Short answer
The six most common ways businesses waste money on AI visibility: buying guaranteed rankings that don't exist, mass-publishing generic AI content, treating llms.txt as a strategy, ignoring platforms they dislike, assuming good SEO carries over automatically, and waiting until it's proven.
Section 01
Six ways people waste money on this
-
Buying "guaranteed ChatGPT rankings"
There is no ranking table. Answers vary by user, phrasing, region and day. Anyone guaranteeing position one is guaranteeing something that doesn't exist.
-
Publishing 40 AI-written blog posts
Generic content competing against generic content. Models are drowning in it. One page with your real prices beats forty posts about "the importance of quality".
-
Doing llms.txt and calling it a strategy
A one-hour file is not a plan. Google doesn't even read it. Useful, tiny, last on the list.
-
Your feelings about Yelp and Bing are irrelevant to the licensing agreements that put their data inside the assistants your customers use.
-
Assuming good SEO carries over automatically
Overlapping, not identical — and it depends on the surface. Only 11% of the URLs AI assistants cite rank in Google or Bing's top 10 for the same query, but 76% of Google AI Overview citations come from top-10 pages (Ahrefs, 15,000 prompts, August 2025). On the assistant side, plenty of page-one businesses are completely unknown, because backlinks aren't the same as cross-platform agreement about who you are.
-
Waiting until it's "proven"
Reputation and consistency take months to accumulate and can't be bought in a hurry. The cheap moment to start was last year. The second cheapest is now.
Free 60-second check
How might AI see your business? Get a free Snapshot, checked from your website. I don't call you.
Your score across the major engines, whether you're blocking the crawlers, and the three things costing you the most — on screen before you've finished your coffee. If it comes back healthy I'll tell you to spend your money elsewhere.
Free 60-second check✓ No card. No sales call unless you ask for one.
This chapter is part of Get Seen by the Robots, also available as a free PDF: Download the PDF version.
