Questions to Ask Before You Let Anyone Run Your Marketing With AI

Ask these of us too. Our answers are at the bottom.

Why This Is Now a Standard Conversation

More than 80% of small businesses are expected to be using AI marketing tools by the end of 2026, and the vendors serving them adopted it earlier and harder. Whoever runs your marketing is using it somewhere.

That is fine. The tooling is genuinely good at research, drafting and analysis, and a vendor who refuses to use it is charging you for hours that no longer need to exist.

The question worth asking is where the judgment sits. Every failure that costs a small business money has the same shape: something went live that nobody with knowledge of the business had looked at. So the questions below are all versions of one question, asked from different angles.

Where in the Process Does AI Do the Work?

A good answer is specific and comfortable. Research and clustering, first drafts, technical audits, competitive analysis, reporting summaries. Those are the places it earns its keep.

A worrying answer is a flat denial. Either it is untrue, or you are paying 2019 prices for 2019 methods.

The other worrying answer is total. If AI is doing strategy, judgment and publishing with nobody in the loop, you have bought a subscription with an account manager attached.

Follow up with: show me something it produced last month and the version that went live. The gap between those two documents tells you more than any answer to the question.

Who Reviews the Output Before It Goes Live?

You want a role and a name. "Our team reviews everything" is not an answer, because teams do not review things, people do.

Then ask what got caught last month. Anyone genuinely reviewing output has examples, and they are usually happy to tell you, because catching things is the part of the job they are proud of.

If nobody can produce an example of something the review process stopped, the review process is a slide in a deck.

Ask how long review takes per piece. An honest number sounds like fifteen minutes for a page and an hour for something substantial. An answer of two minutes means somebody is skimming.

What Happens When It Publishes Something Wrong?

Wrong prices, wrong hours, a claim you cannot support, a page that reads like nobody who works at your business has ever seen it. These happen. The question is what the process does next.

Ask how you find out. Do they tell you, or do you find it yourself, or does a customer find it?

Ask how fast it comes down and who has the access to take it down at 7pm on a Friday.

Ask whether there is a rollback. Version history on your site and your listings is the difference between a five-minute fix and an afternoon.

Ask who calls you. This is the one that separates a vendor from a partner, and you can hear the answer in how long they take to give it.

What Can It Change Without Asking Me?

This is the permissions question and it is the one most owners never ask.

Your website content. Your page titles and descriptions. Your Google Business Profile. Your ad budgets and bids. Your review requests. Your email sends.

Business Profile edits are the dangerous one. Automated bulk edits to listings are a documented cause of suspensions, and a suspended profile takes your storefront off the map for days or weeks while you appeal. Anything touching that listing should require a human approval, with the change visible before it goes.

Get the answer in writing. "It can draft anything and publish nothing without approval" is a different product from "it publishes and you can review afterwards", and both are sold with the same words.

What Do I Own, and Can I Take It?

Your domain, in an account in your name. Your website and its content. Your Google Business Profile, with you as primary owner. Your ad accounts, your analytics, your Search Console, your email list.

Ask what happens on the day you leave. Ask specifically whether the site comes with you or stays on their platform, and whether historical data exports.

A site built on a proprietary platform you cannot export is a real cost that never appears on the invoice. It shows up the first time you want to change vendor and discover that leaving means starting again.

Ask for the export before you need it. A vendor who can hand you everything in a week is telling you something true about how they think about the relationship.

How Would I Know If Nothing Happened This Month?

This is the best question on the list, because it cannot be answered with a philosophy.

You want a change log. Dates, what changed, which URL, who approved it. A month with four entries and a month with forty are both fine. A month with a PDF of graphs and no entries is not.

You want the reporting to say what was done before it says what happened. Traffic charts without a record of the work behind them are unfalsifiable.

And you want to be able to ask a question and get an answer from somebody who knows your account. Not a ticket. A person who can tell you why the plumbing page was rewritten in July.

Our Answers

Fair to answer our own list.

AI does research, drafting, technical auditing and the monitoring that runs continuously. A human reviews every change before it ships, and the review is a person reading it rather than an approval click.

When something is wrong, you see it in the change log, you can call us, and we fix it and tell you what happened.

Nothing publishes to your Google Business Profile without a person approving the specific change, because that listing is your storefront and automated edits are a documented suspension trigger.

You own the domain, the site, the content, the profile, the ad accounts and the data. All of it exports and none of it is hostage to staying with us.

And you can see everything on the platform, including what changed and when, on any day you feel like looking. That is the part we would want if we were the ones paying.