18. What evidence would make you stop, reduce or refuse to renew an AI-visibility programme?

Require a credible stopping rule before asking for a growth plan.

Put to: Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds and the buyer’s CMO.

Why it matters to buyers: AMEC’s GEO principles call for documented methods, repeated testing, saved outputs and separation of visibility from outcomes. Those requirements provide a useful foundation for a review, but do not prescribe a universal renewal threshold. (amecorg.com)

Ask: “What findings would make you recommend that we stop paying you, reduce monitoring or move the budget to a different capability?”

A good answer should cover:

• Prompt groups shown to be commercially irrelevant.
• Unresolved measurement changes that prevent a fair comparison.
• No implementable opportunity or no available delivery owner.
• Useful corrective work completed, with a lower-cost monitoring requirement thereafter.
• Continued uncertainty that justifies a different research design rather than a longer identical retainer.
• Harm to accuracy, trust or existing search performance.

Press for: separate criteria for continue, redesign, reduce and stop. Ask what the buyer will retain: evidence, methodology, published assets and an actionable handover.

A good answer should allow the possibility that the work was useful and should now end.

Expert quote — pending: ____________________

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