AI SEO agencies and companies: how to choose one
How to evaluate an AI SEO agency — the questions that separate genuine practice from vocabulary, and the contract terms worth negotiating.
Choosing an AI SEO agency is harder than choosing a traditional SEO agency, because the field is new enough that credentials are thin and case studies are unverifiable. This article gives a practical evaluation process and the specific questions that separate substance from vocabulary.
What a good agency actually does differently
The competent agencies in this space differ from traditional SEO agencies in three observable ways.
They measure generated answers, not just rankings. They will have a method for running a prompt set across engines repeatedly, storing responses, and reporting mention rate and competitor gap. If this capability is absent, the offering is traditional SEO with a new label.
They treat retrievability as a separate discipline. AI crawler access, server-side rendering, and bot protection behaviour are not part of a standard SEO audit, and an agency that does not raise them has not done this work before.
They work on the off-site record. A large part of what models believe about a brand comes from third-party sources. Agencies that only touch your own domain will move retrieval-driven citations and nothing else.
Questions that reveal competence
- How do you measure whether we appear in AI answers, and how many times do you run each prompt? A vague answer here is disqualifying, and a low repetition count means their numbers are noisy.
- Which engines do you cover, and do you use APIs or the consumer interfaces? Both are defensible; not knowing the difference is not.
- Show me a report where the numbers went down. Agencies that only present improvements are either selecting their cases or not measuring honestly.
- What would you check before writing any content for us? The right answer starts with retrievability and existing page structure, not a content calendar.
- How do you handle the variance between runs? If they have not encountered it, they have not measured seriously.
- What did you do that stopped working in the last year? This field changes quickly, and an agency with no revised opinions has not been paying attention.
- Who does the writing, and what is the fact-checking process? AI-assisted production is fine; unreviewed AI output published at volume is a real risk to your domain.
Commercial terms worth negotiating
- Ownership and export of the prompt set, response data, and content briefs. These are the durable assets of the engagement.
- A documented, frozen baseline in the first month, so later claims of improvement are checkable.
- Reporting that includes per-engine breakdowns and the competitor set, not a single composite score.
- A break clause tied to a review at three months, since this is long enough to see retrieval-side movement.
- Clarity on whether content production is included or billed separately, and at what volume.
Warning signs
- Guaranteed AI answer placement, guaranteed rankings, or a guaranteed visibility score.
- Proprietary scores with undisclosed methodology used as the primary success measure.
- Large upfront content volumes proposed before any measurement.
- Case studies with percentage improvements and no absolute numbers or prompt sets.
- Reluctance to show the raw engine responses behind their metrics.
In-house or agency
The measurement side of this work is largely tooling and process, and is genuinely feasible in-house once someone owns it. The parts that benefit most from an agency are the off-site work, which depends on relationships and outreach capacity, and the initial diagnosis, where experience across many accounts shortens the learning curve considerably. A common and sensible arrangement is an agency for the first two quarters and a documented handover to an internal owner.
Common questions about AI SEO agencies
- Do I need a specialist AI SEO agency? Only if your existing provider cannot demonstrate the measurement capability. Ask to see a documented prompt set and stored engine responses — that single request separates genuine practice from vocabulary faster than any conversation.
- What should an AI SEO company deliver in month one? A documented, frozen baseline and a retrievability audit with fixes identified. If month one is a content calendar, the engagement is running backwards.
- How do I compare agency proposals? Normalise them on three things: what is measured and how often, whether content production is included and at what volume, and who owns the data at the end. Everything else is presentation.
- Are the large established SEO agencies behind on this? Some have built genuine capability and some have relabelled existing services. Firm size is not a reliable signal either way; the measurement test is.
- What does a fair contract length look like? Three months to a first review, which is long enough to see retrieval-side movement and short enough to change course. Twelve-month commitments signed before any baseline exists are worth resisting.
- Should the agency also write the content? Efficient if their editorial standard is good, a liability if it is not. Ask who writes, what the fact-checking process is, and to see three unedited examples.
Tip: before any pitch, run your five most valuable buying questions through two engines yourself and keep the answers. Agencies that engage with what those answers actually show, including the unflattering parts, are the ones worth shortlisting.
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