What a local business should ask an AI marketing tool.

You'll be pitched a lot of AI marketing this year. Most of it can write. The questions below are about everything around the writing: whose facts, whose approval, and what you're left with. They work for software and for agencies alike.

1. Where do the facts on my pages come from?

A good answer: from your own records, with you asked to fill the gaps. A worrying answer: "the AI researches your industry".

Pages built from the open web sound like everyone else's, and can be wrong about you: services you don't offer, towns you don't cover, prices you've never charged. Ask how the tool learns your prices, service area and real jobs, and what happens when it doesn't know something.

2. What goes live without my say-so?

A good answer names each thing that can happen without you, and the list is short or empty.

Publishing pages, posting on your profile, replying to reviews, emailing customers and changing ad spend are all things a tool might do on its own. Ask which of those need your approval, and whether that's a setting someone could switch off.

3. Do you promise rankings?

A good answer is no. Nobody controls Google's results.

What a provider can promise is the work: which pages, which fixes, which listings, by when, and an honest report of what changed. "Page one in 30 days" is a sales line, not a plan.

4. How do you ask for reviews?

A good answer: every customer, the same way, with nothing offered in return.

Google's policy doesn't allow asking only happy customers, and calls offering discounts or free goods for reviews "strictly prohibited".¹² A tool that sends happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form is putting your profile at risk. Our guide to asking for reviews has the details.

5. What will the monthly report show me?

A good answer: a short report in plain words, where every number says where it came from.

Ask to see a sample. Look for what was done, what changed, and what's next, with the source of each figure (your Search Console, your analytics, your call log). Be wary of numbers with no source and charts with no plain-language summary.

6. How many pages will you make, and why?

A good answer ties each page to a real reason: a service you offer, a town you've worked in, a question customers ask.

Google's spam policies describe "many pages … generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users" as scaled content abuse, however they're made.³ A big page count is not a selling point. We wrote more about this in SEO written from your real business.

7. If I leave, what do I keep?

A good answer: your website, your accounts, your content and your data, with a way to take them with you.

Ask who owns the domain, the Business Profile, the ad accounts and the pages written for you, and whether you can export your records. Get the answer in writing before you start.

Our own answers

Comparing options side by side? See our honest comparisons, or how a minion takes on a job.