Agree most of the work overlaps. The one part a normal SEO audit misses is access: a page can rank fine on Google and still get refused to ChatGPT-User by a CDN bot rule, and nothing flags it because Googlebot gets through. Requesting a few key pages with each AI user agent is a five minute check.
Agreed, and it belongs before the first invoice. Your CDN or server logs will show whether the real ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot get through, since Cloudflare verifies bots by IP and a spoofed user agent can get treated differently. If they're blocked, fix that before you pay anyone for AEO.
The three written questions are the strongest part. I would add a fourth for any separate AEO or GEO fee: which deliverables change something a crawler or retrieval system can actually see (access, rendering, entity consistency), and which only produce a report about it? A fee that mostly buys reporting is the easiest one to cut or bring inside the SEO scope.
Hanin, your fourth question mostly lands inside question one. Work that changes what a crawler can see, like access, rendering and entity consistency, is technical SEO. It belongs in the SEO scope, and billing it on its own line lists the same work twice. A fee for deliverables that only produce a report is easy to cut. Nothing a crawler sees changes.
My numbers push it further. Across my six local clients, AI tools sent 69 leads out of 27,637 tracked. About 1 in 400. At that volume I can't make the real fixes work as their own line either. I'd keep them in the SEO scope and measure them against the 12 months of numbers.
First time I saw someone else talk about UCP on here. These data standards are really the key and will define how search, buyers, and really how everything works with AI in the future.
Ideas that understand and are forward thinking in that arena will be the foundation of the next version of the internet.
Thanks, Edward. You're right that data standards are the key. Merchant Center already has standard fields for product title, description and price, etc, so some structure is in place. The new version looks like it builds on that. Anyone with products in Merchant Center or Amazon is most of the way there, with extra data added to personalize products. I'd look closely at what Shopify is doing there, I'm not expert. Yet...
Awesome, thank you. I am doing the same, am watching what the big guys are doing. I know it won’t but theoretically if search moves more and more to AI, it really changes the need for these marketplace sites. Possibly breaking up the monopolies. Did you see what happened in India, they did the same thing with their own UCP standards and it seems to be working. Which gives me hope. I hate that a handful of sites control everything. If people get behind this it can really change the internet as we know it.
Thanks for reading this closely. The numbers are right, and I agree the 1.9x weakens the higher-intent story, which is why the article says we can't tell.
The data covers what arrives with no program behind it. It says nothing about what one would add. If you run B2B accounts: what does one lead a month have to be worth to justify the second $1,000? In B2B sometimes it can take 100 leads and 6 months to close a single deal.
Dang, son! Brilliant! (But why should I be surprised?)
Thanks Partner! I'm inspired!
Agree most of the work overlaps. The one part a normal SEO audit misses is access: a page can rank fine on Google and still get refused to ChatGPT-User by a CDN bot rule, and nothing flags it because Googlebot gets through. Requesting a few key pages with each AI user agent is a five minute check.
Agreed, and it belongs before the first invoice. Your CDN or server logs will show whether the real ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot get through, since Cloudflare verifies bots by IP and a spoofed user agent can get treated differently. If they're blocked, fix that before you pay anyone for AEO.
The three written questions are the strongest part. I would add a fourth for any separate AEO or GEO fee: which deliverables change something a crawler or retrieval system can actually see (access, rendering, entity consistency), and which only produce a report about it? A fee that mostly buys reporting is the easiest one to cut or bring inside the SEO scope.
Hanin, your fourth question mostly lands inside question one. Work that changes what a crawler can see, like access, rendering and entity consistency, is technical SEO. It belongs in the SEO scope, and billing it on its own line lists the same work twice. A fee for deliverables that only produce a report is easy to cut. Nothing a crawler sees changes.
My numbers push it further. Across my six local clients, AI tools sent 69 leads out of 27,637 tracked. About 1 in 400. At that volume I can't make the real fixes work as their own line either. I'd keep them in the SEO scope and measure them against the 12 months of numbers.
First time I saw someone else talk about UCP on here. These data standards are really the key and will define how search, buyers, and really how everything works with AI in the future.
Ideas that understand and are forward thinking in that arena will be the foundation of the next version of the internet.
Spot on on the SEO/GEO stuff too.
Great job, look forward to the next one.
Thanks, Edward. You're right that data standards are the key. Merchant Center already has standard fields for product title, description and price, etc, so some structure is in place. The new version looks like it builds on that. Anyone with products in Merchant Center or Amazon is most of the way there, with extra data added to personalize products. I'd look closely at what Shopify is doing there, I'm not expert. Yet...
Awesome, thank you. I am doing the same, am watching what the big guys are doing. I know it won’t but theoretically if search moves more and more to AI, it really changes the need for these marketplace sites. Possibly breaking up the monopolies. Did you see what happened in India, they did the same thing with their own UCP standards and it seems to be working. Which gives me hope. I hate that a handful of sites control everything. If people get behind this it can really change the internet as we know it.
Thanks for reading this closely. The numbers are right, and I agree the 1.9x weakens the higher-intent story, which is why the article says we can't tell.
The data covers what arrives with no program behind it. It says nothing about what one would add. If you run B2B accounts: what does one lead a month have to be worth to justify the second $1,000? In B2B sometimes it can take 100 leads and 6 months to close a single deal.