AI visibility (GEO)

Your clients are asking AI before they ask you

AI search tools don't stop at one answer. They suggest follow-up questions about certification, price, turnaround and specialist fields, and they answer them with specific facts. Most translation agencies keep those facts in their inbox, not on their website. This article shows you how to move them.

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By Luísa Jacinto, founder of Agência Amigus. Before starting the agency, I spent two years as a project manager at a Portuguese LSP.

Before a client fills in your quote form, there's a good chance they've already asked AI about you.

Not about you by name, perhaps. They typed something like "best translation agency for legal documents in Lisbon" into ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode and read the answer. Then they clicked on one of the questions the AI suggested next.

That second step is where most agencies quietly disappear.

What do clients ask AI after the first answer?

AI search suggests the next question, and then the next. For a translation buyer, those follow-ups look like this:

  • Do you do certified translations?
  • How much do you charge per word?
  • How long will it take?
  • Can you handle medical or legal terminology?

These questions are not random. They are the doubts someone has right before they decide. In a recent Search Engine Land case study, Claudia Tomina mapped every follow-up Google's AI Mode suggested for a law firm query. The result was a map of the real decisions clients face. Swap the law firm for a translation agency and the logic holds: the follow-ups tell you exactly what your website should already be answering.

Why do AI tools skip most translation agency websites?

Read five translation agency service pages in a row and you'll struggle to tell them apart. "Professional translators." "Fast turnaround." "Over 100 language pairs." "Quality guaranteed."

When every page says the same thing, an AI has nothing distinctive to quote. It needs a specific fact to answer a specific question, and generic copy offers none.

The details that would set an agency apart usually exist. They just live somewhere else.

Where are the best answers hiding?

When I was a PM, the same questions came in every week. Does this need a certified translation, or will a standard one do? Can you deliver by Friday? Why is this quote higher than the last one? Do you have someone who knows pharmaceutical terminology?

We answered every one of them carefully, one email at a time. Almost none of those answers made it onto the website.

Those answers are exactly what an AI is looking for. They were the most useful content we had, and nobody outside the inbox could see them. Today, neither can an AI.

How can you map your own follow-up questions?

You can do this in an afternoon. The exercise below is adapted from Tomina's workflow.

  1. Start with a real buyer query. Write it the way a client would, not the way you would: "certified translation of a birth certificate for a UK visa", not "official document translation services". Run it in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode.
  2. Follow the follow-ups. Click through the suggested questions and note them down. After three or four queries, the same ones start to repeat. Those repeats are your content map.
  3. Separate what you know from what you assume. For each question, mark whether your answer is verified, comes from experience or is a guess. Only publish what you can stand behind.
  4. Ask the people who know. Your PMs, translators and reviewers hold the specifics. A 20-minute recorded conversation with each of them will give you more usable answers than a week of writing from scratch.

What should you write down?

The goal is not more copy. It's the specific facts only your agency can give.

  • Real turnaround times. Not "fast", but "a 3,000-word technical document usually takes three working days".
  • How certification works. When a client needs a certified or sworn translation, what that involves in your country, and what it adds to time and cost.
  • How you price. If you'd rather not publish rates, publish what moves a quote: word count, specialist field, urgency, formatting, minimum fees. Clients mostly want to understand why a quote looks the way it does.
  • The language pairs and specialist fields you actually cover. Name them, and say who works on them.
  • Your process. Who translates, who reviews, how terminology is checked, and what happens if the client isn't happy.

Write each answer in plain language, as close as you can to the question a client would ask. Use the question itself as the heading.

Will this get your agency recommended by AI?

Nothing guarantees that, because AI answers change from one day to the next. But our industry has always been good at answering questions; we just tend to answer them in private. Moving those answers from the inbox to the website gives AI something real to work with, and it helps the human reader too.

I'll be sharing more over the next few weeks on how language companies can show up in AI answers.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you: what's the question your PMs answer every single week? Tell me on LinkedIn.

Sources

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