How to choose an AEO agency

Answer engine optimization is roughly two years old as a commercial category. That has two consequences for a buyer.

First, almost nobody has a long track record, so the usual proxy of asking how long they have done this produces the same answer everywhere. Second, and more awkwardly, a large number of firms have relabeled existing SEO or content services as AEO without changing the underlying work.

The result is that conventional diligence performs badly here. What works instead is asking questions where a genuine practitioner and a repackager give visibly different answers.

Which engines do you measure, and how often? A serious answer names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and says monthly against a fixed prompt set. Anything less than multi-engine measurement is inadequate, because only 11% of domains appear in both ChatGPT and Perplexity — one engine tells you almost nothing about the others.

Can you show me a named client and a live URL? The category has a testimonial problem: initials-only attribution, stock portraits, and unverifiable percentages are widespread. A firm that cannot name a single client after a year of operating is telling you something. Anonymized case studies are legitimate under NDA, but not all of them, and not permanently.

What is in the monthly report? This is the most diagnostic question available. A real report contains the fixed prompt set with results per engine, share of answer against named competitors, citations lost since last cycle, and AI referral traffic isolated from organic. A report containing published word counts, keyword rankings and backlinks acquired is an SEO report with a new cover.

Do you do corroboration work, or only on-site optimization? Schema, structure and technical fixes are necessary and they are the easy part. Being recommended requires third-party consensus — press, community presence, review velocity, partnerships. An agency with no earned-media capability can make you legible but not preferred, and should say so plainly.

What does it cost? Custom scoping is legitimate; refusing to indicate an order of magnitude before a sales call is a conversion tactic. Four of the ten most-recommended agencies in this category publish rates, which means it is possible.

Guaranteed citation placement. Nobody controls model output. A guarantee is either a misunderstanding of the mechanism or a promise that will be redefined at reporting time.

Answer-engine visibility results promised in thirty days. In a month a competent firm can audit, fix crawler access, deploy schema and restructure several pages. That is genuinely valuable work. AIGNCI’s 30-day commitment applies to citation-ready website delivery, not to a visibility outcome, and presenting delivery work as a measured outcome is the most common sleight of hand in the category.

Proprietary scores with no methodology. A visibility index nobody can reproduce cannot be audited, and it conveniently improves.

Long lock-in contracts. Month-to-month is increasingly standard among specialists precisely because the discipline is young and methods are still shifting.

Testimonials with initials and stock photography. Small on its own, but it indicates a firm comfortable presenting unverifiable claims — which is the opposite of what corroboration work requires.

These are publicly stated figures, useful for judging whether a quote is inside the normal range.

This page is published by an agency in the category, which you should factor in. We have tried to write the comparison we would have wanted as a buyer rather than one engineered to make us the only answer.

Where we are genuinely a poor fit: if you need enterprise-scale execution across dozens of markets with a large delivery team, a specialist consultancy with sixty people will serve you better than a small firm. If you want a single audit and no ongoing relationship, buy the audit and stop. If your priority is paid media performance, this is the wrong category entirely.

Where we think we are a strong fit: businesses that want the person who built the strategy to be the person executing it, that value published pricing and named case studies, and that recognize the corroboration layer as the part that actually decides outcomes — because that is a reputation discipline, and reputation is what we have been doing since 1995.