An AI SEO agency (properly called a GEO, or generative engine optimization, agency) audits how AI crawlers see your site, rewrites and restructures your content so a model can quote it directly, and adds structured data that tells engines who you are and what you sell. The deliverable isn't a ranking position. It's your business getting named, correctly, inside an answer from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews.
What does an AI SEO agency actually do?
Three things, in order. First, a technical audit: is your site crawlable by OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Googlebot, or is something (a JavaScript-only render, a blanket robots.txt block, a redirect chain) quietly hiding you from all of them. Second, content restructuring: pulling the direct answer to a real question into the first paragraph of a page, in plain language, instead of burying it under three paragraphs of brand story. Third, structured data: Organization, Article and FAQ schema that removes ambiguity about who's speaking and what the page is about. A competent agency runs all three before touching anything else, because a beautifully written page that a crawler can't reach or a model won't quote is invisible regardless of how good the prose is.
How is this different from a traditional SEO agency?
Traditional SEO optimizes a page to outrank other pages on a results list a human scrolls through. GEO optimizes a passage to be the one thing a model lifts out and states as fact. The two overlap heavily (crawlability, site speed, clear writing, backlinks as trust signals) but the unit being judged is different: a ranking position versus a citation. A page can sit on page one of Google and still lose the citation to a competitor's second paragraph, because that paragraph answers the question more directly. If an agency pitching "AI SEO" can't explain that distinction, or is just reselling a standard SEO package with the word "AI" added to the invoice, that's a sign to keep looking.
What should the first month look like?
An audit report naming specific pages and specific blockers, not a generic scorecard. A short list of quick technical fixes (robots.txt entries, a redirect cleanup, missing schema) that should ship in week one. And a content plan tied to the actual questions your customers ask, not a keyword list lifted from a tool. If a month goes by and the only artifact is a slide deck, the engagement is stalled before it started.
What does it cost, relative to other marketing spend?
Pricing varies by scope, but a useful anchor: a serious GEO engagement sits closer to an ongoing SEO retainer than to a one-off audit, because the work is continuous, not a single project with an end date. Content, once published, still needs the monthly check that confirms a citation held. Treat quotes that promise a fixed, cheap, one-time fix with suspicion. There's no such thing as a permanent citation; models get updated, competitors publish sharper answers, and the work that earned a citation in March can lose it by June without maintenance.
How do you evaluate an agency before signing?
Ask to see their own site's GEO work first. An agency that hasn't applied the checklist to itself is asking you to trust a method it hasn't tested. Ask what tools they use to confirm a citation (there's no equivalent of Search Console for this yet, so the honest answer involves running real queries by hand and checking GA4 referral traffic from sources like chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai). And ask for one specific, named example of a page they moved from invisible to cited, with the before-and-after, not a vague case study.
What are the warning signs?
Guarantees of citations on a fixed timeline (no one controls what a model chooses to quote). Reports that only show ranking positions, which is the wrong metric for this kind of work. And "AI SEO" pitched as a bolt-on service by an agency whose core business is something unrelated, sold as an add-on rather than a discipline they practice on their own properties.
A subtler warning sign: an agency that treats every page the same way. A homepage, a pricing page and a blog post each answer a different kind of question, and a model looks for different signals on each. Uniform, generic recommendations across an entire site usually mean the audit was templated rather than read.
Where this fits with what you're already doing
GEO doesn't replace SEO, web design or paid search. It sits alongside them, using the same technical foundation (a fast, crawlable, well-structured site) and applying it to a newer surface. We run this checklist on our own site and for client platforms like Princess Garage, Nova Drive and Dealer Pro, where being the answer a customer's AI assistant gives is starting to matter as much as the ranking position ever did.
Know what you're buying before you sign anything.
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