Buyer's Guide
How to choose an AI SEO agency (and what to ask them)
This category is eighteen months old and unregulated. Here are the five questions worth asking — including of us.
This category is eighteen months old, unregulated, and full of firms that renamed their SEO package last year. Here's how to tell the difference — including the questions that make a weak vendor uncomfortable.
We're an AI SEO firm, so read this with the appropriate skepticism. But the questions below are the ones we'd want asked of us, and a vendor who can't answer them is a vendor worth walking away from — including if that vendor is us.
Five questions worth asking
"What number will you show me every month?"
This is the whole thing. AI visibility is measurable: you define the questions your buyers ask, run them across the assistants, and record whether you're named. That's a number, and it moves or it doesn't.
A vendor who can't tell you what they'll measure — or who answers with traffic, impressions, or "brand awareness" — is selling activity. Activity is what gets billed when outcomes can't be.
"What's my baseline today, before I hire you?"
If they can't tell you where you stand right now, they cannot later prove they improved it. Any competent firm can produce a baseline in an afternoon. Many will do it free, because it's also their best sales pitch — and if they won't, ask yourself why.
"Which questions will you track, and why those?"
Watch for a generic list of keywords. What you want is questions phrased the way your actual buyers phrase them — and a clear rationale for why those questions matter to your business. If the list could belong to any company in your industry, it wasn't built for you.
Be equally wary of a very large number. Tracking three hundred questions sounds thorough and usually means monitoring noise. You pay for that breadth, and most of it won't matter.
"What happens in month four?"
A lot of what gets sold as AI SEO is really a one-time technical setup — crawler access, schema, a sitemap — dressed up as an ongoing service. That work is real and necessary, but it's finite. It takes weeks, not years.
The recurring work is content, third-party mentions, monitoring, and responding when a competitor takes an answer from you. If a vendor can't describe what month four looks like in concrete terms, you're paying a retainer for work that ended in month one.
"What do I own if I leave?"
Ask who holds the accounts. Analytics, search console, the content, the listings — are they in your name, or the agency's? A firm that builds everything inside its own accounts has made leaving expensive by design, whether or not that was the intent.
The answer you want is that everything is yours and always was.
The tell that matters most: ask any vendor to show you their own AI visibility. They sell being cited by AI. Are they? If they can't be found when you ask ChatGPT for an AI SEO firm, either the work doesn't work, or they haven't done it on themselves. Neither is encouraging.
Signals worth taking seriously
- They tell you what they can't do. A firm that says "your buyers may not be using AI to find you yet, and here's how we'd check before you spend anything" is more trustworthy than one that says everyone needs this immediately.
- They give you the baseline before the contract. It costs them an afternoon. If they won't, the reason is rarely good.
- They talk about decay. Anyone who describes this as a fix rather than a maintained position either doesn't understand it or is hoping you don't.
- They're specific about timelines. Sixty to ninety days is honest. "Fast results" is not.
Common questions
Can't I just hire my existing SEO agency to do this?
Possibly — the technical skills overlap. The question is whether they've genuinely changed what they optimize for, or just added a page to their website. Ask them the five questions above. Their answers will tell you quickly, and their reaction to being asked will tell you almost as much.
Should I hire an agency or buy a tool?
They solve different problems. A monitoring tool tells you whether you're visible; it doesn't write content, earn mentions, or decide what to do when a competitor takes an answer. If you have someone in-house with time to do that work, a tool plus that person may be enough. If you don't, the tool will just show you the problem more precisely.
How do I know if I even need this?
Go ask. Open ChatGPT, and ask it to recommend a business like yours, in your market, the way a customer would phrase it. If your competitors are named and you aren't, you have your answer — and it cost you nothing to get. If the model names you first, you may not need anyone at all right now.