Suddenly, just about every marketing agency understands AI. Or at least that’s what the websites say. AEO, GEO, AI visibility and AI search strategy have found their way onto agency capabilities pages remarkably fast. The challenge isn’t finding an agency willing to talk about AI anymore. It’s figuring out which ones actually understand what they’re talking about.
I’ve been in digital marketing long enough to have watched this happen before. Social media took off and seemingly every agency became a social media agency. Then came content marketing, performance marketing, marketing automation and any number of other specialties that agencies quickly added to their capabilities. Some genuinely developed expertise. Others updated the website first and figured out the expertise later. I suspect we’re seeing plenty of both with AI search.
That’s why I wouldn’t judge an agency by how much AI terminology appears in its proposal. An agency might use AI brilliantly for research, content or internal workflows and still know very little about why one company appears in an AI-generated answer while another doesn’t. AI search sits somewhere between SEO, content, digital reputation, PR, technical infrastructure and analytics. The agency I’d want to hire is the one that understands how those pieces work together.
Start by Asking What They Mean by AI Search
This sounds painfully obvious, but I’d ask anyway. If an agency says it specializes in AEO or GEO, ask them to explain what that means without using either acronym. You should hear an explanation about how people are discovering businesses through AI-generated answers, what information those systems rely on and how the agency intends to improve the client’s chances of being understood, cited or recommended.
I’d also be cautious if the explanation begins and ends with the client’s website. Your website is certainly part of the equation, but information about a business exists all over the web through publishers, reviews, directories, industry organizations, videos, interviews and other independent sources. AI discoverability increasingly requires understanding that larger information environment, not simply optimizing another collection of landing pages.
The change in discovery is real. Gartner has predicted traditional search volume could decline 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots and other virtual agents gain adoption. I wouldn’t treat a forecast like that as a stopwatch, but the larger point is difficult to ignore: customers have more ways to find information than they did a few years ago.
AI Search Didn’t Make SEO Irrelevant
Marketing loves announcing the death of whatever came before the new thing. SEO has been declared dead so many times it should probably have its own cemetery.
I don’t buy that argument. A technically sound website still matters. Search visibility still matters. Useful content, internal linking, structured information and a clear understanding of what customers are looking for still matter. An agency that treats AEO or GEO as completely separate from SEO would make me nervous.
But the reverse bothers me too. AI search isn’t simply traditional SEO with a different results page. Ahrefs analyzed 1.9 million citations in Google’s AI Overviews and found that only 38% of cited pages also ranked in the top 10 traditional search results. In other words, ranking well can certainly help, but it doesn’t automatically determine which sources an AI-generated answer will use.
That’s the distinction I’d want an agency to understand. Good SEO creates a strong foundation for AI discoverability, but the work increasingly extends into the quality of the information you’re publishing, the questions you’re answering, how clearly your expertise is established and what evidence about your company exists beyond your own website. If an agency tells you SEO doesn’t matter anymore, I’d be skeptical. If its AEO strategy is simply the existing SEO program with a new report attached, I’d be skeptical of that too.
Somebody Still Has to Prove This Is Working
I’ve sat through enough marketing presentations to know that almost anything can look impressive if nobody agreed on the baseline beforehand.
Before an agency starts doing AEO work, I’d want to know which questions actually matter to the business, where the company appears today, which competitors appear instead and whether the company is being cited, mentioned or recommended. Those aren’t the same thing, and lumping them together into one AI Authority score doesn’t make them the same thing.
Then measure those questions consistently. Look at whether visibility changes over time and whether anything else moves with it: branded search, referral traffic, leads, sales conversations or CRM data. Attribution is going to be imperfect because someone can discover your company through an AI answer and visit the website later through an entirely different route. Marketing attribution wasn’t exactly flawless before AI showed up, either.
I’d rather have an agency acknowledge those limitations and show me what it can measure than hand me a mysterious score of 87.4 and act as though the science is settled.
Look at Where the Agency Thinks Authority Comes From
This may be one of the biggest differences between an agency that actually understands AI search and one that added AEO to its navigation last month.
A business doesn’t exist online only through its own website. There are reviews, trade publications, directories, videos, podcasts, industry organizations, news stories and other independent places where the company and its people may appear. Those sources can support what a business says about itself, introduce information the company doesn’t control or sometimes contradict it entirely.
For a Kansas City business, local authority isn’t created by putting “Kansas City” into a dozen pages and calling it a strategy. It’s stronger when there is real evidence connecting the company to the market through customers, projects, organizations, publications and actual participation in the community. That’s harder than adding a location keyword, but it’s also a lot more meaningful.
I’d ask an agency what role digital PR, third-party credibility, reviews and consistent company information play in its AI strategy. If the answer is basically “we’ll publish more blogs,” I’d keep asking questions.
Read What the Agency Actually Publishes
Don’t decide whether an agency understands AI search based entirely on the sales presentation. Read its work.
AI has made competent-looking content incredibly easy to produce, which means the mere existence of a blog doesn’t tell you much anymore. Look for original experience, useful research, actual opinions and credible sources. See whether the agency is willing to acknowledge uncertainty or disagreement instead of presenting every new AI development as though somebody handed marketers the instruction manual.
The simplest test is whether you learned anything you couldn’t have gotten from asking an AI tool the same generic question. If an agency claims to build AI Authority for clients, I’d expect to see some evidence of authority in its own work.
Guarantees Deserve a Longer Conversation
If an agency guarantees that your business will consistently become the top AI recommendation, I’d ask how.
AI-generated answers aren’t permanent numbered rankings. They can vary depending on the question, context, available information and system producing the answer. An agency can strengthen the content around a company, improve technical accessibility, clean up inconsistent information, create original research, earn credible third-party recognition and monitor whether visibility changes.
What it can’t do is control the final answer produced by somebody else’s technology. That’s the difference between influence and guarantee, and I’d want an agency to understand it before I signed anything.
Don’t Let the Case Study Do All the Talking
Case studies matter, but large percentages need context. If AI visibility increased 500%, I’d want to know what the starting number was and what “visibility” actually means.
Did the company begin appearing for commercially meaningful questions? Was it cited as a source, mentioned as an example or actually recommended? Did branded search increase? Did referral traffic or leads move? Was the improvement broad enough to suggest a pattern, or are we looking at three favorable screenshots?
AI adoption itself is growing, so some visibility metrics may naturally rise as more people use these systems. That’s why methodology matters. The best case study isn’t necessarily the one with the biggest number. It’s the one where you can understand what changed and why the agency believes its work contributed.
Ask What Happens When It Doesn’t Work
Before hiring an agency, ask what happens if you’re six months into the engagement and your company still isn’t appearing for the questions that matter.
Does the agency revisit the questions? Study the competitors that are showing up? Look at the sources being cited? Question whether the company has enough original information or third-party evidence? Is it willing to admit that the original strategy might have been wrong?
There may also be businesses where AI search isn’t the biggest problem yet. If the company has terrible reviews, a confusing website and almost no useful content, there may be better places to spend the next marketing dollar. An agency willing to have that conversation, even when the answer isn’t “buy more AEO,” gets my attention.
The Bottom Line
Choosing an agency that understands AI search isn’t really about finding the one that uses the most AI terminology. I’d pay more attention to how the agency defines the problem, how it connects AEO and GEO to SEO, what work it actually intends to do, where it believes authority comes from and how it plans to measure whether anything changed.
Read its content. Look closely at its case studies. Ask what it can and cannot control. Notice how comfortable the team is admitting uncertainty. I’d trust an agency willing to say, “We don’t know yet, but here’s how we’d test it,” considerably more than one claiming to have discovered a secret formula.
I’ve been around digital marketing long enough to be suspicious of secret doors. AI search hasn’t changed that. It’s simply given marketers a few new ones to sell.
Related:
- What Questions Should I Ask an Agency Before Signing an AEO Contract?
- What Is GEO and Is It the Same as AEO?
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This article originally appeared on Fireball.agency and was syndicated by MediaFeed.co
