Hiring an AI SEO Agency? What to Ask, and 7 Promises That Should End the Call

Hiring an AI SEO agency? Start with the question Google wrote for you. Its guide to hiring an SEO has a line about AI: "If they have advice on optimizing for AI experiences (also known as "AEO" "GEO" services), is their advice aligned with Google Search's official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features?" (Google Search Central).

Many AI SEO agencies do this work well. Some sell tactics the AI platforms' own documentation contradicts. Here is what a credible engagement covers, what to ask, and seven promises that should end the conversation.

What a credible AI SEO engagement covers

The work that holds up is about access and accuracy. Can AI crawlers reach your pages? Can they read them? Is what AI says about you true?

Workstream	What a good agency checks	Why it matters
Crawler access	robots.txt rules per AI crawler, search bots kept separate from training bots	OpenAI: sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers"
Firewall and CDN	Whether each crawler gets a 200 or a 403	OpenAI also requires a host or CDN that "allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses"
Rendering	Whether key facts are in the raw HTML or appear only after JavaScript runs	Vercel: ChatGPT's and Claude's crawlers fetch JavaScript files but "don't execute them"
Index eligibility	Google indexing and the Search Console setting for AI features	Google: a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet"
Snippet controls	Stray noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet	Bing: marked content "will be excluded from snippets and AI summaries"
Factual accuracy	What AI says about you, checked against your real facts	It is what buyers read, and an error can be traced and fixed
Measurement	Dated samples of real answers, limits stated up front	Google's AI report in Search Console counts impressions only: no clicks, no positions

Google's best practices for AI features start in the same place, "Ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure", and add: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." It is the part with evidence behind it.

Questions to ask an AI SEO agency

1. "Which AI crawlers will you test, and how?" A good answer names the search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot) separately from the training crawlers, and requests your pages as each one instead of only reading robots.txt.
2. "What documented mechanism backs each recommendation?" Google's hiring guide asks: "Do they cite official Google documentation as supporting evidence for their recommendations?" A link to the source is a good answer. A case study is a weak one.
3. "What can't you measure?" A good agency says a set of test prompts is a sample, and that nobody outside the platforms sees a true AI ranking. Our guide to LLM SEO covers what tools can and cannot measure.
4. "How will you check what AI says about us?" Look for a comparison against your real prices, products and company facts, and a fix at the source of each error.
5. "What access do you need, and will you show us every change?" For an audit, Google says to "only grant read access to Search Console", and suggests asking an SEO to "share with me all the changes you make to my site".

7 promises that should end the call

Each is contradicted, or left unsupported, by the source it leans on.

1. "We guarantee top rankings in ChatGPT or AI Overviews"

Nobody can. Google: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." And on tools: "Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data. They can't guarantee performance" (Google Search Central). OpenAI says the same of ChatGPT search: "Placement is not guaranteed." A guaranteed AI position is a number the agency cannot see.

2. "An llms.txt file will get you cited"

Google: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them" (Google Search Central). That covers Google only, but OpenAI's, Anthropic's and Perplexity's crawler pages don't say their crawlers read one either. The file does no harm; selling it as a citation lever does. More in our llms.txt guide.

3. "Schema markup boosts AI citations"

A matched-control study of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD found: "Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform." AI Overview citations fell 4.6% against the controls. The caveat: every page studied was already heavily cited, so whether schema helps a page AI has never cited is untested. Google says structured data "isn't required for generative AI search" but still helps with rich results. See schema markup for AI: what the evidence shows.

4. "Allow GPTBot and you'll show up in ChatGPT"

GPTBot collects training data: OpenAI says it is used "to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models." ChatGPT search relies on a different crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and "Each setting is independent of the others." Read GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot before you change either.

5. "Our method delivers 40% more AI visibility"

The number traces to the 2023 GEO paper (arXiv 2311.09735): GEO "can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses." That was measured on an engine the authors built, fed the top five Google results per query. Its one live-engine test supplied the sources by hand: "Since perplexity.ai does not allow the user to specify source URLs, we instead provide source text as file uploads." A 2026 survey of 45 GEO studies found the gains "conditional on a source already being present in a fixed context", not proof of being found in the wild.

6. "We'll raise your E-E-A-T score"

There is no score. Google: "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful" (Google Search Central). Named authors and checkable claims are good practice. A number that rises every month is made up. More in E-E-A-T for AI.

7. "We'll grow your domain authority so AI trusts you"

Domain authority is a metric SEO tool vendors calculate. Google's guide to its ranking systems lists no authority score, and Google warns that "Some third-party services provide data that some users of those tools misinterpret as somehow being from Google." OpenAI describes ChatGPT's search ranking only as "multiple factors". Earning real coverage is fine. Selling a vendor's score as AI trust is not.

What to check before you buy AI SEO services

These take an afternoon and give you a baseline to judge proposals against.

1. Read your robots.txt. Look for rules naming OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot, and for a blanket AI block that also removes the search crawlers. Our AI crawler list shows which bot does what.
2. View the source of your pricing page. View Source, not Inspect. If the prices aren't in the raw HTML, crawlers that don't run JavaScript never see them.
3. Search that source for noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet. One stray tag in a shared template hides content site-wide.
4. Open Search Console. Google: "a site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console to be eligible for display in generative AI features on Google Search." Confirm yours is.
5. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude five questions about your brand. Write down every wrong price, product or fact, with the date. Bring the list to the call.

An agency that reads that list and starts with the failures is doing the work. One that opens with llms.txt is not.

If you want this as a repeatable report, 99Visibility audits five AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude), checks whether AI crawlers can reach your site, checks the answers against the brand facts you enter, and tracks your competitors. Your first audit is free, with no credit card, and covers ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. See the plans for all five platforms. Inside the dashboard, Agent V reads your audits and your site and drafts the fix, such as page copy for you to paste. It never edits your site itself.

FAQ

What does an AI SEO agency do?

A good one makes sure AI crawlers can reach and read your site, removes whatever keeps your pages out of AI answers, and checks what AI platforms say about you against your real facts. Then it fixes the source of each error and re-checks.

Is it worth hiring an SEO company for AI search?

It depends on the size of the job. Google: "If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself." The checks above take an afternoon. Hire when the fixes need engineering time you don't have, or the site is too large for one person.

See where your site stands before the first call. Run a free AI visibility audit: no credit card.