How to Choose an AEO Agency (Without Getting Sold Repackaged SEO)
AI search visibility is the hot new service, which means the market is filling up with agencies that renamed their old SEO deck. Here are the questions that separate the real ones from the rebrands.
A quick, slightly awkward admission from an AEO agency writing about how to hire an AEO agency: most of our new competitors are not really doing this.
When a category gets hot, the rebrands arrive. “AI search visibility,” “GEO,” “AEO,” and “answer engine optimization” are now stapled onto a lot of decks that, underneath, are the same link-building and on-page SEO from 2019. Some of those teams are excellent at SEO. That is not the same as knowing how to get you cited inside ChatGPT.
So before you sign anything, here’s how to tell the difference. These are the questions we’d ask if we were the ones hiring.
1. “How do you measure whether it’s working?”
This is the fastest tell. AI answers are non-deterministic, so a real AEO team has a real measurement approach: a defined set of buyer prompts, sampled repeatedly across engines, rolled into a share-of-voice number they can show you move over time.
Green flag: They talk about tracking your presence and sentiment across specific engines, and they can show you a baseline before they start.
Red flag: The answer is some version of “we’ll improve your rankings” or “you’ll see more traffic.” That’s SEO measurement. It does not tell you whether ChatGPT recommends you, which is the thing you’re paying for.
2. “Which engines do you optimize for, and how do they differ?”
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, and Google’s AI Overviews don’t behave the same way or trust the same sources. A team that understands AEO will talk fluently about those differences. A team that doesn’t will collapse them all into “AI.”
Green flag: They explain that the sources earning a citation in one engine often do nothing in another, and that coverage means working several engines deliberately.
Red flag: Everything is about Google, with “and AI” tacked on at the end. That’s a Google SEO shop wearing a new hat.
3. “What do you do beyond my website?”
Here’s the one that exposes a rebrand fastest. Getting recommended by AI is mostly about corroboration: the reviews, roundups, and community presence the model trusts as outside proof. If an agency’s entire plan lives on your own domain, they’re optimizing a brochure.
Green flag: Their plan includes earning third-party mentions and presence on the sources your buyers and the models actually read.
Red flag: The whole engagement is on-page tweaks and content on your blog. Necessary, but nowhere near sufficient.
4. “How do you handle it when the AI says something wrong about us?”
A serious team has a method for this: tracing a bad or outdated answer back to its source, working out whether it’s coming from live retrieval or baked-in training, and correcting it accordingly. A rebrand will look at you blankly, because this isn’t an SEO problem and they’ve never had to solve it.
Green flag: They describe a process for diagnosing and repairing what the models believe about you.
Red flag: They’ve never thought about brand sentiment inside AI at all.
5. “How long until we see results, honestly?”
Anyone promising you’ll be the top ChatGPT recommendation next week is lying or doesn’t understand the mechanism. Corroboration and trust build over months, not days. A good agency will tell you that plainly, then show you the leading indicators you’ll see move sooner.
Green flag: Realistic timelines, usually first new citations in a month or two and momentum building from there, with honest milestones along the way.
Red flag: Overnight guarantees, or vagueness about timing because they don’t actually know.
The uncomfortable part: hold us to this too
We wrote this guide knowing it sets a bar we have to clear ourselves. That’s the point. If you take these five questions to us, we should have crisp, specific answers, a baseline we can measure, a per-engine plan, work that extends past your website, a method for fixing what AI believes, and honest timelines.
If any agency, including us, fumbles those questions, keep looking. The category is too new and too important to hand to someone who’s improvising.
Want to see how we’d answer them for your brand specifically? Book a call and we’ll walk you through your current AI visibility and exactly how we’d improve it. Or start with a free AI visibility audit and judge us on what we find.