How to choose an AEO agency. Nine questions. No acronyms.

Two years ago, almost nobody called themselves an AEO agency. Now everybody does, including a few who learned the acronym on the drive over. The good news is that the job is simple enough to describe, which means the people who can do it can explain it, and the people who cannot will reach for a glossary.

What an AEO agency actually does

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. Some people call it GEO, AI SEO or AI search optimization, and the name changes depending on who is selling it. The job does not. An AEO agency gets AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews to name your business when a customer asks who to hire.

That work has three parts. Make your business easy for AI to read: your website, your listings and your details, saying the same thing everywhere. Get other sources to vouch for you: reviews, directories, press and the sites AI already quotes. And answer the questions your customers actually ask, in plain language a machine can lift. Anyone who describes the job as something else is describing a different job.

The nine questions to ask before you hire one

Ask these on the first call. You are not grading vocabulary. You are listening for specifics.

1. What does AI say about my business right now? A serious agency checks before the call, or offers to. A good answer comes with screenshots from more than one platform. A bad answer is a score out of 100 with no screenshots behind it.
2. Which questions will you track? They should name real questions your customers ask, in your customers’ words, not a list of keywords. “Who is the best roofer in Louisville” is a question. “Roofing services” is a keyword.
3. How do you know what AI said? AI answers change from one run to the next, so one screenshot proves very little. Ask how often they check, on which platforms, and whether they cross-check with more than one tool. In October 2026, researchers showed that Google had been feeding decoy result pages to automated rank trackers, which is a good reminder that a tool’s number is an estimate, not the record.
4. What do you do by hand? A lot of the sites AI trusts do not let software in. Listings, reviews, outreach and editing all need a person. If the answer is “our platform handles it,” you are buying a subscription with a sales team attached.
5. Who writes my content, and whose name is on it? Google’s own guidance, updated October 5, 2026, calls invented author profiles a form of deception and calls mass-produced AI text without human review low effort. The answer you want is a real person who reads it before it goes live.
6. What will you fix first, and why? They should be able to tell you the first three things after one look. If everything is “phase one,” nothing is.
7. Who have you done this for? Named clients, real results, and a way to check. Directories like Clutch exist for this. So does picking up the phone.
8. Can you get AI to recommend you? The fairest test in the business. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini which agency can help a brand show up in AI answers, and see who comes up. An AEO agency that AI has never heard of is a cobbler with no shoes.
9. What happens if it does not work? Nobody can promise what a model will say, and you should hear that. What you should also hear is a timeline, a monthly report you can read, and no contract that locks you in past the point of evidence.

Red flags: walk away from these

• “We guarantee you number one in ChatGPT.” No one controls what a model says. A guarantee is either a misunderstanding or a sales tactic, and neither is a good sign.
• “You can pay to be recommended.” You cannot. OpenAI sells ads in ChatGPT, and it says in writing that advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides. You can buy the billboard. You cannot buy the recommendation.
• A report that is only a score. “Your AI visibility is 63” tells you nothing you can act on. You want the actual answers, which questions you won, which you lost, and why.
• “AI does all the work.” AI helps with plenty of it. The parts that move recommendations, reviews, mentions, listings and real expertise, mostly need people.
• No named clients, no proof of their own visibility. If they cannot get found, they will have a hard time getting you found.
• A twelve-month contract before any results. First results usually show in weeks, not quarters. A long lock-in protects the agency, not you.

What it should cost and how long it takes

Price depends on how competitive your market is, the state of your website and how much proof already exists about you online. A single location in a quiet market and a national brand in a crowded one are not the same job, and anyone who quotes you before they look is guessing. We broke the factors down in what AEO costs and how long it takes.

On timing: most of our clients see their first AI recommendations in two weeks to two months, and some see them within days. A crowded market takes longer. If an agency promises results by Friday, see the first red flag.

How we answer our own questions

It would be strange to write nine questions and not answer them. So, briefly, as of this week: we rank number two on Google in the US for “AEO agency.” On October 13, 2026, when Gemini was asked which agency can help a brand show up in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, it named Agency AEO first, according to our SE Ranking AI tracker. We graded our own AI visibility and published the report card, including the parts that did not flatter us. Other agencies hire us to do this work for their clients under their own name.

If you want to see what AI says about your business before you talk to anybody, the 20-minute AI visibility audit walks you through it yourself. If you would rather we look, here is how we get businesses recommended by ChatGPT.

Questions People Ask