An AI SEO agency can help a business improve its visibility in conventional search and AI-generated answers. Its services may include technical fixes, content development, business-information updates, and measurement. Because the label covers different offerings, ask the agency to demonstrate what it would do for your website.
A useful demonstration connects a customer question to a page, identifies the missing information, proposes a change, and explains how the team would verify it. That gives you a practical basis for comparing agencies.
Bring an actual page to the conversation. The dashboard can wait a few minutes.
Clarify what the agency means by AI SEO
An agency might use AI to speed up research and production. It might optimize your information for AI search. It might offer both. Ask for a plain description of each service and its output.
Then identify the business objective. Are you trying to improve a service page, support product comparisons, expand location coverage, or understand how buyers research your category?
The answer determines the staffing and work required. A local service business needs different factual inputs from a manufacturer managing a large catalog. The proposal should reflect the company in front of the agency.
My overview of AEO explains the core concepts. Use those definitions to keep the vendor discussion focused on the assignment.
Request a demonstration on one priority page
Choose a page connected to revenue. Ask the agency to identify the question it should answer and review the information currently available.
For a fictional repair company, that might include supported equipment, service area, diagnostic fees, scheduling, and what happens after the technician’s inspection. The exercise should reveal which facts require input from the business.
Ask who would collect those facts, who would write the revision, and who would publish it. Then ask how the agency would check the finished page.
I would pay attention to the questions the team asks you. A recommendation based on your customer, operating constraints, and actual service is easier to evaluate than a recommendation that could be pasted into any proposal.
Look for capacity across the whole assignment
Identify the strategist, writer, developer, analyst, and account lead. Ask which people you will work with directly and where specialist support is available. My consultant evaluation guide offers further questions about experience, scope, and responsibility.
For a complex service, the writer needs a route to a subject expert. For a technical issue, the developer needs access and time. For reporting, someone needs to understand how the observations were collected.
Ask how the team handles factual review. Google’s helpful-content guidance discusses originality, accuracy, and clear authorship. Those standards give you concrete questions about the agency’s editorial process.
I would request an example showing how an expert’s input became a published page. Review the brief, the approved facts, and the final copy. That is where production quality becomes visible.
Check the crawler recommendation carefully
Have the agency identify any access issue before changing your crawler rules or security settings.
OpenAI documents separate search and training controls. Perplexity also publishes crawler and firewall guidance. An agency should use the relevant documentation when explaining a platform-specific access change.
Ask for the affected URL, the observed response, and the verification method. If a firewall is involved, your security or hosting team should review the proposed configuration.
That process gives you a precise technical task. It also preserves the business’s ability to choose how its content is used.
Give the agency a reporting test
Ask it to show how one observation becomes a reported metric. Start with a saved answer, its date, the question, the platform, and any directly visible sources.
Then inspect the calculation. What counts as a mention? What counts as a citation? Does the percentage represent recorded answers, distinct questions, or something else? Where are missing observations recorded?
For an illustrative sample, an agency could collect forty answers and find your business named in eight. That is 20% of the recorded answers. If only two link to your site, preserve that distinction in the report.
My article on SEO and AEO reporting expands on this approach. A manager should be able to reconstruct the important figures without needing a private explanation from the analyst.
Ask how visibility connects to inquiries
Have the agency define the conversion actions it will monitor. These might include quote requests, completed bookings, qualified calls, or product inquiries. Choose the actions that matter to the business.
Inspect the path after someone lands on the page. Can they understand the offer? Can they determine whether they qualify? Can they provide the information needed for the next step?
A fictional equipment supplier might receive more relevant visits while its inquiry form still requests too little information for a useful quote. The project should include a discussion of that gap.
Keep observed referrals, customer-reported discovery, and estimated influence labeled separately. If a salesperson asks how the prospect heard about the company, store the answer as a customer report. Use it alongside the website record.
Read case studies with the scope in view
Request the starting point, dates, work completed, and outcome measured. Ask whether several channels or major website changes occurred during the period.
My SEO case-study collection illustrates the kind of project detail you can inspect. A conventional search case demonstrates the work and metrics documented in that case. Additional AI-answer claims need their own evidence.
Ask the agency what it can reasonably conclude from its results. A team that can explain the limits of a case gives you a more useful basis for forecasting your own engagement.
Compare contracts through responsibility and risk
Review the page volume, technical capacity, factual review process, reporting access, and approval rules. Ask how the agency charges for work outside the initial scope.
If it offers a guarantee, request the exact qualifying question, platform, conditions, and remedy. Decide whether satisfying that promise would advance your business objective. You are buying an outcome that matters to the company, so inspect the promise accordingly.
Google’s hiring guidance advises reviewing experience, expected results, methods, and communication. Carry those questions into the AI SEO conversation as well.
Finish the evaluation with a pilot brief
Choose one service, a small page group, and a documented baseline. Agree on the completed outputs and the review date. Ask the agency to price that assignment and identify what it needs from your team.
At review, inspect the published work and the evidence. Discuss accuracy, implementation quality, relevant inquiries, and the next priority. Expand the scope when the working relationship and records support the decision.
The evaluation should leave you able to answer a straightforward question: who will do what, on which pages, and how will we judge it? Get that answer into the agreement. It is more useful than a dashboard you have to admire from a distance.