Some of it nobody can do for you
Deciding what you charge, who you are wrong for, and what you will state publicly are business decisions. An agency can tell you the page needs a number; only you can decide the number — and refusing to state one is what keeps you out of the answers.
This is the part most engagements stall on, and it is worth knowing before you sign anything. A supplier who does not push you on it will produce polished pages that avoid the same questions your current ones avoid, which is an expensive way to change nothing.
Do it yourself: the audit and the basics
Asking the engines about yourself, fixing contradictory descriptions, and consolidating your naming are an afternoon of work with no specialist knowledge required — the thirty-minute audit finds most of it.
Do this before you brief anyone, for two reasons. It removes the cheap findings from the supplier’s scope so you pay for harder work, and it tells you whether your problem is one an agency can solve at all. If the audit reveals that your positioning is unresolved, no amount of content work fixes that.
Pay for the work that needs doing repeatedly. Keep the work that requires deciding what your business will say.
Buy: measurement and the restructuring pass
A stable prompt set sampled properly every month is tedious and easy to do inconsistently — and inconsistency destroys the trend, which is the only thing the measurement is for. Restructuring key pages for passage-level retrieval is a skill that improves with repetition; the tenth page is much faster and better than the first.
Buy: the corroboration work
Getting described accurately at credible third-party sources takes relationships and persistence, and it is the first thing to be dropped internally when a busy week arrives. It is the slow lever that decides recommendation, which makes it the worst candidate for whoever-has-time.
The hybrid most companies land on
Do the audit and the decisions internally. Buy the restructuring pass as a defined project with a fixed scope. Buy measurement as an ongoing retainer, because it is small, recurring, and easy to let slip. Keep the writing wherever the genuine subject knowledge is — which for a specialist business is usually inside.
How to tell a good supplier
They ask what you refuse to publish and why, in the first conversation. They report appearance and description rather than traffic. They tell you which parts you must decide yourself rather than promising to handle everything. They can explain why a specific page of yours is not being cited, in terms of its structure.
Anyone promising rankings in AI answers does not understand the medium, because there is no ranking to promise. Anyone whose proposal is mostly a content volume commitment is selling the approach that now actively hurts you.
Questions worth asking before signing
How will you measure this, and does the method survive us changing our minds about which prompts matter? What will you need from us, and how many hours a month is that? What do you do if we decline to publish pricing? Who owns the prompt set and the results at the end?
That last question separates suppliers meaningfully. The measurement record is the only evidence of whether the engagement worked, and it should be yours regardless of how the relationship ends.
Either way, own the measurement
Keep the prompt set and the results yourself, in your own document. It is the record of whether anything worked, it is the baseline for the next supplier, and it is the one artefact that should never leave with an agency.