Evaluating AEO agencies
Best AEO Agencies: What to Look For
Most AEO agency pages are existing SEO service copy with the acronym changed. That is not automatically bad, since the disciplines overlap heavily, but it does mean the pitch tells you very little. These are the checks that do.
Written by Younus Fardeen, Marketing Manager at Masai School.
What you are actually buying
An agency sells process and capacity. For answer engine work the deliverable is mostly decisions about structure and content, which is a smaller unit of work than agencies are usually shaped around. That mismatch is worth understanding before you sign.
- Capacity across many contributors, which is the real thing agencies are good at
- Process that survives staff turnover, which an individual cannot offer
- A named practitioner who will actually do the thinking, not just the pitch
- Reporting that distinguishes citation from ranking from traffic
7 criteria I would actually use
- 01
You can meet the person doing the work
Agency pitches are staffed by the strongest communicator. Ask who will hold the account in month three and speak to them before signing.
- 02
The AEO offer is not recycled SEO copy
Read their service page closely. If every mention of AEO could be replaced with SEO without changing the meaning, they have not thought about the surface.
- 03
They will name what they do not do
Agencies that claim every channel are selling a roster. The useful ones are specific about where they add nothing.
- 04
Ratings are treated as context
Clutch scores and review counts are marketing assets. Ask for one client whose engagement went badly and what happened next.
- 05
Their own site is evidence
An agency selling answer engine visibility that is invisible in answer engines has told you something. Check before the call.
- 06
Reporting has a baseline
Ask what they capture before starting. An agency that cannot answer this will report improvement against nothing.
- 07
The contract lets you leave
Twelve-month lock-ins exist to protect revenue during the period where results are hardest to show.
Questions to ask before hiring one
- Who is doing the work in month three, and can I speak to them?
- What do you capture as a baseline before we start?
- Which parts of this overlap with our current SEO retainer?
- Show me a client where this did not work.
- What is the notice period, and why that long?
Claims I would be skeptical of
Award-winning AEO agency
Most marketing awards are paid entries judged by peers. Useful signal about ambition, weak signal about outcomes.
Rated 4.9 from 250+ reviews
Directory ratings are a channel agencies invest in deliberately. Treat them as evidence of marketing competence rather than delivery quality.
Proprietary AEO framework
Usually a named version of the same steps everyone runs. Ask which part is genuinely theirs and how they know it works.
We will get you into ChatGPT
Nobody controls the selection layer. The honest framing is improving the odds and measuring the movement.
Full-service, so it is all joined up
Sometimes true. Often it means one team stretched across channels that each needed a specialist.
Worth evaluating alongside me
An independent consultant
Better when the constraint is judgement rather than production, and considerably cheaper for the same decisions.
Your existing SEO agency
The overlap is large enough that adding this to an existing relationship is frequently the cheapest correct answer.
In-house with an external advisor
A few days a month of senior input alongside a team that already publishes tends to beat outsourcing the thinking.
Nobody, yet
If the site is not crawlable or the content is thin, an AEO retainer buys you a report about problems you already know you have.
Where I fit
The part where I make a caseI am not an agency, so for pure production capacity across many contributors I am the wrong shape and one of the options above will serve you better.
Where an individual is the better fit is when the work is decisions: what the pages should be, how the entity should be described, what to stop publishing, and how to tell whether any of it moved.
If you already have an agency, the most useful thing I can do is often a free audit you take to them, which costs you nothing and does not require changing supplier.
Questions
Agency or individual for AEO?
Individual for judgement, agency for capacity. Small teams almost always need the first and are usually sold the second.
What should an AEO engagement include?
A baseline of current AI answers, an entity and structure review, a content decision list including what to remove, and reporting that separates citation from ranking.
How do I compare two proposals?
Ignore the deliverable counts and compare the diagnosis. Two proposals describing the same problem differently is the only part that tells you who understood the site.
Do you take agency subcontracts?
Sometimes, where the agency wants the structural thinking and keeps delivery in house. It is an honest arrangement and I would rather do that than duplicate their team.
By market
- BangaloreSEO and AEO for startups and engineering-led companies, where the buyer usually wants the mechanics rather than the pitch.Learn more
- IndiaVernacular and Hinglish retrieval, DPDP, and a market where the category is sold almost entirely by agencies.Learn more
- UAEBilingual structure, GCC regulation, and a live page-one hospitality build you can open.Learn more
Worked with
- Masai School
- Sparkling Sandset
- Under 25
- Snapchat India