How to choose an AI SEO agency: what to ask before you sign

Choose the AI SEO agency that can show you, before you pay, exactly how it measures whether AI assistants name your business: which engines, which questions, how many runs, and whether a mention is counted separately from a link. An agency that cannot answer that is selling a label. The rest of this guide is the checklist: what to expect in a report, what to walk away from, and the questions that sort one kind of agency from the other.

What does an AI SEO agency actually do?

"AI SEO agency" means two different businesses, and the first thing to find out is which one you are talking to.

• An agency that uses AI to do SEO. It produces pages, briefs and reports faster with AI tools. The deliverable is still ordinary search work, and the question is whether the output is any good.
• An agency that works on your visibility inside AI answers. It tries to get your business named and linked when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews a buying question. This is also sold as GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization).

Both are legitimate. They are priced and judged differently, and a proposal that slides between the two should be pinned down. This guide is about the second kind. If the terms are new, our explainer on generative engine optimization covers where they came from.

What should an AI SEO agency measure?

It should measure repeated answers to fixed buyer questions on named engines, and report mentions and citations separately. Each part of that sentence is there for a reason.

• Named engines. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot are separate systems and give different answers. "AI visibility" with no engine named is not a measurement.
• Fixed questions in a buyer's words. "Who is the best commercial HVAC contractor in Phoenix" is a buyer question. Your company name is not. Questions that include your brand test whether the engine knows you exist. They do not test whether a stranger would find you.
• Repeated runs. AI answers move. Ahrefs followed more than 43,000 keywords and found AI Overviews change about every two days, with 45.5% of cited sources new from one response to the next. One run tells you what happened once.
• Mention and citation counted apart. Being named in the answer and having your page linked as a source are different outcomes. When Ahrefs tracked its own brand across six assistants, the mention carried a link about 28% of the time. You need to know which one you are getting.
• The sources behind the answer. If the engine recommended three competitors, which pages did it cite to do so? A directory, a review site, a local news piece? That list is the work plan.
• Enquiries, kept separate. A citation is not a customer. The report should show calls and form enquiries next to the visibility numbers without claiming one caused the other. Our guide to measuring AI-search enquiries explains how to keep those records honest.

What are the red flags when hiring an AI SEO agency?

Walk away from guarantees, from schema sold as the way into AI answers, and from a single screenshot offered as proof. Here is why each one fails.

Guaranteed AI rankings or placements

Nobody outside OpenAI or Google controls what their systems say. OpenAI's help page on searching the web with ChatGPT states that placement is not guaranteed. Google's own guide to hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, and warns about SEOs who guarantee rankings or allege a "special relationship" with Google. The same warning applies to anyone claiming an inside line to ChatGPT.

"Schema gets you cited"

Schema markup is housekeeping. It is not a lever for AI answers. Google's page on AI features says there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add and no new AI text files to create. Ahrefs tested it: 1,885 pages that added schema showed no major uplift in citations on AI Overviews, AI Mode or ChatGPT. An agency whose AI package is mostly schema and an llms.txt file is charging for work with no measured effect on citations.

A single screenshot as proof

A screenshot of ChatGPT naming a client shows one answer, to one question, on one day, for one account. Given how often answers change, it cannot show a result that holds. Ask for the question list, the dates and the count of runs in which the client appeared. If the agency has only the screenshot, it has an anecdote.

Hundreds of AI-written pages

Volume is not a strategy, and it carries a spam risk in the Google index that its AI features draw from. Google's spam policies name using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users as scaled content abuse. A plan that leads with page count should make you ask what each page is for.

A proprietary score with no method

If you cannot see the questions, the engines and the dates behind a score, you cannot check it and you cannot compare it with next quarter's. A method you can read beats a number you cannot.

What questions should you ask before signing?

Ask these in writing, and compare the answers across the agencies you are considering.

1. Which engines will you measure, and why those for my customers?
2. Can I see the exact questions you will track, and can I add my own?
3. How many times is each question run, over what period, before you report a result?
4. Do you report mentions, citations and recommendations separately? Show me a sample.
5. What will you change on my website, who makes the changes, and will I see a list of every change?
6. What work happens off my website (directories, reviews, press), and who does it?
7. How will you connect any of this to calls and enquiries, and what will you mark as unknown?
8. What have you seen not work? An agency with real experience has a list.
9. What happens to the work, the content and the data if I stop?

Question five comes from Google's own advice, which says to ask whether an SEO will share all the changes made to your site. For the wider choice between an agency, a freelancer and a hire, see agency, freelancer or in-house.

How much does an AI SEO agency cost?

It depends on scope, and the scope is what to compare. A quote for "AI SEO" might cover a one-time access and content audit, a monthly measurement report, page rewrites, or outreach to directories and publications. Two proposals at the same monthly fee can contain very different amounts of work.

Ask each agency to split the fee into measurement, website changes and off-site work, and to say who implements. Then test the number against your own economics: if a new customer is worth a known amount to you, the break-even calculator shows how many additional enquiries the fee has to produce. Our guide to how much SEO costs goes through pricing in more detail.

Do you need an AI SEO agency separate from your SEO agency?

Usually not. Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and ChatGPT search starts with crawler access to your site. The foundation is the same crawlable, indexed, useful site that ordinary SEO builds. If your current agency can explain crawler access for AI search bots and can measure the way this guide describes, you do not need a second one. If it cannot, that is the gap to fill.

How does Strata handle this work?

We do it the way this checklist describes, because it is the only version we can defend to a client. Our AI-search optimization work fixes access first, then the pages buyers and engines read, then what the wider web says about the business. Measurement runs fixed questions on named engines several times, with mentions and citations reported apart. We do not guarantee placements, and we do not sell schema as a citation fix. You can read our published results, with their periods and limits stated.

To see how we look at a site before any contract, ask for a free site check. You get one useful finding within two business days, and no call is required.