioning rather than the market.
Agree the Reporting Before You Sign Settle this in the contract rather than discovering it in month three. A useful monthly report contains the prompt set, the raw answers, which competitors were named, which sources were cited, what changed against last month, and what work was done that might explain the change.
Be wary of pricing tied to a proprietary visibility score, since the vendor controls both the number and the prompt set that produces it. Be equally wary of performance pricing tied to mentions, which sounds aligned and creates pressure to game the measurement rather than improve the business.
How to Test Rather Than Trust Everything above is a starting hypothesis. Run twenty prompts in your own category across all three, from signed out sessions, recording the mode and the date, and count the cited domains for each.
Look at What They Do About Third Party Sources This is where the real work lives and where weak proposals are thinnest. Ask specifically what they will do about the review platforms, directories, forums and comparison articles that assistants actually cite in your category.
Writing to Be Quoted, Not to Persuade Most marketing copy is constructed to move somebody through an argument. Generated answers do not consume arguments, they extract claims, which means the persuasive structure most copywriters were trained in produces text with nothing to attach a citation to.
What can legitimately be committed to is process: the prompt set will be run on a schedule, the raw answers will be kept, specific technical fixes will be made
get recommended by ai a date, a defined number of third party listings will be corrected. Commitments about inputs are honest. Commitments about outputs are not.
The weakness is that corroboration is scarce, so a system has little to work with beyond what the site itself says, and self description carries limited weight. The opportunity is that influencing a small number of sources changes the whole picture, where a crowded category would require displacing established coverage.
Ask How They Price It Retainers dominate this field and mostly make sense, because the work is continuous and the third party portion is slow.
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