Four clients in six weeks asked one agency owner on r/DigitalMarketing some version of "how do we show up in ChatGPT," and when he probed, not one of them could explain what they actually wanted. By his account they'd seen a LinkedIn post or heard a competitor use the words. They turned up holding a phrase with no goal behind it.
The replies under his post pile on. Accounts are panicking that traffic is headed to zero, and one client was trying to cancel the ad spend that drives three quarters of their leads, "because of AI."
Anyone else notice clients are suddenly asking about "ai visibility" without really knowing what they're asking for?
In the last 6 weeks, I've had four different clients ask some version of "how do we show up in ChatGPT". None of them could tell me what they actually wanted when I probed. They'd just seen something on LinkedIn or heard a competitor mentio...
For the last two years I've worked inside this discipline, building measurement and content systems for AI search. I talk constantly with agency owners who are in the same spot as that thread. They have real demand that arrives confused, and no agreed playbook to sell against. What follows is the advice I keep giving over coffee, in the order I'd do things. It ends with the one move that makes the rest believable.
A disclosure, since you're reading a software company's blog. We build an AI visibility platform for brands that run their own content engine. We don't do white-label agency reporting and agencies aren't really our market, which is why I can write this one straight. I'm not selling you what I describe below, so run the playbook on whatever stack you like.
First, refuse to sell the confusion back
Four confused clients in six weeks make it tempting to type "AI Visibility Package" on a slide and price it before you've decided what's in it. I get why. Practitioner threads keep citing an AgencyAnalytics benchmark in which roughly five hundred agencies put AI search visibility at the top of their new-service requests, ahead of paid and short-form video. Still, a category that gets sold before anyone defines it tends to get poisoned early, and this one is about halfway there.
The most useful comment in that thread said to split the client's question before selling anything, since "AI visibility" bundles at least three separate problems. Showing up in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode is mostly an extension of the SEO you already sell. Getting cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity runs on retrieval and corroboration, and those levers are different.
The third problem is accuracy. Does the engine say true things about the client when it mentions them at all? That's a facts-and-reputation problem, and most clients don't know they have it until you show them. So when a client asks how to show up in ChatGPT, your first job (and your first invoice) is working out which of those three they actually need.
The service, defined in four work streams
On the slide I'd define the service as four work streams, partly because that definition happens to be true. It opens with a baseline. You take twenty of the client's real buying queries and run them across the major engines, then screenshot every answer and log who got cited and how the client was described. Next is an extraction pass on their ten revenue-closest pages, restructured so the answers can be lifted out.
The third stream is a consistency pass, where you reconcile the client's name, category and pricing everywhere the engines read. Last comes a corroboration program. That's the reviews, mentions and community presence that decide what a model says about your client when their own site isn't in the room.
Weekly monitoring sits under all four and feeds a monthly report. Keep it in a spreadsheet or automate it with per-engine tracking tooling; that choice moves your margin, and the method stays the same either way.
Most of that list is work your agency already does, pointed at a new scoreboard, which ought to be a relief. The discipline carries over. What's new is the measurement layer and the weighting, since corroboration goes from a bit of PR garnish to a primary lever. If your team can run a proper content and SEO engagement, it can run this one. The gate-by-gate walkthrough in that guide works as your internal training doc.
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The first engagement, shaped as a pilot
I wouldn't sell anyone a retainer first. Sell a bounded pilot, and do it for your own protection as much as the client's.
The first week goes to the baseline, and that's the deliverable that changes the relationship. At some point your client watches ChatGPT recommend their competitor on their own money query, and that meeting does more for the engagement than any deck you'll build.
From week two through week ten you work through the cheapest fixes the baseline exposed. Extraction and consistency go first because they're fast and people can see them. Week twelve is the rerun and the verdict, presented as exhibits. Bring the before-and-after citation table and the description bugs you found and fixed, and put the competitor screenshot in too, dated and framed.
Then there's pricing. The market is a circus right now, and clients can see it from where they sit. In one r/ecommerce thread, a two-person Shopify store said they'd nearly paid three thousand dollars for an AI visibility audit plus four hundred a month for monitoring. Replies quoted everything from a full audit at four hundred fifty pounds down to fifty a month. One of them pointed out that monitoring tools now handle much of the base layer cheaply.
Do we even still need to hire an agency for this AI visibility stuff
We run a small Shopify store, just two of us, and almost paid an agency close to $3000 last month to audit how our brand shows up across ChatGPT and Gemini, plus $400 a month after that to keep monitoring it. I noticed there's already a bun...
You can make that spread work for you. Price against deliverables the client can verify, attach the baseline artifacts to a fixed fee, and your pilot holds up at almost any point in that range. The skeptical replies are warning small clients about the opposite: a proposal line that reads "AI visibility retainer, POA."
The conversation script, since the ask arrives confused
These engagements are won or lost in the intake conversation. When a client opens with "we want to show up in ChatGPT," don't answer with capabilities. Make a diagnostic offer: "Give me your five most valuable buying searches and thirty minutes, and I'll show you exactly who the AI engines recommend today and what they say about you." Then run those queries live while they're still on the call.
That call can go three ways, and I can't think of one that's bad for you. A client who's cited and described well trusts you more, because you didn't invent a problem for them. If a competitor owns the answers, the engagement sells itself and you won't need a single slide. And when the engines get the client wrong, you've found a concrete bug you can fix, which turns the talk from chasing a trend into repair work.
The script also screens out the panic cases, like the advertiser from the first thread who wanted to kill the channel bringing in three quarters of their leads. Evidence on a screen settles that LinkedIn-induced vertigo faster than anything reassuring you could say, and calmer clients buy better engagements.
Reporting that survives its second month
What will your report say in month three? If it's built on mention counts and answer appearances with no fixed query set, it'll say the numbers went up, and that won't mean anything. Those counts drift upward as the engines get chattier. That's the vanity-metric trap in this category, and teams walk into it fast.
Hold the query set constant and report four numbers. Citation share on each engine goes first, with description accuracy and the fixes you shipped beside it. Below those sit AI-referral conversion measured against the client's organic median and the branded search trend. I'd keep the slide to those four.
Expect clients to ask why each one is there. Agencies that can explain their own metrics are about to be rare and expensive, so work through the reasoning behind each number before your first report goes out.
The disintermediation question, answered honestly
The title of that Shopify thread asks the question agency owners should sit with: do we even still need an agency for this? I'm on the software side of the fence, and my answer is that tooling is eating the monitoring and production layers quickly. A two-person store that checks twenty prompts a month doesn't need a retainer for that part.
Tools still can't choose the right queries for a business they don't understand. They don't do corroboration work that lives on other people's websites, they don't rebuild pages, and nobody holds a tool accountable when the number doesn't move. One reply in that thread drew the line better than I could. An audit only earns a premium when it turns into work the client can't or won't do themselves.
So decide where your agency stands. If you resell dashboard access, you're standing in the path of every price drop the software industry has planned. If you use the dashboards to sell judgment and execution, and you'll answer for the result, you're selling the part that doesn't commoditize. I'd planned to soften that for this post and chose not to. The agency owners I respect most are repositioning right now, while the confusion premium still pays for the transition.
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Your own domain is the training ground
Almost nobody does this, and it pays back more than anything else here: run the whole discipline on your agency's own site for one quarter before you sell it to a client. Baseline your own twenty queries, and put "best [your specialty] agency" among them. Do your own extraction pass and fix the facts about you that contradict each other. Then go and earn your own mentions.
Ninety days on, you can walk into a pitch with screenshots of your own citations appearing. Solo freelancers can take the same path, as our guide to getting your first SEO and GEO clients shows.
Your team learns on a site where mistakes are free, and the awkward parts of the workflow show up before any client is watching. You also end up with the only sales asset in this category that can't be faked: proof the work did something for the seller. That counts double in a market where, as that thread showed, clients arrive pre-confused and half-skeptical. It's your case study and your credential, and your best answer when someone asks "why you and not a tool," for the price of practicing what you're about to charge for.
So start this week with your own baseline, which takes one hour. The four confused clients will still be confused next month, and you can be the agency in the room holding receipts instead of a package slide.
You're getting AI traffic. But do you know where it comes from?
RankControl credits every visit to the assistant that sent it: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok. Full source attribution, next to your Google traffic.
