Check the sources first, because they are the whole decision
Before you open anything, put the coverage in a list. You're looking for around three strong, distinct sources that are reliable, independent of you, and cover you in real depth, which is the rule of thumb Wikipedia's own reviewing instructions hand to reviewers. Three good ones beat dozens of passing mentions. For a company each source has to clear the bar on its own, so you can't assemble one qualifying source out of four partial ones. For a person the rule is looser: several thinner sources may be combined, as long as none of it is trivial coverage.
Everything a PR budget buys is named and ruled out. The guideline for companies excludes press releases and press kits, anything substantially based on a press release even when an independent outlet published it, any paid or sponsored article, and by name, pieces by non-staff contributors to Forbes, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com and TechCrunch. Interviews mostly fail too, because the content came from you.
Routine business events don't count: funding rounds, hires and departures, product launches, new locations, financial results, sponsorships, conference appearances. A company also needs at least one source with a regional, statewide, national or international audience, since attention only from a small-town weekly isn't an indication of notability. And one wire story reprinted in twenty papers is one source, not twenty.
For a person the shape is the same: multiple published secondary sources, reliable, independent of you and of each other, or a well-known award, or an entry in a country's standard national biographical dictionary, per the guideline for people. Nothing is inherited, so a famous founder doesn't qualify the company and the company doesn't qualify the founder. If the list comes up empty, stop here. Wikipedia says it in those words: if your topic is not notable, stop here and find a new one.
Asking a volunteer to write it instead isn't a way around this. Wikipedia:Requested articles opens by telling you it isn't an on-demand article writing service, that most requested articles will not be written, that its associated WikiProject is inactive, and that if you really want an article you should consider writing it yourself.
Make the account, then disclose the money before you edit anything
Register one account and use it for everything that follows. Creating a page directly in the encyclopedia is limited to autoconfirmed accounts, which means at least 10 edits and 4 days since your first edit. Don't spend those four days waiting if you're connected to the subject, because that direct route isn't open to you anyway.
If you are the subject, work for the subject, or are being paid, you use Articles for Creation. The AfC page is flat about it: the process must also be used by editors with a conflict of interest. Reviewers are told what to watch for, and the listed warning signs include an author who refers to the subject as their client, company or employer.
If money changes hands, the disclosure comes before the editing, not after the draft is written. The Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use require you to disclose each and any employer, client, intended beneficiary and affiliation, in at least one of three places: a statement on your user page, a statement on the talk page accompanying the paid contribution, or a statement in the edit summary. This one is contractual, so skipping it isn't a norms problem, it's a blocked account and a deleted draft.
The wizard makes you do it and won't let you past. Its Paid Editing step ends on the line "You must complete these steps in order to continue." The steps are: edit your own user page, paste {{paid|employer=Name of your employer|client=Name of your client, if different from your employer}}, click the "Publish changes" button, then click "I have disclosed". On an article's talk page the template is {{connected contributor (paid)}} instead.
Run the Article Wizard and create the draft
Wikipedia:Article wizard is the route and it's four screens if you have no connection to the subject, six if you're paid or connected, because that branch adds a Paid Editing screen and a COI Editing screen before Draft Creation. The first is Welcome, offering "Practice in the community sandbox" or "Practice in your personal sandbox" before you go on. Click Next for "Referencing and notability", which tells you outright that your article will be declined if the topic is not notable, violates copyright, or is not referenced properly. Click Next again.
"Common mistakes" is where you pick your own branch, and the three buttons are the real question: "I'm paid to edit or I'm writing about my employer", "I'm writing about myself, or a close person/subject", and "I'm not connected to the subject". Pick the true one. The first two route you through disclosure and conflict-of-interest steps; only the third goes straight to Draft Creation.
On the Draft Creation screen the input reads "Enter the name of your draft here" and the button under it reads "Create new article draft". Type the subject's name exactly as it should read as an article title. Wikipedia adds the "Draft:" prefix itself, so don't type it in. "Start over" is the only other button on that screen, and it does what it says.
The draft is invisible to search engines from the moment it exists. The wizard states it plainly: when you create your draft, it will not be seen by external search engines. So there's no search benefit, no AI-citation benefit and nothing to show anybody while it sits there. A draft is work in progress, not a result.
Write it so a reviewer can check every line
Open with a sentence that says who or what the subject is in plain English, then attach a citation to every factual claim, inline, wrapped in a pair of ref tags. Reviewers look for at least three sources doing real work. Offline, paywalled and non-English sources are all fine, as long as somebody could go and check them.
Do not have an AI write it. Wikipedia's first-article page says don't use large language models or generative AI, the reviewing instructions call using them to generate or rewrite article content prohibited, and there's a speedy-deletion criterion for AI-generated content. Reviewers are handed the tells: fabricated references, references that don't support the text, invented facts, confident statements nobody can verify.
Cut every word you'd use in a pitch. The wizard names "leading expert" and "ground-breaking technology" as exactly the register that gets a draft killed. Don't copy-paste or closely paraphrase from your own website or anyone else's. Don't add categories either, since the AfC page asks you to leave those to the reviewer who accepts it.
Don't burn a week on formatting. Reviewers are explicitly told not to decline a draft for citation formatting, bare URLs, general references, offline or paywalled or non-English sources, a missing infobox, missing images, missing categories, or a draft that's short or needs ordinary copy-editing. Spend that hour on the sources instead, because that's the only thing a decline will actually be about.
Submit it, then look for the yellow box
The submit button sits at the top of your own draft page. The AfC page calls it "Submit for review" and Your first article calls it "Submit the draft for review!", so scan for either. If there's no button, switch to the source editor and add {{subst:submit}} as the first line, or use the submission wizard, which needs JavaScript turned on.
You are not submitted until a yellow box on your draft reads "Review waiting, please be patient." That box is the confirmation and there is no other one. If it isn't there, nothing is in the queue and nobody is coming, and the place to ask is the Articles for creation help desk.
Budget seven weeks or more. That's the wizard's own number: reviews can take a long time, and this may take 7 weeks or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. The reviewing instructions put it a second way, that there's no fixed waiting time and it isn't a first-come, first-served queue. So no date exists, and anybody selling you one is selling you a date they invented.
Keep improving the draft while it waits. That's allowed and encouraged. What you must not do is move it into the encyclopedia yourself or paste it into a new page: the AfC page warns that bypassing the process can get the page moved back to draft, speedily deleted or listed for deletion, and that repeated attempts carry consequences.
Declined is fixable. Rejected is the end of that draft.
A decline names a problem and invites you back. The reviewer picks up to two standard reasons and codes them: nn for general notability, bio for people, corp for companies, prof for academics, and a long list beyond that. Read what the notice actually names, fix that, and resubmit with the same button. There's no waiting period before you resubmit.
If a decline cites only formatting, a missing infobox or a paywalled source, that's a decline the instructions tell reviewers not to make, and you can raise it at the help desk or ask the reviewer to explain. What doesn't work is resubmitting the same draft unchanged until a different reviewer sees it. The instructions call that disruptive, and it eventually costs you the draft.
A rejection is a different word and it means stop. Reviewers are told to reject only when the subject or content is fundamentally unsuitable with no reasonable prospect that further work makes it acceptable. It doesn't bar an article forever, but what reopens it is new coverage appearing, not a rewrite. Go back to the rejecting reviewer only when you actually have new sources.
An abandoned draft disappears after six months with no human edit, deleted under criterion G13, and nothing warns you first. Put the date in your calendar now. If it's already gone, it can normally be restored on request at Requests for undeletion, and the instructions treat that as housekeeping rather than a verdict on the subject.
What an accepted article doesn't get you
Acceptance means one volunteer answered one question: if this article were nominated for deletion, would it be likely to survive? That's a prediction, not protection. The article can be nominated the following week and deleted, and thin promotional company articles regularly are. Nothing about publication is permanent, and no service on earth can make it so.
It may not be in Google on day one. New articles may be kept out of search-engine indexing until New Pages Patrol reviews them or they've existed for 90 days, and after that Wikipedia doesn't control indexing at all. Creating the article directly yourself gets you indexed no sooner: that route runs into the same rule.
The day it publishes, it stops being yours. Anyone can edit it, nobody has to ask you, and you can't lock it. Corrections go through the article's talk page with your connection disclosed, which is slower than editing it yourself and is the only version that doesn't get you blocked.
Nobody can sell you an acceptance, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. Wikipedia's scam warning names the exact pitches: writing and publishing an article for you, getting a draft accepted quickly, preventing or reversing a deletion, protecting an article from changes. If somebody contacted you first, by email, LinkedIn or WhatsApp, stop replying and forward the whole conversation to paid-en-wp@wikipedia.org. Paid work is permitted when it's disclosed. A guarantee never is.