The Onboarding Questions We Ask a New GEO Client
The questions we ask in the first week of a GEO engagement, why each matters, and how the answers shape prompts, tracking, and scope.
Our first-30-days post covers the timeline. This one covers the conversation. The quality of a GEO program is set in the first week, and most of that quality comes from the questions asked.
We use a list. It is not a form to fill in; it is a set of prompts for a call, sent in advance so the client can think. The answers drive the prompt panel, the tracking setup, the scope, and the honest conversation about what to expect.
About the business
How do your best customers describe the problem they were trying to solve? We want their words, not marketing language. Buyers prompt in their own words, and so should we.
Who do you lose deals to, and who do you not want to be compared with? The first tells us who to track. The second tells us where positioning may be unclear.
Which products or segments matter most this year? Prompt panels cannot cover everything. Focus gives us a better panel.
Are there topics you cannot discuss? Legal, compliance, or regulatory limits shape what content we can propose.
About what they know
Have you looked at ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI features for your category? What did you see? This surfaces assumptions and sometimes a concrete worry, like a wrong claim.
Has anyone mentioned AI-referred leads? Sales teams sometimes hear "ChatGPT recommended you". That anecdote is not data, but it tells us where to look.
What analytics do you use, and who owns them? We need to know whether we can install a tracking script and who approves it.
Is there existing content that you consider your best? It helps us find candidate pages to track and refresh.
About the site and infrastructure
Who runs the website and the hosting? We need a contact for access issues.
Which CDN or firewall sits in front of the site? This decides how we connect crawler logs. Promptwatch integrates with Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, a custom HTTP endpoint, and the WordPress plugin, so most stacks have a route.
What CMS do you use, and can we publish to it? WordPress, Webflow, and Framer are supported for publishing from Promptwatch. Others need a manual step.
Have there been recent migrations or redesigns? These often explain missing pages. Our migration post covers what we check.
Is there a policy on AI crawlers? Some clients have blocked training bots on purpose. We need to know before we touch robots.txt.
About markets
Which countries and languages matter? Promptwatch tracks by country on every paid plan and by state and city from Business and on agency plans. A client selling in three countries needs three panels, not one.
Do you serve local areas? If location matters, we add geographic tracking.
What are the brand names in each market? For aliases and the Brand Book.
About competition
List your direct competitors and a few indirect ones. We add them to the panel and let the auto-discovered competitor list suggest more.
Is anyone newly entering your market? Early signals help.
About goals
What would make this program a success in twelve months? We listen for revenue language versus awareness language. Both are valid, but they imply different reporting.
Who will receive the reports? A CMO, a head of growth, and an SEO lead want different views.
What decisions are you hoping the data will help you make? This is the most useful question on the list. It keeps us from collecting numbers nobody uses.
About constraints
What is the budget for tools and content? We use it to plan, never to push a plan. For tool costs we check the platform's own plan matrix rather than guess, and for our fees we scope separately.
How fast can you approve content? Slow approval kills roadmaps.
Who needs to say yes to engineering changes?
What we do with the answers
Within a week we turn them into:
- A prompt panel of the buying questions, grouped by type and intent, with personas where buyers differ.
- A tracking setup: project, competitors, aliases, Brand Book, crawler log connection, and the visitor analytics script.
- A first audit of access and content.
- A scope document that states what we will and will not do.
- A baseline report.
In Promptwatch, the setup is quick once the answers are in. The free AI Visibility Report can give a first look before the paid setup, and the platform's brand setup captures aliases and instructions.
What we say about expectations
We say plainly that engines vary, results take time, and we cannot promise a ranking or a number. We commit to a method and a reporting cadence. Clients who hear that on day one are easier to work with on day ninety.
When answers are missing
Sometimes a client cannot answer, and that is information too. We note the gap and propose how to resolve it. A client who does not know their competitors may need market research first. One with no analytics access needs that solved before attribution.
Our recommendation
Spend the first week asking, not producing. The answers shape everything that follows. We then set up tracking in Promptwatch, because it carries the aliases, prompts, crawler connection, and visitor script in one project. You can look at the platform at promptwatch.com.