How to Choose a Manufacturing Marketing Agency: 10 Questions

Redbrick Web's publication of a guide on choosing a manufacturing marketing agency outlines 10 essential questions, including RFQ tracking, contracts, AI search and pricing. For website owners in the manufacturing sector, this checklist highlights that agencies are increasingly leveraging AI‑driven search tools to scrape product data and generate SEO content. That means your site could see a surge in automated visits from agency‑owned crawlers, potentially skewing analytics and consuming bandwidth. Moreover, agencies that promise “AI‑enhanced” campaigns often require access to your product feeds, raising privacy and data‑ownership concerns that must be addressed in contracts. **Actionable tips:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to explicitly list approved agency bots and deny all unknown crawlers, using the User‑Agent and Disallow directives to protect sensitive RFQ pages. 2. Deploy an AI‑bot detection layer (e.g., Bot‑Manager or server‑side fingerprinting) to differentiate genuine customer traffic from agency‑generated AI traffic, and set alerts for spikes on high‑value URLs. 3. When negotiating contracts, include a clause requiring agencies to share their bot‑user‑agent strings and to honor your llms.txt policy, ensuring compliance and transparent traffic reporting.