Run the Baseline Properly Run each prompt in a signed out session, or in a fresh session with memory and personalisation disabled. Your own browsing history and past conversations will otherwise skew results toward showing you what you already know.

Write between fifty and two hundred prompts covering five types: the category question, the problem question, the comparison question, the question that names a competitor, and the question that names you directly. The last one matters because it reveals what an assistant believes about you specifically, which is often more alarming than being absent.

Your Content Is Not Extractable A page that renders its content only after JavaScript executes may be readable by a browser and not by a retrieval system. The same applies to text locked in images, key specifications trapped in a PDF, and pricing hidden behind a form.

Which to Fix First Work in that order, because the sequence is roughly cheapest to most expensive and each step is wasted without the one before it. There is no value in earning press coverage if the crawler cannot reach the page it points at.

Everything else has to be transformed. A brand page has to be reframed as one option among several. A specification sheet has to be weighed against a competitor's. A comparison page needs none of that work, which makes it the cheapest source to use.

Why the Format Wins When somebody asks an assistant who they should use, the answer required is a comparison. A page that has already performed that comparison, naming specific options and stating how they differ, maps directly onto the shape of the answer being composed.

Influencing Sources You Do Not Own The highest value work sits on pages your team cannot edit. Review platforms, directories, forum threads and comparison articles carry disproportionate weight in generated answers, and getting represented accurately on them requires outreach, correction requests and occasionally patience with people who are not obliged to help.

Two caveats belong next to that number every time it is used. Opollo sells services in this space, so it is vendor research and interested. And business to business brands are not representative of retail, local services or consumer products.

One thing worth deciding before you start is who inside the business will answer factual questions. This work generates a steady trickle of small queries about lead times, price ranges and what you will and will not take on, and an agency that cannot get answers will either stall or guess. Naming one person and giving them twenty minutes a week removes the most common cause of these projects drifting.

If you want your own figure, the segment worth building is narrower than most people set up. Compare assistant referrals against branded organic search rather than against all organic, over at least a quarter, and exclude any campaign traffic. It will be a small sample and it will be about your audience, which makes it more useful for your decisions than a published study about somebody else's.

Run each prompt at least three times. Assistants vary their answers between runs, and a single result is a sample rather than a finding. Record the full text of each answer and every source cited, not a summary.

Days Thirty to Sixty: Correct the Record Take the ranked list of cited sources from phase one and go through it. On each source, check whether you appear, whether the details are right and whether the platform accepts corrections.

These pages are cited heavily and are frequently thin, because most are assembled purely to capture the search phrase. A genuinely useful one that says which alternative suits which situation, including cases where staying put is correct, will outperform a dozen keyword driven versions.

The sources column is the one people skip and the one that generates the actual work. It tells you which third party pages your category's answers are built from, which is a target list you did not have to guess at. answer engine optimization

Keeping Them Alive Comparison content decays faster than anything else you publish. Prices change, features ship, companies get acquired and a page comparing five options on last year's figures is not just stale, it is wrong.

The Referral Growth Figure Is Weaker A widely shared statistic reporting several hundred percent growth in assistant referrals is worth handling more carefully still. Traced back, it rests on a sample of nineteen analytics properties.

The Objection, and the Answer to It Sales teams resist naming competitors and conceding anything, and the resistance is understandable. The counter is that the comparison is happening regardless, inside a model, using whichever sources it can find.

What the Evidence Actually Is The figure quoted most often comes from Opollo, which reported assistant referred traffic converting at 14.2 percent against 2.8 percent from conventional search. The sample was 312 business to business brands, attributed through UTM parameters, covering the third quarter of 2024 through the first quarter of 2025.