Abstract
AEO is a young category with inconsistent definitions. Some providers sell technical SEO under a new name. Others offer prompt monitoring without implementation. This scorecard helps buyers identify a partner that can connect research, content, evidence, technical access, and answer-level measurement.
What should an AEO agency be able to prove?
A credible agency should explain how it selects prompts, audits sources, prioritizes pages, improves evidence, coordinates implementation, and measures change. It should distinguish what the brand controls from what an answer engine controls. It should also connect AEO to existing SEO, content, brand, product, and analytics work.
12 questions to ask
1. How do you define AEO?
Look for a definition that includes discoverability, comprehension, evidence, representation, and measurement. Be cautious when the answer is only about adding FAQs or schema.
2. How do you select prompts?
The method should connect prompts to customer intent, buying stage, audience, market, and commercial priority. A large prompt count is not a strategy.
3. Which answer systems do you measure?
The agency should name the platforms, explain how tests are run, and document limitations such as location, personalization, and volatility.
4. How do you establish a baseline?
A baseline should record brand mentions, recommendation share, citations, cited pages, answer accuracy, competitors, and prompt-level context before implementation begins.
5. How do you audit technical access?
Expect a review of indexability, robots controls, status codes, canonical signals, rendered content, internal links, sitemaps, and relevant crawler access. OpenAI specifically tells publishers not to block OAI-SearchBot if they want inclusion in ChatGPT summaries and snippets.
6. How do you decide which pages to improve?
The answer should combine prompt demand, current visibility, citation gaps, business value, page authority, and implementation effort.
7. What makes content citation-ready?
Look for specific claims, clear definitions, dates, methods, authorship, source links, and evidence placed near the claim it supports. Vague advice about writing for AI is not enough.
8. Who creates and approves the content?
Clarify who researches, writes, reviews, designs, develops, and publishes. Strong programs include subject-matter expertise and a defined approval path.
9. What does your reporting show?
Useful reports show more than a visibility score. They reveal the prompts tested, answer text, sources cited, pages used, competitors present, and changes over time.
10. How do you handle volatility?
The agency should use repeated observations, stable prompt groups, and clear confidence rules. One screenshot should never be presented as a durable trend.
11. How does AEO connect to business outcomes?
Expect a plan for referral tracking, landing-page engagement, assisted conversion, sales feedback, and brand accuracy. OpenAI adds a ChatGPT referral parameter that can be tracked in analytics.
12. What happens after the first 90 days?
A mature answer covers governance, content refresh, new prompt demand, platform changes, and handoff to internal teams. AEO is an operating capability, not a one-time page edit.
A simple selection scorecard
Score each agency from one to five across method clarity, evidence standards, technical depth, implementation ownership, reporting transparency, category experience, and team fit. Weight implementation and measurement most heavily. Strategy without execution stalls. Execution without measurement cannot improve.
Ask finalists to review one priority journey and explain what they would inspect first. The quality of the questions they ask is often more revealing than a polished case study.
Red flags
Avoid guaranteed rankings, guaranteed citations, secret model access, unexplained visibility scores, prompt lists with no demand logic, and content plans built around hundreds of near-duplicate pages. Google explicitly recommends useful, original content and warns against scaled content created mainly to manipulate search visibility.
See Answer Share of Voice for a measurement framework and First Brand's AEO methodology for the full operating model.
Limitations
Case studies from one category or platform may not transfer directly to another. Access to client data may limit what an agency can disclose. Buyers should evaluate the method, sample outputs, references, and proposed scope together.
Frequently asked questions
Should an AEO agency guarantee results?
No. It can guarantee deliverables, standards, and measurement. It cannot control whether an external system cites or recommends a brand.
Should the SEO agency also handle AEO?
Yes, if it has a clear answer-level research method, evidence design capability, platform-specific measurement, and the ability to implement beyond standard SEO tasks.
Primary sources
How to cite this paper
First Brand Research. “How to Choose an AEO Agency: 12 Questions to Ask.” Published August 28, 2026. firstbrand.ai/research/how-to-choose-an-aeo-agency.