Next steps · No. 05 / 11
Stage 3: What needs fixing—and which capability should you buy?
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Separate observed facts from explanations. An absent recommendation does not, by itself, establish a technical problem, a content problem or an authority deficit.
| Evidence observed | Next investigation | Appropriate first purchase | Acceptance evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Important pages appear inaccessible or excluded | Crawl controls, indexing, infrastructure and platform-specific settings | Technical SEO or web engineering | Documented issue, approved change and successful retest |
| Product facts are incomplete or inconsistent | Approved documentation, pricing, integration and security pages | Product marketing and editorial implementation | Dated, approved facts published consistently |
| Competitor answers repeatedly cite relevant external sources | Exact pages, editorial relevance, factual coverage and source ownership | Citation research; then targeted communications or PR if justified | Verified source map and legitimate outreach plan—not promised citations |
| Monitoring scores conflict with saved answers | Collection route, prompts, denominators and scoring | Measurement specialist | Reconciled evidence and an auditable specification |
| Visibility exists but commercial value is unclear | Analytics instrumentation, customer research and CRM evidence | Analytics or marketing-operations support | Explicit measurement definitions and attribution limitations |
| The baseline does not establish an actionable problem | Prompt relevance, product fit and competing priorities | No new supplier | A documented no-spend decision and a sensible recheck trigger |
Which technical checks deserve priority?
Google’s current guidance retains indexing and snippet eligibility requirements and says generative AI inclusion must be enabled in Search Console. Google also states that special AI text files and special markup are unnecessary for its search features. (developers.google.com)
Check Settings → Search generative AI, including inherited controls, before commissioning a large content programme. The setting can exclude a site’s links and content from supported generative AI features. (support.google.com)
For ChatGPT search, distinguish OAI-SearchBot from GPTBot. OpenAI documents independent controls for search discovery and training-related crawling; allowing search access does not require allowing GPTBot. Treat changes as an approved access-policy decision, not a blanket instruction to unblock every crawler. (developers.openai.com)
How should you investigate competitor citations?
Build a citation map containing the exact source page, answer context, recurrence within your sample, source category and verified references to each vendor.
Then ask:
- Does the page accurately describe the category and products?
- Is your company genuinely relevant to its audience?
- Is the proposed action an owned-page correction, an external correction request or an editorial pitch?
- What remains unknown about why the assistant selected that source?
Treat source recurrence as an investigation lead, not proof of causal influence. Microsoft similarly cautions that observed citation trends cannot be attributed to a particular content change or event from its aggregate reporting alone. (bing.com)
Stage output: a prioritised backlog with evidence, hypothesis, owner, effort, dependency and acceptance test for each item.
Sources cited on this page
- developers.google.com developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- support.google.com support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16908024
- developers.openai.com developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots?app=1&utm_source=openai
- bing.com www.bing.com/webmasters/help/ai-performance-9f8e7d6c?utm_source=openai