What questions should I ask an AI SEO agency before hiring one?
Short answer
Ask how they measure whether AI assistants name your business, which prompts and assistants they test, what they will change first, and what they can't promise. A credible answer includes a dated baseline, a written list of prompts, and the plain admission that nobody can guarantee an AI recommendation.
Ask an AI SEO agency how it measures whether AI assistants name your business, what it will change first, and what it can’t promise. AI SEO here means work aimed at being named or quoted in AI answers, which I call AI visibility. The field is new, and much of what is sold has never been tested. The questions below are the ones I’d want a client to ask me.
Questions about measurement
Start here, because an agency that can’t measure the result can’t show you it did anything.
- Which assistants do you test, and with which prompts? A good answer names them and offers a written list of prompts that sound like your customers, with your services and cities in them.
- Will I see a baseline before any work starts? You should get a record of who was named and which sources were shown, with dates.
- How do you deal with answers changing from day to day? A good answer involves repeating the same prompts over time and reporting the pattern, not a single screenshot.
- What goes in the report? It should say what was changed, when, and what moved afterward, in plain English.
Questions about the work
Ask what they will change, in what order, and why that first. Then ask how much of it’s the same as local SEO. The honest answer is most of it: accurate listings, consistent business facts, real reviews, clear pages. An agency that describes AI work as entirely new and separate is either unaware of the overlap or planning to bill for it twice.
Also ask who does the work and whether you keep ownership of your website and accounts. Ask how long you’re committed for. Those belong on the list of what to ask before hiring an SEO company of any kind.
Questions about promises
Ask directly whether they can make ChatGPT or Gemini recommend you. The only truthful answer is no, because nobody can guarantee an AI recommendation. Ask as well what happens if nothing changes after the first rounds of work. An agency worth hiring has an answer that doesn’t involve another twelve months.
Answers that should worry you
| What you hear | Why it’s a problem |
|---|---|
| “We have a proprietary method for getting into ChatGPT.” | Nobody outside these companies knows how a business is selected. |
| “Your placement in AI answers is assured.” | Replies vary by assistant and by day. There’s no fixed position to hold. |
| “We submit your site to the AI platforms.” | I know of no submission step that gets a business recommended. |
| “We publish a set number of AI-optimized articles a month.” | Volume is easy to invoice and says nothing about results. |
| “Our dashboard shows your AI score.” | Ask what the score is built from. If they can’t show the prompts behind it, it tells you little. |
How I answer the same questions
I run the prompts a real customer would ask, record which businesses each assistant names and which sources it shows, change one thing, and run them again about two weeks later. That first recording is the AI visibility audit, and the rounds that follow are my AI SEO services. If I think the money would do more somewhere else, I’ll tell you before you pay. As for who does the work and how long you’re committed: I do it, you talk to me, and there’s no long contract.