Third Coast AI: frequently asked questions
Last updated October 14, 2026. Written by the Third Coast AI team.
Third Coast AI is an AEO and GEO consultancy in Holland, Michigan, that works in person in West Michigan and remotely across the United States, covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, starts every engagement with a three-week audit priced as a fixed fee quoted after a short scoping call, and does not build AI software, offer general AI consulting, or run SEO or paid media programs. The questions below are the ones prospective clients ask most, answered in two or three sentences each so they can be read quickly, or quoted by an engine, without a sales call.
Where an answer has a longer version on the site we link to it, and the about page gathers the same facts in one place.
Where is Third Coast AI, and how does it work with clients?
Where is Third Coast AI based?
In Holland, Michigan, on the Lake Michigan shore of West Michigan, and we work from there with companies across the state and the country.
Do you work with companies outside Michigan?
Yes. We work remotely with companies anywhere in the United States, and the method is the same wherever the client is; only the list of local sources the engines cite changes from market to market.
Do you meet clients in person?
In West Michigan, yes: Grand Rapids, Holland, Zeeland, Grand Haven, Muskegon, Kalamazoo and the surrounding towns. Readouts for regional clients usually happen in the client's conference room.
How do I contact Third Coast AI?
Email hello@third-coast.ai or use the form on the home page. We reply within two business days with whether an audit makes sense and what it would cover.
Is Third Coast AI an agency or a consultancy?
A consultancy, and a narrow one. We do answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, and we deliver it directly to companies and under agencies' names.
Who owns the prompt bank and the raw answers after an audit?
You do. The audit is delivered with the prompt set and the raw answers so you can re-run it yourself or hand it to another team.
Which services does Third Coast AI offer, and which does it not?
What does Third Coast AI do?
We find out which companies the AI engines name when your buyers ask, why they chose those companies, and then we do the on-site and off-site work that puts your company in the answer. The four services are the audit, the GEO content program, the citation and entity program and white-label AEO for agencies.
Do you do SEO?
We focus on AEO and GEO. Classic SEO health still underpins AI visibility, so the audit flags crawl, index and rendering problems that keep engines from reading you, but we do not run keyword or link-building programs, and for a full SEO engagement we refer you out or partner with a firm that does.
Do you run paid media?
No. If paid search or paid social is part of what you need, we refer you to people who do that work or partner with your existing agency.
Do you build AI software, chatbots or agents?
Not any more. Third Coast AI no longer builds AI software or automation for clients; the company does AEO and GEO only.
Do you offer general AI consulting?
No. We do not advise on how a company should adopt AI across its operations. Our only subject is how the AI engines answer buyer questions in your category.
Do you write the website content?
Yes, within the GEO content program, where a typical month is four to eight pages written or rebuilt, each aimed at a named prompt cluster. If you have a writer on staff, the program can be scoped as briefs, publish gate and verification only.
Is the entity program a PR service?
Partly. It earns mentions on the sources the engines cite for your category, reconciles your profiles, creates a Wikidata item and closes the schema sameAs chain. We do not buy placements or disguise paid coverage as earned.
Can you get us a Wikipedia page?
Only if you meet Wikipedia's notability standard, which most mid-sized companies do not yet. We always create a Wikidata item, and any Wikipedia draft we prepare discloses our conflict of interest as the rules require.
Do you work with agencies?
Yes. We deliver audits, content and entity work under an agency's name in its templates, or we run one real engagement with the agency's team and hand over the prompt bank, the gate and the reporting format.
How much does it cost, and how long does it take?
How much does the audit cost?
It is a fixed fee for one brand in one market, quoted after a short scoping call, and it is credited against the first month if you continue into a program. Each additional market or brand adds a week and a fee adjustment.
How are the programs priced?
As monthly retainers that depend on page volume, whether we write or you do, and the number of target sources for entity work. Fees are quoted after a short scoping call.
Is there a minimum term?
The audit has no minimum. The content and entity programs run on a six-month initial term and then month to month, because the publish, index and re-run loop takes roughly that long to show a trend rather than noise.
Does Third Coast AI publish a rate card?
Not on the site. Ask and we will send the current rate card the same day; the pricing guide explains how agencies and tools price the work in general.
How long does the audit take?
About three weeks for one brand in one market: intake and prompt bank in week one, the runs, citation reads and proof audit in week two, the plan and readout in week three.
How long before the engines change what they say about us?
Corrections to factual errors can show within weeks of the corrected page being indexed. Being named for competitive prompts builds over months, and six months is a reasonable horizon for a trend. The timeline page goes into detail.
What do you need from us during the audit?
About two hours in week one to talk through buyers, services, markets and competitors, read access to your analytics and Search Console, and a list of the claims you can prove.
Does the method depend on particular engines or tools?
Which AI engines do you cover?
ChatGPT with web search on, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini with grounding on, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. The weight given to each depends on your category and where your buyers ask.
Which tools do you use?
PromptWatch and Profound for ongoing tracking, and our own prompt miner for the retrieval-on runs, because the miner captures the engines' hidden sub-queries and citations that dashboards do not show.
What does the audit include?
A prompt bank, repeated multi-engine runs, the hidden sub-queries captured, the decision factors in the engines' own words, a proof audit of your pages, citation reads of the pages the engines trust, a fact-check log and a ranked 90-day plan, plus a one-hour readout. The what-to-expect page lists each part.
How many prompts do you run?
Usually 60 to 120, split across visibility, decision-factor, competitor and fact-check prompts, each run more than once per engine so the scorecard shows a rate rather than a single snapshot.
Do you capture the hidden searches the engines run?
Yes. Google has described AI Mode as issuing many related searches for one prompt, and our captures show 10 to 20 behind a typical buyer question; the audit groups them into the topics your pages have to answer.
How do you report results?
At the prompt level, across repeated runs, by engine: whether you are named, where, how you are described and which pages are cited. The misses are in the report alongside the wins.
Do you promise a position or a visibility score?
No. The engines vary by phrasing and by session, so we report rates over repeated runs and we show you the change, which is a more honest measure than a single number.
Do you recommend schema markup or an llms.txt file?
Schema should be correct, especially Organization and sameAs, and it matters for Copilot and Bing; the evidence that it drives citations elsewhere is weak. We publish an llms.txt file because it costs nothing, and Cyrus Shepard's synthesis scores it only 2.0 out of 10 as a citation factor.
Who does Third Coast AI work with?
Who is Third Coast AI for?
Owners and CEOs of $5M to $100M companies, marketing directors who have been handed AI visibility as a project, and agencies and professional-services principals whose clients are asking about AI search.
Which industries do you work in?
Regionally, restaurants, home services, youth activities, manufacturing, legal and professional services, plus the agencies that serve them. Nationally the mix is wider, and the method does not change by industry.
Can a small local business use this?
Yes, and often faster than a national brand, because the pool of cited sources for a local prompt is small and the decision factors are rarely supplied by anyone. The Michigan page shows how regional prompts behave.
Do you work with companies that have almost no website?
Not usually. The engines need something to cite, and if the site is three pages and a contact form the audit will mostly say so. In that case we suggest the content program first.
If your question is not here, the questions-to-ask page lists what to put to any vendor, including us, and the numbers behind the method are on the definitions page: Ahrefs measured the overlap between Google's top ten and AI Overview citations at 38% in March 2026, down from 76% eight months earlier, and Pew measured click-through falling from 15% to 8% when an AI summary is present, which is the reason a company that ranks well can still be absent from the answer.
- Email hello@third-coast.ai with your company and the buyer question you want answered with your name.
- Read the audit page for the three-week scope.
- Read the about page for the entity facts in one table.
Short answers are a courtesy to the reader and to the engines. If a question about us can be answered in two sentences, we would rather publish the two sentences than make someone book a call to hear them.
Third Coast AI
Frequently asked questions
Email hello@third-coast.ai with your company and the buyer question you want the engines to answer with your name. We reply within two business days with whether an audit makes sense and what it would cover.
Yes. The audit has no minimum term and is delivered with the prompt set, the raw answers and the plan, so you can run the fixes in-house or with another team. The fee is credited against the first month if you continue with us.
Not on the site. The audit is a fixed fee and the programs are monthly retainers, both quoted after a short scoping call, and we send the current rate card the same day you ask.
The audit page if you want to know what you would buy, the definitions page if you want to understand the discipline, and the about page if you want the facts about the company in one table.