What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company
The Honest Uncertainty Anyone claiming precision about this channel is overselling. Retrieval behaviour changes without notice, published studies use small samples, and vendor research tends to flatter the vendor. Opollo's finding that AI referral traffic converted at 14.2 percent against 2.8 percent from search came from 312 business to business brands, and Opollo sells this service.
One practical consequence of the variation between systems is worth planning for. If your customers are split across two assistants that behave differently, resist building separate programmes for each. The shared requirements account for most of the achievable outcome, and the effort spent on system specific tactics is usually better spent widening the number of third party sources that describe you correctly.
Where Marketplaces Fit Marketplace listings are frequently cited, and they are a mixed blessing. They provide corroboration and structured data you did not have to build, and they put a description of your product in circulation that you only partly control.
Ask How They Price It Retainers dominate this field and mostly make sense, because the work is continuous and the third party portion is slow. What matters is what the retainer covers and whether the scope is written down in units you can count.
Absence is not disqualifying on its own, since their category is crowded and they may serve a niche. But they should have an interesting answer, and the answer should not be defensive. A practitioner who has run this test on themselves will have thought about it and will tell you what they found.
How Measurement Differs Search measurement is mature. Impressions, positions, clicks and conversions are all available in tools most teams already run, and the numbers are reasonably stable between checks.
Ask Who Writes and Who Reviews Find out whether the writing is done by somebody with subject knowledge or generated and lightly edited. Both happen, and the second is not automatically disqualifying, but you need to know because you are the one who carries the liability for inaccurate claims about your own products.
Ask how they will handle being wrong. Every engagement in this field produces at least one confident recommendation that does not work, because the systems change and the published research is thin. What matters is whether that gets reported or quietly dropped from the next deck, and asking the question directly at the outset makes it considerably more likely to be reported.
Where the Work Is Genuinely the Same The foundations do not change. Crawlable pages, sane site structure, fast rendering, accurate structured data, internal links that reflect how topics relate, and content that answers a real question all serve both channels.
The complication is that AI systems use several distinct agents for different purposes. One may crawl for training corpora, another may fetch pages live when composing an answer, and a search provider's traditional crawler may feed both search results and an AI summary.
The exception is a category where assistant use at the research stage is already heavy and where the incumbent comparison pages are weak. There the newer channel can be underpriced, and moving early is worth more than it will be in two years.
Keep a dated note of what you observed each quarter, including behaviour that later turned out to be temporary. The value is not in the individual observations, most of which expire, but in noticing how fast they expire. A team that has watched three of its confident conclusions become wrong within a year develops the right amount of scepticism about the fourth.
The practical response to that uncertainty is to work on the things that are robust to it. Accessible pages, coherent identity, quotable writing and honest third party coverage have helped under every configuration observed so far, and they are the parts you would want anyway. perplexity seo
Ask What They Will Not Do Good practitioners have a list. They will not guarantee a position in an answer, because nobody controls that. They will not fabricate reviews or seed forum threads under false identities, because it is detectable, damaging and increasingly enforced against.
Ask to See Their Own Position This one is unfair and revealing. Ask an assistant to recommend an agency for this kind of work, using a prompt a buyer would write, and see whether the company sitting in front of you appears.
It also appears more conservative in commercial categories, hedging or declining to make a direct recommendation more often than the others. Where it does recommend, established entity signals seem to matter, which favours brands with consistent details and long records over newer entrants.
One final question is worth reserving for the end of the meeting. Ask what they think you should stop doing. An agency with a real diagnosis always has an answer, and an agency that only wants to add work to your existing spend usually does not. perplexity seo
