How to choose an AI search optimization agency
The category is new, the claims are loud and the proof is thin. Twelve questions that separate agencies doing real measurement work from agencies renaming their SEO retainer.
AI search visibility is a young category with low barriers to entry, confident marketing and very little verifiable proof. That combination reliably produces bad purchases.
Here is what we would ask if we were buying this service rather than selling it.
1. “What exactly will you measure and how?”
This is the single most revealing question.
A good answer describes a prompt set, a defined list of buying questions, run on a schedule across named assistants, with results recorded so that a trend can be read over time. It should include how they handle variance, because the same prompt genuinely returns different answers to different users.
A weak answer talks about “AI visibility scores” without explaining where the number comes from, or points at a dashboard without saying what it samples.
2. “Can I see the prompts?”
You should be able to re-run the measurement yourself and get broadly similar results. If the prompt set is proprietary, the measurement is unfalsifiable and unfalsifiable measurement is a reporting aesthetic rather than evidence.
3. “What will you guarantee?”
The correct answer is: nothing about placement in AI answers.
These systems do not publish ranking factors, change frequently and personalise. An agency guaranteeing citations in ChatGPT or AI Overviews is either misleading you or does not understand the systems well enough to be trusted with the work.
Guarantees about process, a defined deliverable, a reporting cadence, a notice period, are reasonable and worth asking for.
4. “What happens to my accounts if we stop?”
Your analytics, ad accounts, search console, domain and content should be owned by you, with the agency holding delegated access. If any of it is created inside the agency’s own account, you are renting your own marketing history.
5. “Show me the work that is unique to AI visibility”
A lot of the underlying work overlaps with good SEO, which is fine and expected. What should be itemised separately:
- AI crawler access policy (
GPTBot,OAI-SearchBot,PerplexityBot,ClaudeBot,Google-Extendedare controlled independently ofGooglebot) - Entity reconciliation across your site, profiles and third-party listings
- Prompt-level measurement and trend reporting
- Content restructured for extraction and attribution, not just ranking
- Corroboration strategy, getting credible independent sources to describe you accurately
If the proposal is a standard SEO retainer with “AI” in the title, you will pay twice for one body of work.
6. “How do you handle the fact that you cannot see the ranking factors?”
Listen for intellectual honesty. The right answer acknowledges uncertainty, describes what is documented versus observed versus hypothesised and explains how they test rather than assert.
An agency with a confident, complete theory of how AI Overviews rank sources is telling you something no one outside Google knows.
7. “What does your reporting look like in a bad month?”
Ask to see a report where nothing improved. Agencies that only show you upside are selecting what they show you and you will find out eventually.
8. “Who actually does the work?”
Sold by a senior, delivered by a junior is the oldest problem in agency services. Ask who writes the content, who makes the technical changes and whether any of it is outsourced.
9. “What is your position on AI-generated content?”
There is a defensible answer, used as a drafting aid, with subject-matter review and human editing. There is an indefensible one, volume publishing with no review, which tends to produce exactly the unverifiable, uncitable content that performs badly in the systems you are trying to win.
Ask specifically who verifies factual claims before publication.
10. “How do you measure business outcomes, not just visibility?”
Share of AI voice is an input. Qualified leads and revenue are the output. An agency that cannot connect its work to pipeline is optimising a metric you cannot spend.
11. “What would make you tell me not to hire you?”
A good agency has a real answer: your site is too broken to layer this on, your category has negligible AI query volume, your budget is better spent fixing conversion first. An agency for whom every business is a perfect fit is describing a sales process, not a diagnosis.
12. “What do your contracts actually say?”
Check the notice period, whether there is an initial lock-in, what happens to work-in-progress content and whether there are setup fees that are not in the headline price.
The honest summary
Most of the value in this category right now comes from two things that are not glamorous: making sure the AI systems can actually access and parse your site and measuring what happens rigorously enough to tell whether anything you did mattered.
Anyone selling you certainty in a category this young is selling you the one thing that does not exist in it.
If it is useful, our own approach is documented on the AI visibility audit page and our pricing is laid out on the pricing page rather than hidden behind a call.