Search around for help with AI search and you’ll find dozens of agencies claiming they can get you into ChatGPT answers, AI Overviews and Perplexity results within weeks. Some of that is genuine capability. A lot of it is guesswork dressed up as expertise.
Good AI SEO support should be easy to explain: fix weak pages, improve structure, strengthen content and report what changed.
If you’re trying to work out who to trust, you need a way to separate real process from confident-sounding claims. This article is not a pitch. It’s a checklist for evaluating any provider you’re considering, including us.
Start by ignoring the promises
The fastest way to spot a weak provider is to listen for guarantees. Nobody can promise you’ll be cited in ChatGPT, featured in an AI Overview, or ranked on page one. These systems change constantly and no agency controls them.
What a credible provider can promise is a process: an audit, a set of fixes, a way of measuring change over time, and honesty about what’s working and what isn’t. If someone skips straight to guarantees without mentioning any of that, treat it as a warning sign, not a selling point.
It’s also worth understanding what actually separates this kind of work from standard SEO. We covered that distinction in more detail in our piece on SEO vs AEO vs GEO. The short version: rankings still matter, but AI systems now summarise and select sources in ways traditional SEO reporting doesn’t fully capture.
Ask what the audit actually covers
Any agency worth paying should start with an audit, not a proposal full of stock phrases. A proper audit should look at:
- Whether search engines and AI crawlers can actually access and read your site
- Whether the right pages are indexed and the wrong ones aren’t competing for attention
- Whether your content clearly states what you do, where you operate and who you help
- Whether entity signals (your name, services, locations) are consistent across the site
- Whether schema markup is present, accurate and not just bolted on for the sake of it
- Whether internal links support understanding rather than just padding out a sitemap
Ask to see a sample audit or a summary of what one includes. If the answer is vague or the agency can’t explain what they’d actually check, that tells you something.
Questions worth asking directly
- What would your audit find on my site specifically?
- Which pages matter most for revenue, and how would you prioritise them?
- What technical issues are common causes of poor performance in my industry?
- How do you decide what to fix first?
If the answers sound like they’d apply to literally any business, keep looking.
Check whether they understand technical foundations still matter
Some providers talk about AI search as if it replaces technical SEO entirely. It doesn’t. AI systems still need clean, crawlable, well-structured sites to work with. A provider who skips straight to “content for AI” without mentioning crawlability, indexing, duplicate content or site speed probably hasn’t thought it through.
Ask how they’d handle common technical issues: broken pages, thin duplicate location pages, slow load times, weak heading structure. A good agency will have straightforward answers. A weak one will pivot back to talking about content strategy without addressing the question.
Look at how they talk about content changes
Be cautious of any agency that leads with “we’ll write you new content.” Often the better first move is fixing what already exists: clarifying vague intros, restructuring pages so they answer the actual question, removing filler, and making sure headings match what people are searching for.
Many weak proposals become clearer once you understand the difference between SEO, AEO, GEO and LLM SEO and what each part is supposed to achieve.
A good provider should be able to explain, in plain terms, why a page is underperforming before proposing to rewrite it. If they jump to a content calendar before diagnosing the actual problem, that’s backwards.
Ask how they measure progress
This is where a lot of agencies fall short, because measuring AI search performance is genuinely harder than tracking keyword rankings. Be sceptical of anyone who claims they can show you precise, reliable numbers for ChatGPT citations or AI Overview appearances every month. Some of that is observable. Much of it still isn’t measured cleanly by anyone in the industry yet.
What you should expect instead:
- Organic traffic trends to your key commercial pages
- Indexing and crawl health improvements over time
- Changes in click-through patterns from Google Search
- Any observable AI Overview presence for target topics, reported honestly as partial data
- Growth in topic coverage beyond just branded terms
- A clear link between the work done and actual business outcomes, not just dashboard metrics
An agency that admits the limits of measurement is usually more trustworthy than one that claims full search performance into how AI platforms select sources.
Watch for scope creep and vague deliverables
A common issue with less experienced providers is scope that expands without a clear reason. One month it’s an audit, the next it’s “AI content optimisation,” then it’s “entity building,” without ever explaining what specific problem each activity solves for your site.
Ask for a plan that ties each activity to a finding from the audit. If a task doesn’t trace back to something specific they found on your site, question why it’s there.
Reporting should be specific, not decorative
Good reporting should tell you:
- What changed this reporting period
- What impact is visible so far, even if partial
- What’s still being monitored
- What comes next and why
- Anything blocking progress on your end
If a report is mostly charts with no explanation of what was actually done, it’s decoration, not accountability.
Get clear on what “AI SEO” actually means for your business
The term gets used loosely across the industry, which is part of why buyers get confused. In practice it usually covers technical fixes, content structure, entity clarity, schema and internal linking, applied with an eye on how both search engines and AI answer tools interpret your site. If you want a fuller breakdown of what that work involves and how it’s scoped commercially, our AI SEO agency page covers that in more detail.
The point of this article isn’t to sell you that. It’s to help you ask better questions of whoever you’re considering, including us.
For the language-model side of the work, LLM SEO for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity explains how major AI systems can interpret business content.
Red flags worth remembering
- Guarantees of AI Overview placement, ChatGPT citations or specific rankings
- No mention of a proper audit before proposing work
- Jargon-heavy pitches that don’t explain what will actually change on your site
- Reporting with no explanation of cause and effect
- Content plans proposed before any diagnosis of existing pages
- Claims of exact, reliable data on AI platform citations
None of these automatically mean a provider is dishonest. Sometimes it just means they haven’t thought through the details yet. Either way, it’s worth pushing for clearer answers before signing anything.
A short list of good questions to bring to any pitch
- Can you show me an example audit or explain what yours would cover?
- What’s your process for deciding what to fix first?
- How do you handle the fact that AI citation data is hard to measure precisely?
- What would you change on my site in the first month, and why?
- How will I know if this is working after three months?
If those questions get straight, specific answers, you’re probably talking to someone who knows the work. If they get deflected with confidence and buzzwords, that’s your answer too.
Final word
Choosing a provider in this space is harder than choosing a traditional SEO agency, mostly because the terminology is new and half the industry is still figuring out how to measure success properly. The safest approach is to ignore the promises, focus on process, and ask direct questions about audits, technical work and reporting. Once you’ve got a shortlist that passes that test, you can dig into specifics like how they’d handle your content. Our piece on optimising website content for ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity is a good next read if you want to understand what page-level work actually looks like once the basics are sorted.
