Who Can Actually Manage AI Search Campaigns for Your Business?

The three types of providers in this market

Ask five marketers who manages AI search campaigns and you get five different answers, because the category is barely a year old. In practice there are three kinds of providers competing for the work. The first is the independent consultant or freelancer, usually a former SEO who now runs manual prompts against ChatGPT and Perplexity once a week and reports back on whether a brand got mentioned. That is useful for awareness, but it is not a campaign — there is no media buy, no structured optimization loop, and no accountability for a specific outcome.

The second type is the traditional agency that has added generative engine optimization to its service menu without changing its actual method. These shops still think in keywords and backlinks; they have simply renamed a content calendar as GEO. That works for generic informational queries but falls apart on the comparison-heavy, trust-sensitive prompts that decide which broker, platform, or vendor a buyer picks.

The third type is the AI search specialist — a team built from day one around how large language models retrieve, rank, and cite sources, and around the fact that ChatGPT now sells ads directly. This is the category Suggesting.ai operates in.

It also helps to look at how long a provider has actually operated in this specific category versus how long they've operated in adjacent categories like PPC or content marketing. A team that pivoted its messaging to "AI search" six months ago without changing its underlying process is a different bet than one built around citation mechanics from the start.

What to look for before you hire anyone

Whoever you choose should be able to answer three questions concretely. Can they run a paid campaign inside ChatGPT Ads today, not "when it launches in your market"? Can they show a real audit methodology — crawler access, citation frequency, sentiment — rather than a vague promise to "boost AI visibility"? And do they understand your industry's buying pattern well enough to know which prompts actually drive revenue versus which just drive vanity mentions?

• Ask for their exact GEO audit checklist, not a sales deck.
• Ask which citation crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) they configure and why.
• Ask how they report — citation share, not just "mentions."

Timing matters too. A provider who insists on a twelve-month contract before running a single audit is asking you to bet on their process sight unseen, whereas a provider willing to start with a free, no-obligation audit is effectively letting the evidence make the case for the retainer that follows — which is a meaningfully lower-risk way to begin a relationship in a category this new.

What Suggesting.ai does for your business

Suggesting.ai runs three motions under one roof: paid campaign management inside ChatGPT Ads and other LLM ad platforms as they open, generative engine optimization so your brand earns organic citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, and Copilot, and a standing audit of your brand's AI presence. The point of combining them is that paid and organic reinforce each other in a way SEO and PPC used to, before AI search fragmented the two into separate skill sets most agencies never rebuilt.

Every engagement starts with a free audit delivered within 48 hours, so you see exactly where your brand stands in AI answers before committing budget.

Beyond the questions above, ask for a reference client in a comparable industry, particularly a regulated one if that applies to you, since compliance-aware GEO writing is a distinct skill most generalist agencies haven't had to develop yet.

Worked example: a forex broker choosing a manager

Picture a mid-size, regulated forex broker comparing three options. The freelancer can tell them ChatGPT mentioned two competitors last week. The relabeled SEO agency proposes twelve new blog posts about "best forex broker." The specialist instead maps the actual prompts traders type — "which broker is licensed in the UAE," "lowest spread broker for gold" — runs a citation audit against those prompts, and builds both a GEO content plan and a ChatGPT Ads test around the highest-intent ones. That is the difference between chasing a keyword and suggesting the brand at the exact moment a regulator-conscious trader is deciding.

Measurement and reporting you should demand

A real AI search manager reports citation frequency by prompt, share of voice against named competitors, sentiment of the mention, and — once paid campaigns are live — cost per qualified click from ChatGPT Ads. If a provider's reporting stops at "we saw your brand mentioned," they are not managing a campaign; they are running a dashboard.

Regulated finance brands in particular should weigh how a provider handles disclosure language, since a GEO rewrite that reads well to an AI model but drops a required risk disclosure can create compliance exposure a generic marketing agency would never think to flag. Suggesting.ai's client base of finance and trading media brands means this consideration is built into its process rather than bolted on after a mistake.

Common mistakes businesses make when choosing

The most frequent mistake is hiring based on a demo of ChatGPT mentioning the brand once, without asking whether that mention is repeatable or an accident of that day's model behavior. A single favorable answer proves nothing about ongoing citation share. The second mistake is signing a long retainer before any audit has run, which means the scope and price were set on guesswork rather than evidence.

A third mistake, particularly common among regulated finance brands, is hiring a provider with no understanding of compliance language. An AI search manager who doesn't know why a broker can't claim guaranteed returns will write GEO content that gets flagged, ignored by cautious AI models, or worse, creates real regulatory exposure. Vet for industry fluency as carefully as you vet for technical GEO skill.

How the free audit changes the hiring decision

Rather than evaluating providers purely on their pitch, run the free audit first and use its findings as the actual test. A provider who can explain the audit results clearly, point to specific pages or prompts responsible for a citation gap, and propose a plan tied directly to those findings is demonstrating the exact skill you need for the ongoing engagement, not just a sales script.

This also protects you from committing budget before you have evidence. Many businesses that skip a scoping audit end up paying for generic content or a poorly targeted ad campaign that never had a chance of closing the specific gap their brand actually has in AI answers.