Had a sales call yesterday

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Morning all. Had a sales call yesterday that left me uneasy. The agency guaranteed we would appear in ChatGPT answers for our main service terms within sixty days, and offered a package of best-of mentions across a network of sites they said they control. It sounded impressive on the call and considerably less impressive an hour later. I’ve been burned by link schemes before, back when that was the fashion, so maybe I’m primed to be suspicious. Is any of this legitimate, or is it the same old trick in new clothes? Would appreciate a sanity check.

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Trust the second instinct. Nobody controls model output, so a guaranteed position in a generated answer is a promise the seller has no way to keep. The network of sites is the bigger problem: pushing a brand into thin sites to manufacture best-of mentions was catalogued by Microsoft as AI recommendation poisoning in February 2026, which makes it a documented attack pattern rather than a tactic. A LinkedIn rundown of nine Dubai AEO providers https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-aeo-agency-dubai-2026-i-ranked-nine-including-myself-haseeb-ijaz-0trtf/ has a red flags section covering this one and a few others worth memorising. Legitimate placement on real platforms costs more and moves slower, three to six months rather than sixty days.

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