Providers are popping up that promise a spot in ChatGPT answers, sometimes even with a guarantee attached. That sounds reassuring, and it is exactly the promise this field cannot deliver on.

01 / the promiseWhy no one can guarantee a position

Because there is no fixed position to guarantee. An AI answer is composed anew for each conversation. Ask the same question twice, and you get two answers that can differ in wording, in structure and in the sources mentioned.

On top of that, every platform makes its own choices. Google AI Overviews leans on the regular search results, ChatGPT looks more broadly, Perplexity weighs recency heavily. Appearing as a source on one platform does not automatically mean visibility on another.

The last reason is the simplest: the algorithm does not belong to your supplier. No agency has a direct line to OpenAI, Google or Anthropic through which it can arrange a mention. Anyone who guarantees a position is therefore promising something they have no control over.

Anyone who guarantees a position is selling a certainty they do not possess.

02 / the parallelWhat no cure no pay means here

No cure no pay offers less protection here than it sounds, because the risk does not lie in the payment but in the definition of cure. The construction is older than AI: in online marketing the promise that you only pay for results has existed for years. Whoever writes the guarantee determines what counts as delivered, and that definition usually works out in favour of the one writing it.

With AI answers that problem is bigger than with classic search positions. A position in Google is at least a measurable fact on a fixed results page. An AI answer is not: it changes per session, and without an agreed measurement method a provider can afterwards cite every favourable moment as proof and dismiss every unfavourable one as coincidence.

Press further and the guarantee can start to shift. A top position becomes a mention, a mention becomes visibility, and visibility turns out at delivery to mean that content about your topic has been published. Each step in that shift is defensible, and the end point has little left to do with what you thought you were buying. Anyone who only gets the guarantee defined at delivery has not bought a guarantee but a form of words.

03 / what is possibleThe method, the measurement and the benchmark

What a serious provider can guarantee: how the work is done, how it is measured, and that you get to see the outcome. That starts with a benchmark fixed in advance: which search queries count, on which platforms, and what counts as visible. A baseline measurement follows, and then a remeasurement at fixed moments using the same method. The difference between the two is the proof, in both directions. How such a measurement works is set out in how do you measure AI visibility. What we ourselves commit to is set out on the guarantee page.

What that looks like in practice: a monthly report that shows, for each agreed search query, whether you appear as a source, where that differed from the previous measurement, and what was done about it that month. Nothing more than that. A report that mainly shows graphs about impressions and reach but does not go through the agreed queries answers a different question than the agreed benchmark.

A fair arrangement also has an exit. If the remeasurement shows no movement, the provider should say so themselves and advise stopping. A provider that can only upsell and never advise against continuing has an interest that does not align with yours.

04 / the testFour questions for any provider

Whoever you are considering, us or someone else, ask these four questions before you sign. For each question it states what a good answer looks like, and what answer is a red flag.

The four questions test the same principle from four angles: is the arrangement fixed before the work starts, or filled in afterwards. A provider who answers all four fluently and concretely does not need to give a guarantee; the arrangements themselves are then your protection. If an answer stays vague, bear in mind that this is exactly the point you will be having a conversation about later.

For completeness: if your site does not yet have a substantive foundation, this whole question does not yet apply. First something needs to exist that an AI can actually cite; only then does measuring become meaningful. What such a first measurement involves is set out on the page about the scan.

This text was produced with AI assistance and checked and approved by a human before publication.