How to choose an AI SEO agency

A few years ago a buyer looking for a contractor, an attorney or a fabricator typed a phrase into Google and picked from a list of links. Today a large share of those same people ask an assistant, or read the AI answer sitting above the results, and never scroll to the list at all. That changes what you are buying. Page one still helps, but if the answer above the results names three companies in your category and you are not one of them, the ranking you paid for is doing less work than it used to.

This is why AI SEO is suddenly on every agency's homepage. Some firms have built something real. Some have renamed the same monthly report. Telling the two apart is not hard once you know what to ask, and the write-up behind this review lays the questions out plainly.

Strip away the language and the work falls into four buckets. Making the business legible to machines: consistent name, address, phone and service details everywhere they appear, plus structured markup so a machine can read what you do and who you serve without guessing. Answering the questions buyers actually ask, in a format an assistant can quote, rather than keyword pages. Letting AI crawlers in, because plenty of sites quietly block the very crawlers that feed the answers, or hide their content behind scripts those crawlers never run. And measuring citations, not just rankings: whether the business gets named, per engine, checked repeatedly over time.

The seven questions are the useful part. Show me an AI answer where a client of yours is named. Which engines do you check, and how often. What exactly will be different on my site in the first thirty days. Who writes the content, and will it read like us. What happens to the work if I leave. What won't this fix. What does the reporting actually show me. Each one has a worrying answer attached, and the worrying answers are all variations on the same theme: vagueness where a specific should be.

On pricing, the argument is that nobody can quote your number in an article, but you can judge whether a quote is coherent. Price follows locations and service areas, the state of the foundation on day one, how much writing is needed, and whether someone is adjusting monthly or shipping a setup and leaving. A one-time foundation project and a monthly engagement are both reasonable shapes. A monthly fee with no defined deliverables, a twelve month lock with no exit, or a price so low it can only cover an automated tool run are not.

The proof section is where the piece earns its keep. It publishes three client results straight from Search Console exports, comparing the same date range year over year, and notes that in two of the three, impressions fell while clicks rose. Real data is untidy. Numbers that only ever move up, with no context and no date range, are usually a slide. Ask any agency for the export behind the chart, the exact dates compared, and what else changed in the business during that period.

The closing advice is the part worth repeating: ask the seven questions, insist on one real AI answer naming a current client, read the deliverables rather than the adjectives, keep ownership of everything, and walk away from anyone guaranteeing placement.