Two years ago, hardly any agency sold “AI SEO”. Now it’s on half the service menus in the country, often next to the same SEO packages those agencies sold before, with a new name and a higher price.
Some of those agencies have built genuine expertise in how ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews choose what to cite. Others have added the words to their website and changed very little else. Because the field is so new, there are no industry standards or certifications to tell them apart.
Going into the first meeting with written questions makes it easier to compare agencies fairly.
Alt text: A notepad with a handwritten numbered list, a pen and a laptop on a café table
What you can do is ask better questions. These eight are designed for the first meeting, and the answers will tell you quickly whether an agency understands AI search or is hoping you don’t.
Before the Meeting: Know What You Want
It’s easier to judge answers when you know what you’re after. Spend ten minutes putting three or four questions your customers ask into ChatGPT and Gemini, and note who gets named. That gives you a baseline and a concrete example to put in front of each agency.
Also decide what success would mean for you. For some businesses it’s more enquiries from people who say “ChatGPT recommended you”. For others it’s protecting traffic that AI summaries are starting to absorb. An agency should shape its plan around that goal rather than its standard package.
1. How Do You Measure AI Visibility?
This is the question that sorts agencies fastest. Traditional SEO has well-understood metrics: rankings, organic traffic, conversions. AI visibility is harder to measure, and an agency selling it should have a clear answer.
A good answer describes a fixed set of prompts that customers might ask, tested regularly across several AI tools, with a record of whether your business is named, how it’s described and which sources are cited. It should also cover referral traffic from AI tools in your analytics.
A weak answer talks only about keyword rankings, or offers an “AI score” from a tool the agency can’t explain.
It’s reasonable to ask to see the prompt list itself. For a physiotherapy clinic, it might include questions such as “who treats running injuries in the Inner West?” and “is dry needling worth it for back pain?”. If the agency’s prompts don’t sound like something your customers would type, the tracking won’t tell you much.
2. Which AI Tools Do You Track, and Why Those?
ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews all work differently and draw on different sources. An agency should be able to explain which ones matter for your customers and why.
For a local trade business, Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT may matter most. For a software company selling to developers, Perplexity and Claude might deserve more attention. One-size-fits-all tracking suggests a one-size-fits-all service.
3. What Will You Change on My Website First?
Ask for specifics. Useful early work often includes rewriting key service pages so they answer common questions directly, adding structured data, fixing crawl settings that block AI search bots, and making business details consistent everywhere.
If the plan is mostly “publish more content”, dig deeper. Volume on its own rarely helps, and it can hurt.
A sensible first quarter usually looks unglamorous: an audit of what AI tools currently say about you, fixes to crawl access and business listings, rewrites of your five or six most important pages, and a plan for earning mentions on sites you don’t own. New content comes later, once the foundations are right.
4. Do You Use AI to Write Content, and How?
Many agencies now use AI writing tools, and that isn’t a problem in itself. What matters is how.
Google’s spam policies describe “scaled content abuse” as producing large amounts of unoriginal content mainly to manipulate rankings, however it’s made. An agency churning out hundreds of thin AI articles on your domain puts the whole site at risk, in traditional search and in the AI answers that draw on it.
Listen for an answer that involves subject experts, original information from your business, and human editing. Google’s own guidance on helpful, people-first content is a useful yardstick: content should show first-hand experience and give readers something they can’t get elsewhere.
AI visibility reporting should show tracked prompts, citations and referral traffic alongside keyword positions.
Alt text: A tablet on a desk showing an abstract dashboard with small bar charts and a list of tracked prompts
5. How Is This Different From the SEO You Already Sell?
A fair question, and an honest agency won’t be offended by it. AI SEO builds on the same foundations as traditional SEO. Google states in its guidance on AI features in Search that pages need no special optimisation to appear in AI Overviews beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.
So the difference should lie in the extra work: tracking AI answers, building independent mentions that AI tools use to verify a business, structuring content so individual passages can be quoted, and reporting on AI referrals. If the agency can’t name what’s different, you may be paying extra for the same service.
6. What Results Have You Seen, and Over What Timeframe?
Ask for examples with dates. Before and after screenshots of AI answers, referral traffic charts and changes in branded search are all reasonable evidence.
Be cautious about big claims. The major AI tools change how they answer often, and no outside agency controls which sources they cite. A credible agency talks about improving your odds and shows you the trend, rather than promising a set number of AI mentions.
7. Who Will Actually Do the Work?
AI SEO touches technical settings, content, digital PR and reporting. Ask who covers each part, and whether the people who pitch are the people who deliver. If the answer is a single account manager handling everything across dozens of clients, adjust your expectations accordingly. Ask too how often you’ll speak with them, and whether you’ll get access to the tracking data yourself or only see it in a monthly report.
8. What Happens if It Isn’t Working After Six Months?
A good agency will have thought about this. Ask what they’d review, what they’d change, and whether you can leave without penalty. Month-to-month terms, or a short initial term with a clear review point, suggest an agency confident in its work.
What Good and Weak Answers Sound Like
| Question | A good answer sounds like | A warning sign sounds like |
| Measuring AI visibility | A fixed prompt set tested monthly across named tools | “We track your keyword rankings” |
| Which AI tools | Chosen to match how your customers search | “All of them” with no explanation |
| First website changes | Specific pages, fixes and structured data | “We’ll publish four blogs a month” |
| Use of AI writing | Human experts, original input, editing | Large volumes of AI articles |
| Difference from SEO | Named extra activities and reporting | A new name for the same package |
| Results | Dated examples and trend charts | A promised number of AI mentions |
| Who does the work | Named specialists for each area | One person across dozens of accounts |
| If it isn’t working | A review process and fair exit terms | A 12 month lock-in |
Use the right-hand column as a list of phrases to listen for.
Asking each agency the same eight questions makes their proposals much easier to compare.
Alt text: Two printed proposals side by side on a boardroom table with a pen between them
Making the Shortlist
Talk to at least three agencies. It’s worth including one that specialises in your city, because local AI answers lean heavily on local sources such as regional media, council directories and area-specific reviews. If you’re comparing an AI SEO agency in Sydney against a national or overseas provider, ask each how they’d build the local mentions your business is missing, and how long they expect that to take.
Then compare the written answers side by side, ideally with a colleague who wasn’t in the meetings and won’t be swayed by the pitch. Agencies that answer all eight questions clearly and specifically, without guarantees, are the ones worth a second meeting.
Before You Sign
AI SEO is a real discipline, but it’s new enough that the label alone tells you very little. The questions above shift the conversation from the pitch to the plan.
Print them, take them to your next agency meeting, and write down the answers as you go. If an agency can’t explain how it measures AI visibility in plain English, keep looking.