Search “AI SEO agency” and you’ll get two completely different pitches back, often from the same company. One is an ordinary SEO agency that now runs its content and reporting through AI tools internally. The other is optimising specifically for the answers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity give people, which is a different discipline with different metrics. Most sales pages don’t tell you which one you’re buying, and that ambiguity is where a lot of wasted budget comes from.
What “AI SEO agency” actually means
If an agency’s pitch stops at “we use AI,” ask which side of the split they’re on. Using AI as a tool to write faster or automate reporting doesn’t change what you’re being sold, it’s still traditional SEO: rankings, organic clicks, keyword positions. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what most people searching this term are actually after.
The other meaning, usually called AEO or answer engine optimisation, is about whether your business gets cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of typing a search query. That covers structured data and schema, crawler access for bots like GPTBot and PerplexityBot, and content written to actually answer a question rather than rank for a keyword. It’s a real, separate skill set, and Google’s own documentation on AI features is explicit that the same technical fundamentals still apply underneath it. This matters more every quarter: Search Engine Land reported zero-click searches reaching 68% in early 2026, which means a growing share of the people who’d have clicked through to your site now get their answer without visiting at all. If nobody’s optimising for that, you’re invisible to a chunk of demand that used to be reachable.
A competent agency should be able to tell you, in one sentence, which of these two things they mean when they say “AI SEO.” If they can’t, that’s the first sign to keep reading rather than sign anything.
Red flags to walk away from
A handful of patterns come up again and again with agencies trading on the term without doing the underlying work.
- Guaranteed rankings or citations. Nobody controls what a search engine or an AI model outputs, including the platforms themselves. A guarantee of a top spot, or of being cited by ChatGPT, is a promise nobody can keep and a sign they’re selling confidence rather than results.
- Vague “AI-powered” language with no specifics. Ask what the AI actually does in their process, on which platforms, and what changes because of it. “Our proprietary AI system” with nothing underneath it is marketing copy, not a method.
- No proof of AI visibility work, only rankings. If every example they show you is a Google ranking chart, and none of it covers whether they’ve measured or improved citations in ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Overviews, they’re not doing the thing the pitch implies.
- AI content with no human check. Fine as a first draft, not fine as a finished product. If nobody at the agency can tell you who reviews and fact-checks what the AI produces before it goes live, expect it to read like everyone else’s AI output, because it will be.
- Backlink volume with no quality detail. Watch for agencies quoting a number of links per month without naming the kind of sites they come from. Cheap, high-volume links from directories and link farms can do more harm than good.
- Long contracts with no way out. A lock-in with no performance milestones and no exit clause protects their retainer, not your results.
None of these are unique to AI SEO. They’re the same warning signs that have applied to SEO generally for years. AI has just given agencies a new word to hide behind while doing the same old thing.
What to actually check before you sign
Once you’ve filtered out the obvious red flags, a shorter list of questions tells you whether an agency is genuinely doing the work.
- Ask for a real example, not a case study PDF. A specific client, a specific starting point, and what actually moved, in rankings and in AI citations if that’s what you’re paying for.
- Ask whether they audit before they quote. A price given before anyone has looked at your site is a guess dressed up as a quote.
- Ask what they measure monthly, and at what threshold they’d change strategy. Agencies that can’t define their own success metric tend to drift once the contract’s signed.
- Ask who does the work. One named point of contact who follows your account from the audit through to reporting, not a rotating account manager relaying updates from someone you never speak to.
- Ask how SEO and AI visibility connect in their process, rather than being sold as two separate add-on services. The two increasingly reinforce each other: strong SEO gives AI models a page worth citing in the first place.
If an agency answers all of that without hedging, you’ve probably found one worth a proper conversation.
How I approach it
I run SEO and AEO as connected work rather than two separate line items, because in practice they draw on the same audit and the same understanding of your market. The SEO side covers the fundamentals: technical fixes, white-hat link building, content and local listings. The AEO side runs your category’s actual buying prompts through ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to find out where you’re missing from the answer, then fixes the schema, crawler access and content gaps behind that.
Every engagement starts with an audit, not a quote, so pricing reflects what your site actually needs rather than a package built for someone else’s business. I don’t guarantee rankings or citations, because anyone who does is guessing, but I do measure a baseline before starting and report movement against it.
For proof rather than promises: a Dorset insurance broker went from just under 100% to 300% ROAS after a link building campaign that earned over 800 genuine backlinks, alongside a paid search overhaul. On the content and AI side, an AI copywriter and content researcher lifted organic traffic 370% and conversions 60% for a client capturing long-tail search demand, with a person signing off every piece before it published.
If you’re evaluating agencies right now, the checklist above works whoever you end up talking to. If you’d rather skip straight to a conversation about your own site, a consultation call is free and thirty minutes, or you can see how the wider audit-to-installed-agent process works on the AI Makeover page.
