Six Stops to Check Before You Hire an AEO Agency

Read three agency pages about answer engine optimization and the process will sound identical: an audit, some authority building, content, monitoring, placements and a monthly report. Ours, on the AEO agency page, lists exactly those six steps. The names of the steps are not what separates a useful agency from an expensive one. What separates them is what each can show you at every step, in a form you can check without taking anybody's word for it.

So treat the process like a metro line. At each station, before you ride on to the next, ask for something you can verify yourself. Here is what I would ask for at each stop, and I would ask it of us as well.

Stop 1: the audit

The audit should show how AI assistants answer the questions buyers ask in your category, where you appear and where a competitor appears instead. Ask for the raw material behind it: the exact prompts that were tested, which assistants they were tested on, the date, and the answers themselves as screenshots or exported text. A score with no prompts behind it cannot be checked. A list of prompts can, because you can type them in yourself tonight and see whether you get the same picture.

Stop 2: entity and authority

This step is about making your business a clearly defined thing to AI systems: consistent structured data, a plain description of who you are and what you do, and a presence on the sources those systems read. Ask which sources, specifically, and who will own the profiles once they exist. A listing created in an agency's own account belongs to the agency, and you may lose it the day you part ways. Ask for every profile to be registered to your business from the start.

Stop 3: citation-ready content

This is where most of the monthly hours go: articles, FAQs and data pages written so that an AI system can lift a clear, correct answer from them. Ask who checks the facts before anything is published, whether you approve each piece, and whose name goes on it. Content that states something untrue about your business is worse than no content, because assistants may repeat the error long after the page is fixed.

Stop 4: visibility monitoring

Monitoring means re-running the same prompts over time and tracking whether you are mentioned. Ask for the list of assistants covered in the report itself, how often each one is checked, and whether the prompt set stays fixed from month to month. If the prompts change every month, the trend line tells you nothing, because you are comparing different questions.

Stop 5: trusted source placement

AI systems lean on sources they already trust, so agencies work to get clients mentioned in publications, directories and platforms those systems read. Ask for the list of target placements before the work starts, and ask which of them are paid. Paid placement can be legitimate, but it should be disclosed on the page where it appears and itemised on the invoice where you pay for it.

Stop 6: the monthly report

The AEO agency page says the monthly report covers AI citation rate by engine, new brand mentions, a comparison with competitors and the content actions taken. Whoever you hire, ask to see a sample report before you sign, with the other client's details removed. Then ask the question that matters most: what does the report say in a month when nothing got cited? A good report shows the misses as clearly as the wins, and says what changes next month because of them.

Signs to walk away at any stop

• A promise that a specific assistant will name you by a specific date.
• A score that goes up with no prompts, answers or dates behind it.
• Profiles, listings or content created in accounts you do not own and cannot take with you.
• Placements the agency will not name until after you have paid.
• Content published under your name that you were never asked to approve.

Any one of these is reason enough to pause. None of them takes technical knowledge to spot, and that is the point: you should be able to judge an AEO agency without having to become one.

What the agency needs from you

An agency can only be as accurate as the facts you give it. Before the first stop, write one page of the things AI assistants should get right about you: your exact business name, the services you actually offer, the areas you serve, your opening hours and the questions customers really ask. Keep that page current and send every change the same week it happens. A good share of the errors that end up in AI answers start life as a stale fact on a page nobody updated.

The question underneath all six

Nobody controls what an AI assistant says. An agency can make your business easier to understand and easier to cite. It cannot make ChatGPT or Perplexity name you on a schedule. Our own AEO Starter page says citation outcomes depend on the recommendations being implemented, and some version of that is true for every agency in the market. Treat any timeline as an estimate, and pay attention to how an agency talks about the months when the estimate turns out wrong.

There is a practical way to test this in the first conversation. Ask the agency to describe a month that went badly for a client, with the details removed, and what they changed afterwards. An agency that cannot think of one has either not been doing this long or is not telling you. Either answer is useful to hear before you sign, not after.

Where AEO sits next to SEO

AEO does not replace search engine optimization. The same agency page says the two run in parallel and that strong SEO feeds the authority AI engines look for. If you are deciding how to split a budget between them, AEO vs SEO: where to spend your next marketing hour works through that choice in more detail.

Ride the line before you buy the ticket

You can run the first stop yourself for free. Pick five questions a buyer would ask before choosing someone in your line of work, type them into two or three AI assistants, and save the answers with today's date. That file is your own baseline, and it belongs to you whatever you decide next.

Hand the same file to every agency you talk to, and ask each one to walk you through the other five stops against it. Their answers will tell you more than their case studies. The AEO agency page offers a written audit within 48 hours with no call required, if you would like ours to compare against your own.

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