How to Hire an AEO Agency: What to Actually Look For

Why this hiring decision is genuinely harder than traditional SEO

Traditional SEO has decades of established practice, widely recognized certifications, and mature case-study conventions that make evaluating an agency relatively straightforward. AEO and GEO are new enough that there's no equivalent certification body, no standardized reporting format, and — critically — genuinely no way for anyone to guarantee a specific citation outcome on a specific platform, since none of the underlying platforms publish a ranking algorithm to optimize against. Any agency claiming a guaranteed AI Overview placement or a guaranteed ChatGPT citation is making a claim the underlying technology doesn't currently support.

Red flags worth taking seriously

• Guaranteed placement or citation promises on any specific AI platform — no legitimate agency can make this promise given how these systems actually work.
• Vague reporting that can't distinguish AEO/GEO-specific outcomes from general SEO or content marketing results.
• No willingness to explain the actual mechanism behind a proposed tactic — "we do AI optimization" without specifics about schema, content structure, or entity work is a marketing phrase, not a methodology.
• Pressure to fabricate case study results, reviews, or statistics as part of the content strategy — a practice that damages the exact entity trust GEO depends on.

Good signs worth looking for

• A clear, specific explanation of the technical fundamentals — structured data, entity consistency, crawlability — as the foundation, not a shortcut being skipped in favor of a claimed AI-specific trick.
• Honest framing around measurement — an agency that explains the current limitations of AEO/GEO measurement (covered in the companion post on measuring success) rather than presenting a polished but implausible dashboard.
• Willingness to show their own site's AEO/GEO implementation as a working example — an agency practicing what it sells on its own domain is a meaningfully stronger signal than one that only applies the discipline to clients.
• A content strategy grounded in genuine expertise and original data, not high-volume generic content production.

Questions worth asking directly in a sales conversation

• How do you measure AEO/GEO progress specifically, separate from general SEO or traffic metrics?
• Can you show your own site's structured data, llms.txt, and entity setup as an example of the work you do?
• What's your position on content originality versus volume — how many pieces of genuinely original, non-commodity content do you produce versus reformatted general content?
• What happens to the technical foundation (schema, site structure) if the engagement ends — does it stay functional, or does it depend on ongoing management?

Pricing reality check

Because this is a young discipline without standardized service packages, pricing varies widely and isn't yet benchmarked the way traditional SEO retainers are. A useful sanity check: an agency's AEO/GEO work should include real technical implementation (schema, llms.txt, site architecture) as a deliverable, not just a monthly content quota — technical implementation work has a definable, checkable output in a way that pure content-volume promises don't.

The realistic bar for a good hire

The right agency treats AEO and GEO as an extension of solid SEO and content fundamentals, is transparent about what's genuinely measurable today and what isn't, and never proposes fabricating authority signals to speed up results. Given how young this space is, a vendor's honesty about its limitations is a stronger hiring signal than a vendor's confidence about its results.

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