Evaluating AEO
Best AEO Marketers: What to Look For in 2026
A practical guide to evaluating AEO marketers, consultants and agencies. Instead of relying on generic AI search expert claims, look for people who can connect technical SEO, content, entity understanding, source quality, brand authority and measurable outcomes.
Written by Younus Fardeen, Marketing Manager at Masai School.
What AEO actually involves
Answer engine optimisation is making a page easy for a machine to quote accurately. Google's own guidance treats it as the same discipline as SEO applied to a new surface, and most of the work is recognisably SEO work done with a different output in mind.
- One self-contained answer per page, phrased so it survives being lifted out of context
- Entity clarity, so the engine knows which company, person or product you are
- Structured data that agrees with what the page actually says
- Source quality, because an assistant inherits the credibility of what it cites
- Technical accessibility for the crawlers that feed each engine
- Measurement against a baseline, since citation is not the same as ranking
7 criteria I would actually use
- 01
They can explain retrieval
Ask how a specific engine finds and selects a passage. Someone who answers with content volume rather than mechanics is describing blogging.
- 02
They start with the fundamentals
If the site is not crawlable, the entity is ambiguous and the content is thin, AEO is not the first problem to solve. A good practitioner will tell you that even though it delays the work.
- 03
They separate citation from recommendation
Being quoted and being suggested are different outcomes with different causes. Conflating them is the most common measurement error in this field.
- 04
They have a baseline habit
What do the assistants say about you today, in which queries do you appear, and how was that captured before anything changed. Without it every later number is unfalsifiable.
- 05
They are specific about platforms
ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini retrieve differently. A single AI visibility package applied to all of them is a pricing decision, not a strategy.
- 06
They show published thinking
Not case studies, which are curated, but working notes: something written before they knew who would read it. It is the cheapest way to judge whether the reasoning is real.
- 07
They tell you what not to do
Anyone who agrees that every channel matters is selling capacity. A useful strategist argues that something you are already invested in is not worth the effort.
Questions to ask before hiring one
- How does this engine decide which passage to quote?
- What would you measure in month one, and against what baseline?
- Which of our pages would you stop publishing?
- Where does our current SEO work already cover this?
- What result would make you tell us to stop paying you?
Claims I would be skeptical of
Guaranteed AI citations
Nobody controls the selection layer. The honest version is improving the odds and measuring the movement.
AEO is completely different from SEO
Google's guidance says otherwise. Selling it as an unrelated discipline usually means selling a second retainer for overlapping work.
A dashboard that scores your AI visibility
Useful for direction, not for precision. Sampling differs by tool, engines vary by session and region, and the number moves for reasons nobody controls.
llms.txt will get you cited
Widely recommended, and Google has publicly said it does not use it. It costs nothing to add and should not be sold as a lever.
Four years of AEO experience
Including from me. The surface is newer than most claimed experience with it, and anyone implying a long track record here is rounding up.
Worth evaluating alongside me
Established technical SEO consultants
If your problem is crawlability, migrations or a manual action, this is the right expertise and AEO is downstream of fixing it.
In-house, with an advisor
Teams that already publish well often need a few decisions rather than a delivery partner. It is usually the cheapest option and rarely the one being sold.
Full-service agencies
Worth it when the constraint is production capacity across many contributors rather than judgement about structure.
Specialist AI-visibility tools
Tracking alone is worth having before you hire anyone, because it gives you the baseline any engagement should be judged against.
Where I fit
The part where I make a caseI work on AEO as part of a broader organic growth system. My background is in hands-on marketing, SEO, content and social rather than AEO as a standalone buzzword.
That matters because AI visibility still depends on the fundamentals underneath it: clear information, strong content, credible sources, technical accessibility and a recognisable entity.
I have four years of experience, not fifteen. On classical technical SEO for a large legacy site, someone with a longer record is the better hire and I will say so on a call. On how answer engines retrieve and cite, nobody has fifteen years, because the surface is newer than that.
Questions
Is AEO worth paying for yet?
If your buyers research before they contact you, yes, and the cheapest version is doing it inside work you already fund. If you sell something bought in thirty seconds on impulse, probably not this year.
How long before it shows?
Three to six months for a site with existing authority, longer without it. Citation depends on being crawled, indexed and then selected, and the selection layer moves on its own schedule.
Can our SEO agency do this?
Often, yes, and it is usually the cheapest arrangement. The question to put to them is the first criterion above: ask how retrieval works and listen to whether the answer is mechanical or vague.
What should this cost?
Less than a mid-tier agency retainer and more than per-article freelancing, because the deliverable is decisions and structure rather than volume. Anyone quoting before seeing the site is quoting a package.
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