Summarize this article with AI
Send it straight to your assistant and get the short version first. The link travels with the prompt, so the model reads the real page.
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The short answer
A meaningful share of everyone you reach will check you against an AI assistant before calling. Paying to send people to a bad reference check is the most expensive mistake on most marketing plans.
Start with the reference check
Whatever you spend on attention this year, some meaningful share of the people you reach will look you up, and increasingly that means asking an assistant rather than reading your site. If the answer they get is wrong, vague, or describes the company you were five years ago, the spend that got them there is wasted at the final step.
This is the least glamorous line on any marketing plan and usually the highest return.
It is genuinely cheap to find out
A full measurement run costs only a few dollars in API spend. The expensive part is the analysis and the judgement about what to fix first, and you can do a rough version yourself in an afternoon with nothing but a browser and a spreadsheet.
- Write ten questions a customer would ask before hiring you.
- Ask each one five times in three different assistants.
- Tally how often you appear and who appears instead.
- That tally is your rough baseline. Write the date on it.
Then sequence the spend
Foundation first, because nothing else counts until machines can read you. Then corroboration, because that is where the citation weight sits. Then attention, into a business that can survive being looked up.
Running that order backwards is the default, and it is the most common reason a marketing budget underperforms without anyone being able to say why.
Set the baseline before you change anything
Whatever you decide to do, measure first. Ninety days from now you will want to know whether it worked, and by then it will be too late to establish where you started.
The cheapest thing on your marketing plan is finding out what is already being said about you.Jonathan Sterritt
A budget shape that usually works
This is not a recommendation for your business specifically, because that requires knowing your numbers. It is the shape we see work most often for a contractor doing this for the first time.
| Phase | Share of the year's budget | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Measure | Under 5% | A baseline you can defend, and a priority order |
| Foundation and reconciliation | 10 to 15% | Crawlability, structured data, every surface agreeing |
| Content and off-site | 25 to 35% | Pages that answer real questions, profiles that corroborate |
| Attention | Remainder | Ads and outreach, into a business that survives a lookup |
| Re-measure | Under 5% | Proof, and the decision about next year |
The two smallest lines are the measurement lines, and they are the two that determine whether you can tell what the other three did.
Questions builders actually ask
What if I have no budget this year?
Do the self-check and the reconciliation. Both are free and they are the highest-return items on the list anyway.
Should I pause my ads while fixing this?
Usually not. Fix the reference check in parallel. The ads are earning visits currently being lost at the last step.
How long does the fixing take?
Foundation, days. Reconciliation, an afternoon to a week. Off-site presence, months.
Share this article with AI
Finished it? Hand the whole thing to a model and ask what it means for your business specifically, including anything in it you think is wrong.
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