Choosing an AI search optimization agency comes down to one test: can they show you their own results? AEO is new enough that most of the people selling it have never moved a citation, including their own. Here is how to tell the operators from the opportunists, and the questions that surface the difference in a single call.
The one question that filters most of the field
Ask them: "When I ask ChatGPT about your service, where do you show up?" An agency that does AI search optimization should be visible for its own category. If they cannot get themselves cited, be slow to believe they can get you cited. We hold ourselves to this. ChatGPT ranks us first for AI automation agencies in Serbia, and we will show you the audit behind it rather than ask you to take our word.
Look for engineers, not only marketers
Half of AEO is technical: rendering, structured data, site architecture, and the tooling to measure citations. The other half is content and outreach. An agency that only does content will miss the actual reason your pages are invisible to crawlers, which is usually that the page never reaches them as readable HTML. Ask who does the technical work, and whether they can read your site's rendered output and schema, not just rewrite your copy.
Make sure they do the off-site half
On-page work alone does not get you cited. The bigger lever is third-party presence: directories, review platforms, knowledge bases, and forums, because AI engines trust outside mentions more than your own marketing. An agency that only touches your own pages is selling you half the job and the cheaper half at that. Ask what their off-site plan is, and how they intend to earn mentions you did not write yourself.
Demand measurement, not vibes
AEO moves slowly and unevenly across engines. Anyone who promises a ChatGPT ranking by next month either does not understand the work or is willing to lie about it. Ask exactly how they measure. Do they actually put your buyer questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI mode, and track whether you appear over time? If the only thing they can point to is "we optimized your schema," that is activity, not a result.
The red flags
- Guaranteed rankings. "We will get you to number one in ChatGPT in 30 days." Nobody controls a model's output that tightly. The honest version is "we will improve the inputs and measure what moves."
- No proof of their own visibility. If they sell AEO but are invisible when you ask an AI about them, that is the whole answer.
- Content only. No technical work, no off-site plan. They will tidy your blog and leave the crawlers still seeing a blank page.
- A retainer with no measurement attached. If nobody is checking the engines monthly, you are funding activity and hoping.
- "Secret AEO hacks." The work is public and unglamorous. The discipline is in doing it, not in a trick.
The questions to ask on the first call
Bring these five and listen for specifics:
- When I ask ChatGPT about your service, do you appear? Show me.
- Who does the technical work, and what exactly will you change on my site?
- What is your off-site plan for my brand?
- How will you measure this, and how often will I see it?
- What is fixed-scope, and what is ongoing?
Good answers are specific and a little boring. Vague, confident answers are the tell. The person who knows the work will happily get into rendering and directories; the person who does not will keep returning to outcomes they cannot control.
What good actually costs
AEO is scoped work, not a single magic number. An entry audit is fixed and small. A full program, on-page plus off-site plus monthly measurement, is a retainer, because the off-site half is genuinely ongoing. Be wary of both extremes. A flat "AEO package" priced like a product usually means they do the cheap on-page pass and skip the rest. An open-ended retainer with no named deliverables means you are paying for effort, not outcomes. Fixed scope where the work is knowable, a retainer where it honestly is not, and deliverables you can point at either way.
How we set ours up
We built our offer around exactly these tests. The AI search optimization page lays out what is fixed and what is ongoing, and our own site is the case study rather than a slide. If you are interviewing agencies, book a 30-minute call and put the five questions above to us. We would rather you ask them than skip them.