Guide 01
Make your company facts verifiable
Start with the exact legal and trading names, official domains, product categories, service regions and contact routes. For each claim, record who approved it and which public page or source document supports it. This matters especially when a product has different specifications or permitted claims in different countries.
Put the approved facts where a buyer can read them on the official website. A structured-data field should describe visible, supported page content; it cannot turn an unsupported certification or customer claim into evidence. Check that the English page is crawlable, that the navigation uses real links and that the same company identity appears on relevant public profiles.
A useful handoff is a short fact sheet with claim, source, owner and review date columns. It gives writers, translators and reviewers one place to resolve differences before the pages go live.
Guide 02
Record an AI answer baseline you can repeat
Write down the buyer questions before testing. Separate discovery questions, supplier comparisons, product-fit questions and objections. Keep the target market, language and platform beside every question. If a platform or prompt changes later, show the new series separately instead of merging it into the old one.
Save the date, full prompt, full response, visible sources and the page URLs that were cited. Mark three different observations: the brand was mentioned, the official site was cited, or the answer explicitly recommended a purchase. They are not interchangeable. A small set of answers is a record of those observations, not a stable market-wide percentage.
Repeat the same question set after publishing changes. Review inaccurate statements and missing citations individually, then trace them back to the official page and its supporting sources. The raw answers matter more than a single summary score.
Guide 03
Read the result without promising a citation
A page being published, discovered, crawled and cited are separate events. When the official page is absent from an answer, first check whether the page can be reached and whether its claims are clear. Then inspect the answer's actual sources. Do not infer that a single missing citation proves the page is blocked or low quality.
Compare answers under the recorded conditions and keep the original evidence. If the question set, sample size, platform or time window changed, explain the difference before using a trend line. Enquiries and revenue require their own attribution records; an AI mention alone does not establish a sale.
The service provider can be held to approved facts, published pages, agreed content volume and transparent re-test records. Third-party AI platforms decide what to crawl and show. This boundary should be explicit in a proposal and in its acceptance criteria.