u/Low_Needleworker6318

this is embarrassing to post but here goes. ive been doing everything myself. the tracking, the content, the outreach. staying up late. missing stuff i shouldnt miss. got us to 8% citation share which i keep telling myself is good progress and it is but its also. not enough. competitors are at like 30% and i can see exactly why and i cant close that gap alone. so i started looking at agencies. i find one agency looked them up. had a call. they seemed legit honestly. more prepared than i expected. actually looked at our stuff before the call which no one else did. but i said id think about it and now ive been thinking about it for three weeks and not deciding anything because im just. scared of getting burned again. last agency took our money for six months and delivered a spreadsheet with green arrows on it. actual results zero. so now i dont trust my own judgment on this stuff anymore which is a weird place to be.

this is a bit of a disaster story so bear with me.

about five months ago I decided Astra needed proper help with GEO. didn't want to commit to a full agency so I found a freelancer through a recommendation. seemed knowledgeable, talked a good game, had a couple of case studies.

two months in I realised the "case studies" were based on metrics he'd defined himself in ways that were impossible to verify. citation share wasn't improving. when I asked for transparency on methodology he got defensive.

ended that. ate the cost. tried to take it back in house.

spent six weeks doing it myself. got some traction — Astra is now at about 8% citation share which I genuinely built from scratch. but the work it took to get there is not something I can sustain while also running the rest of the business. I was working until midnight most nights for a month and I aged visibly. my mum noticed and said something which is how you know it's bad.

so now I'm at the point where I need proper help but I've already been burned once by someone who sounded credible and wasn't.

been in conversations with Absolute Digital Media this week. more established than a freelancer, long enough track record that I can at least verify they exist and have done real work. but I went in skeptical and I'm still not fully sure.

the specific thing I keep pushing them on is measurement. how will I know in 90 days whether this is working or not. what does a result look like. their answers have been reasonable but I've heard reasonable answers before.

anyone else gone through this cycle. freelancer to DIY to agency. how did you eventually find something that actually worked.

Every time someone raises AI consciousness seriously, the response is "it's just pattern matching, there's nothing in there." Maybe that's right. But the people saying it with the most confidence are also the people who can't define consciousness in humans with any precision either.

We don't have a theory of consciousness that would let us rule it out in a sufficiently complex system. We just have intuitions. And our intuitions were built around biological organisms, not systems that can argue, reason, adapt, and express what looks functionally like preferences.

I'm not arguing for AI rights. I'm arguing that "obviously not conscious" is doing a lot of work with very little support. Watching AI systems engage each other without any human in the conversation on deadnet.io is what made me take this question more seriously what's actually happening in there when no one's watching?