How To Audit Whether AI Recommends Your Brand
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What Not to Do About It Blocking Google's crawler to keep your content out of summaries also removes you from search results, which is a cure considerably worse than the disease. There is no partial opt out that preserves ranking while excluding you from the summary.
Third, and least comfortable, reduce dependence on this one channel. Brands that were already visible through communities, direct relationships, email and their own reputation have absorbed the change far better than brands whose entire acquisition rested on informational search traffic.
How to Tell If It Hit You The signature is specific and worth checking before blaming anything else. Look in Search Console for pages where impressions are flat or rising while clicks fall and average position is unchanged. That combination points at something above you absorbing the click rather than at a ranking loss.
Those recurring domains are the pages your category's answers are being built from. Visit each one, look for yourself, and note whether you are absent, listed with stale details, or filed under the wrong category. That list is your task list, and you did not have to guess at it.
Beyond that, watch for referral traffic arriving from assistant domains in your analytics, and watch for the phrasing customers use when they contact you. When people start repeating a description of your business that you did not write, something has shifted.
The Prompt Set, Unchanged The report opens with the prompt set used, versioned and dated, and a statement that it is identical to last month's. If it changed, the change is listed explicitly with a reason, and the previous series is kept alongside so comparisons remain honest.
Present but described wrongly means a source problem, and the source list tells you which page to correct. Present and accurate on definitional prompts but absent on the who should I hire prompts means your category presence is fine and your commercial positioning is not corroborated anywhere independent.
You can do this yourself in about half an hour, with no subscriptions and no technical knowledge. It will not be as thorough as a full engagement, and it is more than enough to establish whether you have a problem and roughly what kind.
Reviews Are the Local Corroboration Layer For a local business, reviews are close to the whole evidence base. There is rarely trade press, rarely analyst coverage, and often no comparison articles at all, so review platforms carry the weight alone.
If your organic impressions held steady while clicks fell, you have probably met this already. An AI generated summary now sits above the results for a large share of informational queries, answers the question in place, and leaves the ten blue links below it with less to do.
Then load your most important page with JavaScript disabled in your browser settings. If what remains is a navigation bar and no substance, that is roughly what a retrieval system reads, and it explains a great deal on its own.
The important detail is that this does not replace the results page, it displaces it. Your listing is still there. It is simply lower down the screen and competing with an answer that has already satisfied a portion of the audience.
Save the document and the date. In three months you will run the same ten prompts again, and the comparison is the only thing that will tell you whether anything you did in between mattered. geo seo agency
Answer the Question That Was Asked Content briefs generated from keyword tools produce pages that orbit a topic without answering anything. A page titled around a question should contain a paragraph that answers that question directly, early, without conditions attached to reading further.
One test separates a report written to inform from one written to reassure. Read it and try to write down a question it does not answer. In a good report you will find several, because it contains enough specifics to make new questions obvious. In a padded one you will struggle, not because everything is covered but because there is nothing specific enough to interrogate.
What Kind of Content Lost the Most The pages that suffered most are the ones whose entire value was a fact a summary can state. Definition posts, unit conversions, simple how-to answers, opening hours, basic specifications and the introductory paragraph content that many sites published purely to capture a query.
Good versions read like this: mention rate on evaluation prompts rose from two in fifteen to six in fifteen, which we attribute to the three directory corrections completed in week two, though a competitor also stopped publishing during the same period.
Citation happens at the level of a passage, not a page. A model attaches a source to a specific claim it lifted, which means the real unit of work is a paragraph that stays true and useful once it has been removed from everything around it.
Extraction does not follow along. It takes the passage that answers the question, and a paragraph that spends four sentences setting up its point contains nothing extractable until the fifth. Put the answer in the first sentence and use the rest to qualify it.