Pick the agency that can tell you, in words you’d use at dinner, what it plans to change on your website, how it’ll know whether ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews start mentioning you, and how that ends up as phone calls. If you can’t get that answer before you sign, walk away. AEO (answer engine optimization) just means making your business easy for those tools to find, understand, and recommend.
Table of Contents
Fair warning: it’s a noisy market. A lot of agencies bolted “AEO” onto their homepage sometime in the last year and carried on exactly as before. Some of them are still good, because solid SEO covers most of the ground. The hard part is telling which is which, and that’s what these ten questions are for. Ask them in writing if you can, because people get slippery on a call.
Why bother with any of this? Because the way people ask is changing. Instead of typing “plumber near me” and scanning ten links, some now ask an assistant and read one answer. Google’s AI features may run several related searches across subtopics before they respond, which rewards pages that cover the follow-up questions: price, timing, and service area. An agency worth hiring gets that and builds pages around it.
1. What does a win look like?
Calls, booked jobs, and form fills. If the answer is “more mentions in AI answers” and it stops there, that’s a screenshot, not a result. A mention nobody acts on doesn’t pay any bills.
2. Where do we show up right now?
Before touching anything, a decent agency checks. It asks ChatGPT, Google, and the rest the questions your customers ask, writes down who gets named, and does it again a month later. Answers change from one search to the next, so ask how they deal with that. You can peek yourself first with our free AEO Analyzer, which crawls a site and checks things like structured data and content clarity. auxiliumtechnology
3. Are you fixing the basics first?
This one matters more than anything flashy. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special optimization, and the normal SEO rules still apply. A site that’s half-indexed, or crawling along on a phone, won’t get recommended by anything. Ask what they check up front. A technical SEO review is the boring but right place to start.
4. What exactly will you do with schema?
A schema is behind-the-scenes labeling that tells software, "This is a business; these are its services; here are its hours.” Ask which types they’d add and to which pages. “We’ll add schema” is not an answer. If you want a primer first, we wrote one on schema markup for AEO.
5. What about the local stuff?
If customers find you by area, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and a name, address, and phone number that match everywhere still matter. They’re also the cheapest things to fix. An agency that never brings them up is skipping the easy wins. It’s a core piece of local SEO.
6. Who writes the words?
Content is where agencies cut corners. Ask who researches, who writes, and how your actual know-how gets onto the page. If the plan is to churn out articles with a text generator, you’ll pay for pages nobody trusts, and that includes the assistants. Real pages sound like someone who has done the job.
7. Who’s on my account?
Names. Roles. How often you’ll talk. The classic move is a senior person at the pitch and someone brand new once you’ve signed. You want the number of whoever actually fixes things.
8. What’s in the report?
Pages fixed, searches you’re gaining ground on, calls from your profile, and forms filled. Ask for a sample with client details blacked out. And if all you see is a lone “AI visibility score,” ask how it’s calculated, then watch the pause.
9. What won’t you promise?
My favorite question. Honest agencies talk in stages: a baseline first, then early movement, then leads. Nobody controls what ChatGPT says, so a guaranteed top spot or a set number of mentions ends the conversation. How fast things move depends on your competition and where your site starts. Anyone quoting an exact date is guessing.
10. What do I keep if we part ways?
Your content, your reports, your data. Look for clear deliverables, a sane cancellation clause, and no long lock-in before they’ve earned it.
Red Flags, Whatever the Deck Looks Like
A few things should send you running. Guaranteed AI rankings. A “proprietary method” nobody will explain. No plan to count leads. Case studies that never say what was counted, on which platforms, or for how long. And AEO sold as a vague add-on to an SEO retainer, with no separate plan you can actually read.
Compare Them on Your Own Site
Shortlist two or three agencies. Send each the same ten questions, then ask them to look at your real website and name the three biggest problems. Two good agencies will mostly agree on the problems and disagree on the order, which tells you plenty.
Picture a Maryland dentist doing this. One agency says the site is fine and pitches a monthly package. Another points out that half the service pages aren’t indexed and the Google profile lists an old phone number. Same fee, very different value. Pick the one that sounded like it had really looked. Don’t choose on price alone or on the slickest slideshow.
Where We Stand
Choosing an AEO agency comes down to evidence: what they’ll change, how they’ll measure it, and who does the work. We list AI search among our local SEO services, and our SEO agency page describes a mix of technical work, content, user experience, and ongoing tracking. You can read more on our search engine optimization agency page. Want a second opinion on your own site? Auxilium Technology can look it over and tell you what we’d fix first. And if we’re not the right fit, these ten questions work on anyone.
