How to Choose an AI SEO Agency
The category is barely two years old, so nobody has a track record worth the name. Here is what to ask instead, and the answers that should worry you.
Search for an AI SEO agency and you get pages of lists. The 10 best, the 13 best, the 7 leading. Read three of them and you will notice the lists disagree completely, and that most of them were written by one of the agencies on the list.
That is the first thing worth knowing about this market. It is barely two years old. Nobody has a decade of results, the terminology has not settled, and the ranking signals are still moving. Anyone claiming a long track record in generative engine optimisation is describing something that did not exist long enough to have one.
So you cannot choose on reputation the way you would with a plumber. You have to choose on answers. These are the questions that actually separate people, and what the answers tell you.
First, the thing almost nobody asks
"Will you be working on my website itself, or only around it?"
This is the question that sorts the field, and most buyers never think to ask it.
When an AI answers a question about who to hire, it builds that answer from what it can read and verify. Your own website is the main thing it reads. If yours loads slowly, describes what you do in language nobody uses, or never states the plain facts in a form a machine can pick up, no amount of external work fixes it. The AI simply names a business it is surer about.
Plenty of providers will do listings, directories, prompt tracking and reporting, and never touch a line of your site. That work is not worthless, but it is building on whatever foundation happens to be there. Ask directly whether the site itself is in scope, and what specifically they would change on it. A vague answer here usually means no.
Ask what they do themselves and what they resell
Much of this market is white-labelled. A provider sells you a programme that a different company actually delivers behind the scenes. That is not dishonest and it is not unusual, but you should know, because it determines who you can actually get hold of when something needs changing.
There is nothing wrong with a partnership. There is something wrong with not being able to find out where the work happens. Ask, and see whether you get a straight answer.
Ask how they will show you it is working
The honest difficulty with AI visibility is that it is harder to see than search rankings. There is no equivalent of checking your position for a keyword, because two people asking the same AI the same question can get different answers.
So ask what you will actually receive, and how often. Look for tracking of the prompts your buyers really use, some measure of where you are being mentioned and whether that is growing, and a way to see it yourself rather than waiting for someone to tell you. A dashboard you can log into beats a monthly PDF, because you can check it on a Tuesday when you are wondering.
Be wary of reporting that only shows website traffic. AI visibility often produces no click at all. Someone reads the answer, gets your name, and contacts you directly. If the only thing being measured is visits, the thing you are paying for is invisible in the report.
Ask what they will not promise
This is a useful trick. Ask what they cannot guarantee.
A provider who understands this work will tell you plainly that nobody can promise ChatGPT will recommend you, because these systems choose sources they can read and trust rather than sources that paid. Someone who guarantees you a position, or claims a special relationship with an AI company, or offers to "register" your business, is describing something that does not exist. There is no directory to be added to.
The same goes for speed. This works like search optimisation: changes have to propagate before they show up in what the engines say about you. Anyone promising results next week is selling you something else.
Understand what you are being charged for
Two shapes are common, and they are not interchangeable.
A one-off project fixes your site and sets up the foundations. Useful, finite, and it decays, because your competitors keep working and the engines keep changing.
A monthly programme maintains visibility. It costs more over a year and it is what most of this market sells, because the work genuinely is ongoing rather than installed once.
Neither is wrong. What matters is that you know which you are buying. Ask what happens if you stop after six months, and listen to whether the answer is honest about decay.
Also ask whether there is a setup fee and what the minimum term is. In this market a twelve-month term is normal, because a few weeks of work would not survive a moving target. It should be stated up front rather than discovered on the contract.
If you are in the UK or the EU, ask about your data
Much of the tooling in this space is American. That is not a problem in itself, but your data protection obligations do not travel. Ask where responsibility for GDPR due diligence sits, and get a specific answer rather than reassurance.
This is dull and it matters more than it sounds, because it is the sort of thing nobody thinks about until an audit or a client questionnaire lands.
Six questions worth asking on the call
- What will you change on my actual website?
- Which parts do you deliver, and which are handled by a partner?
- What will I be able to see each month, and can I log in myself?
- What can you not promise me?
- Is this a project or a programme, and what happens if I stop?
- Who owns GDPR responsibility for my data?
If the answers are specific, you are talking to someone who does this. If they are broad and confident, you are talking to someone selling it.
The uncomfortable part
The best thing you can do before hiring anyone is look at your own website honestly and ask whether an AI could describe your business in one clean sentence from what is on it. Not whether it looks nice. Whether it says, plainly and specifically, what you do and who for.
If it cannot, that is what any good provider will fix first, and it is worth knowing that before you start paying someone monthly to work around it.
Which is oddly good news. What holds most businesses back here is not budget and not a competitor's head start. It is on their own site, where they can reach it.
If you want that conversation with us, our AI search optimisation service is where it starts, and we will tell you honestly if the answer is that your site needs work first.