A Cold Email That Made Me Stop and Check
In mid-July I received a cold email offering to optimise my business’s AI visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, starting at €99.99. The email was friendly, brief, written in polished Spanish, sent from a .es domain, and signed by someone with a Spanish-sounding name. The subject line was the kind you almost click without thinking.
I did not click. I checked.
What I found is worth sharing, because the same emails are landing in inboxes across Spain right now, and the pattern behind them is consistent enough to be worth understanding. I am not going to name the sender, for reasons I will explain. The goal here is not to condemn one company but to give you a checklist that works on any offer of this kind, from any sender.
What I Found When I Looked Behind the Landing Page
The landing page offered a free 30-second audit and made a specific claim: “92% of optimised businesses improve within 30 days.” Specific numbers tend to create trust. Here is what the rest of the page revealed.
No legal notice, no tax ID. Any business selling services in Spain must publish an Aviso Legal that includes a CIF or NIF, a registered address in Spain, and basic contact details. This page had none of that. A company actively targeting Spanish businesses was invisible to Spanish law.
An anonymous LLC in the USA. The terms and conditions, buried at the bottom, named a US limited liability company as the contracting party. This matters more than it might sound. Several US states allow company formation where the beneficial owner’s name does not appear in any public register, the annual fee is low, and the entire setup can be done in an afternoon from anywhere in the world. Mass-registration agents host thousands of LLCs at a single street address. The practical consequence for you as a buyer in Spain: if something goes wrong, the terms state that disputes fall under US jurisdiction. Filing a claim against an anonymous entity in a US court is not a realistic option for a small business owner in Dénia or Jávea.
A clone network across multiple countries. The same platform, with identical copy, identical claims, and identical product structure, was running under different brand names and domains targeting Belgium, the Netherlands, and an international market. The Dutch version of the same product was priced at €39.99. The Spanish version: €99.99. No difference in deliverables, just a different market. One technical detail that gave this away: the session cookie on the Spanish site still carried the name of its sister brand, a small error in the white-labelling that revealed the shared codebase.
A team of initials. The “About” page listed no names, just abbreviations like “EM” and “JD.” The person who signed the email had no traceable presence online.
The email itself was likely unlawful. Sending unsolicited commercial email to a scraped address without prior consent violates Article 21 of Spain’s Ley de Servicios de la Sociedad de la Información (LSSI). That is not a minor footnote. A company that opens a client relationship with a legal violation is telling you something about how it operates.
Update, 28 August 2026: The Pattern Repeated
Six weeks after publishing this article, two more emails of the same kind arrived, from two new domains under two new brand names. Checking them took ten minutes, because the checklist below is built for exactly this.
The result was the same construction. Both new domains name the same US company in their terms, with the same registration number, at the same mass-registration address as in July, and again with US jurisdiction. The same percentage claims, the same team of initials, and once again a session cookie carrying the misspelled name of a sister brand. I have now found nine domains in this network, covering Spain, Italy, Czechia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and an international market.
Two things changed. The price dropped from €99.99 to €79.99. And the parent company, whose chatbot product trades under the same corporate name, now carries public reviews describing exactly what I could only infer in July: unsolicited commercial email sent to scraped addresses.
I am still not naming the sender, for the same reason as before. The six questions below worked on both waves, and they will work on the next name too.
Why AI Visibility Is Still a Real Topic
None of the above means that AI visibility is a fraudulent concept. The analogy I keep coming back to is the SEO spam wave of the early 2010s, when inboxes were flooded with emails promising “page 1 on Google for €99.” Those emails were mostly worthless, but SEO was not. The underlying topic was real and remained real. The spam existed because the topic was real.
The same is true now. According to Cloudflare, more than 57% of web requests are now automated; in 2026, machines overtook humans for the first time, though the figure varies significantly by industry and site type. More to the point, a growing number of people are asking ChatGPT or Perplexity for business recommendations rather than opening Google. If someone types “good German restaurant in Jávea” into an AI assistant and your restaurant does not appear, that is a genuine visibility gap. Structured data, machine-readable content, and a properly implemented schema markup are real, testable, measurable steps that affect how AI systems understand and represent your business. That work takes time and knowledge. It cannot be automated by a scan report.
A 6-Point Checklist: Run This Before You Pay Anyone
These six questions take about ten minutes to answer. Any credible provider will pass all six without hesitation.
1. Who is legally behind this? Look for an Aviso Legal or Impressum with a real company name, a CIF or NIF, and a physical address in their claimed country of operation. No legal notice means no accountability. Note the irony: a company offering to make your business more visible is hiding its own identity.
2. Are there real people attached to this? Names, faces, LinkedIn profiles, local presence. Not initials, not stock portraits, not a contact form that leads nowhere. If you cannot find the person who will actually do the work, you cannot hold them responsible for the result.
3. How did they reach you? An unsolicited commercial email sent to a scraped address is, as noted, a violation of Article 21 LSSI in Spain. This is not just a technicality. A provider whose acquisition method is illegal is not a good candidate for trust-building work on your brand.
4. What law governs your contract? Read the terms, specifically the jurisdiction clause. If a company is selling to Spanish businesses but placing disputes under US or offshore law, you have almost no practical recourse if things go wrong. This is not an accident. It is a structural decision.
5. What will actually be delivered? “Optimisation for 6 AI engines” is not a deliverable. A deliverable is: which schema types will be implemented, on which pages, with what changes to your content structure, and how will those changes be documented. If the answer is a PDF report generated by an automated scan, you are paying for software output, not for expertise.
6. How will success be measured, and by whom? A percentage claim like “92% improve within 30 days” is not a testing methodology. A credible provider will agree to run specific AI queries before and after the work, so you can see the difference yourself. If the only proof on offer is a statistic with no source, that statistic is doing the work of transparency it has not earned.
You Can Run a Baseline Test Right Now, for Free
Before paying anyone for AI visibility work, spend ten minutes testing where you currently stand. Open ChatGPT and ask it: “What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?” Try variations with your service type and location. Note what comes back and what does not. That is your baseline. Any subsequent work should be measured against it.
This approach is explained in more detail in my guide on testing whether ChatGPT knows your business (currently in German, but the test method translates directly). For a broader look at what machine-readable visibility means for businesses on the Costa Blanca, this pillar article on AI-readable websites covers the structural groundwork.
The Contrast That Does the Explaining
I want to be transparent: I offer AI-visibility work myself, the AI Visibility Setup at €490, with a before/after test using real AI queries so you can verify what changed. There is a free check first, so you can see where you stand before paying anything. I am flagging that upfront because it is the honest thing to do, and because the contrast is the whole point of this article.
The difference is not primarily price. It is structure. My name is on the work. The deliverables are listed before you pay. The methodology involves running real AI queries on your actual business, before and after, so you can verify what changed. There is a legal notice, a Spanish address, and a CIF. If you have a question six months later, I am still here.
That is what any AI visibility offer should look like, regardless of who is providing it.
If you want to see directly what ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity actually say about your business, the free AI-visibility check queries five AI systems and gives you a report in a few minutes. If you’d rather start with a free general check first, the free website audit gives you a starting point at no cost. If you are ready for the full setup, get in touch and I will explain exactly what it covers before you commit to anything.