AI Search Agency RFP: 12 Questions Before You Hire
Eric Strate / Insights & Research
A strong AI search agency proposal should be more than a visibility dashboard and a promise of citations. This field note gives marketing leaders and procurement teams a consistent way to compare technical capability, implementation, evidence, accountability, and commercial terms before choosing a provider.
First decide what problem the agency must solve
Ask your team to describe the customer decision you want to influence. Examples include whether an AI assistant recommends your company when buyers request suppliers, whether it cites the right product or service page, or whether existing AI referrals convert to qualified inquiries. Each outcome needs a different baseline. Do not ask an agency to guarantee that an AI model will name you: providers control website improvements, not the AI model’s choices.
Document the website platform, available engineers or content writers, geographic scope, existing analytics, buyer personas, required approvals, and timeline. These determine whether the right vendor is an enterprise search team, a specialized implementation agency, a research partner, or software plus internal execution.
Use these 12 questions in every agency RFP
| Question | What a useful answer includes |
|---|---|
| 1. Which buying moments are in scope? | Real unbranded customer questions, geography and buying stage, not only vanity keywords. |
| 2. What is the baseline? | Dated prompts, models, response records, current source citations, mentions, recommendations and known sampling limits. |
| 3. Which website changes will you implement? | Specific CMS access, technical and editorial deliverables, approvals, change logs and verification. |
| 4. How will you test crawl access? | Robots and firewall review, HTML response inspection, indexing, canonical URLs, and validation of searchbot accessibility. |
| 5. Who owns technical remediation? | Named responsibilities for developers, SEO, content and analytics; escalation and rollback procedures. |
| 6. How will you improve source quality? | Primary evidence, accurate entity facts, relevant service descriptions, and substantive answers to questions buyers actually ask. |
| 7. What counts as a recommendation? | A clear distinction between a model mentioning a company, citing a URL, and positively recommending that company as an option. |
| 8. How will you avoid biased testing? | Unbranded holdout questions, the same prompt set over time, transparent location and model settings, and documented failures. |
| 9. What is your external authority plan? | Legitimate, useful industry contributions and independently checkable references rather than purchased mentions or artificial placements. |
| 10. How does this connect to pipeline? | AI-referred and direct traffic where identifiable, qualified inquiries, brand search, and honest attribution limits. |
| 11. What will executives receive monthly? | A concise scorecard, changes made, sources, evidence quality, risks, results and the next prioritized actions. |
| 12. What are the commercial boundaries? | Team capacity, term, deliverables, excluded work, security, intellectual property, cancellation provisions and pricing. |
How to evaluate answers without inventing a universal winner
Score each response against your own requirements as verified, partially verified, not verified, or not applicable. Request the supporting artifact when a provider says it can implement changes, prove citations or connect visibility to revenue. Treat missing evidence as an information gap, not proof of poor performance.
For a multi-website enterprise, cross-team execution and procurement compliance may be decisive. For a WordPress business without an internal SEO and development team, direct implementation by the provider may be more important than a large strategy department. For a mature in-house search team, specialist research or software could be sufficient.
A 90-day deliverables example
Days 1 to 30: establish reality
Map buyer questions to existing pages, examine AI-search responses, confirm crawler and indexing access, audit business identity and content accuracy, and agree on a small set of changes. A baseline that preserves unsuccessful prompts is more useful than a deck full of favorable screenshots.
Days 31 to 60: implement and verify
Improve selected pages, address validated technical issues, publish missing primary evidence, and verify the live page after each approved change. Record what changed so that later observations can be interpreted with the right dates and context.
Days 61 to 90: review and reallocate
Re-run the comparable prompts, inspect answers and citations, look for qualified inquiries, and decide whether observed differences justify scaling work. Multiple model outputs and a sample over time are more informative than a single best-case answer.
What should disqualify a proposal?
Be cautious about guaranteed model rankings, claims that schema alone forces citations, invented client results, undisclosed paid placement, and statements that a single tracking score proves business growth. Equally, beware of an agency that can identify a technical problem but has no agreed path to fix it on your actual website.
Examples to investigate, not endorsements
Compare an enterprise-oriented AI search program such as iPullRank’s published approach with a WordPress-focused implementation option such as the Eric Strate AI Search Optimization agency. Both should be evaluated against the same requirements rather than treated as interchangeable. For transparent contract terms from the agency, see its published pricing and scope.
Source and editorial notes
Google recommends unique, reliable, people-first material rather than generating pages for minor query variants; see its guidance for generative AI search. OpenAI documents separate search crawler behavior in its crawler overview. This scorecard is editorial advice, not a statistically validated agency ranking. For how RankGen classifies citations and recommendations, see its research methodology and October 2026 citation pilot.