What an AI SEO agency does
As of October 2026: an AI SEO agency gets a business named inside the answers that Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini give when someone asks who to use. Across 15,745 checks, a brand was cited in only 13.8% of answers (Boring Marketing, 2026). What it costs depends on scope: the number of locations, the number of buyer questions, and how many pages have to be written.
What does an AI SEO agency actually do?
A buyer no longer starts by scrolling ten blue links. They ask a question in plain language and get a short answer that names three or four businesses. The job of an AI SEO agency is to make sure you are one of the names in that answer, and to fix the reasons you are not.
That means two pieces of work, in this order. First, measure what the engines say today, in the exact words your buyers use. Second, build the pages and the signals that change it. Most of the industry sells the first half and calls it a service.
What does it do that ordinary SEO does not?
Ranking still matters. Google's own guidance says its AI features are built on the same ranking and quality systems, so nothing here replaces technical SEO and content. What changes is what you are optimising for:
- It measures an answer, not a position. A page can rank third and still be absent from the answer above it. We score the answer.
- It works per engine. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude draw on different sources and cite at different rates. One blended visibility number hides the one engine where you are winning.
- It treats third-party pages as competition. For many questions the answer is built from listicles, comparison pages and directories rather than from any business site, so being named there is part of the work.
- It separates a mention from a citation. Being named in an answer and having your own page cited as the source are different outcomes with different fixes.
What gets measured, and what does "named" mean?
Three states, and they are not interchangeable. A mention is your business appearing in the text of the answer. A citation is your page being one of the sources behind it. A recommendation is the answer presenting you as one of the options to choose from. A business can be mentioned without being recommended, and cited without ever being named, which is why a single score is not enough to act on.
We run your buyer's questions against each engine, record the answers verbatim, and note who was named instead of you. That last part is what makes the work possible: the businesses named in those answers tell you exactly which pages to build.
How is the price worked out?
As per scope of work. There is no single monthly figure, because the work is not the same for a single clinic and a group with locations in several states. We price after we know what you need measuring and how much has to be built, and we put that in writing before anything starts.
Three things move the number, and none of them is a secret. More locations means more question sets per engine. More missing pages means more writing before anything can be measured. More engines means more runs per month. You can answer three questions on our pricing page and see where your own case lands before you speak to anyone.
How do you tell a real one from a dashboard reseller?
Ask these five things. The answers separate a service from a screenshot.
- Which engines do you measure, and can I see an answer you captured? If they will not paste a real answer with its sources and date, they are not measuring.
- What did you find for my business, before I paid? A diagnosis should be possible in a day. A firm that needs a retainer before it will tell you where you stand is selling a report, not a result.
- Who is named instead of me, and what page would change that? This is the whole plan. Vague answers here mean there is no plan.
- What will you not promise? Nobody can guarantee ChatGPT names you, because the answer is rebuilt each time it is served. A firm that guarantees it has not done the work.
- How will I see movement, and over what period? Ask for the frozen question set. If the questions change between months, the number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your business.
What can no agency honestly promise?
We cannot promise that an engine recommends you. Answers are generated when they are served, they vary by location and by day, and an engine that cites you today may not next month. What can be promised is narrower and checkable: a fixed set of your buyer's questions, run across named engines, recorded before and after, with the same questions both times so the difference means something.
We also will not tell you that AI traffic is large. It is still small next to Google. The reason to do this now is that the answers are being written today, and the businesses named in them are getting harder to displace.
Who should not hire one?
If your pages cannot be crawled, or your title tags do not carry the phrase you want to rank for, fix that first. It is cheaper and it is the precondition for everything here. If your business sells only to people who already know your name, the return is thin.
How can you check us the same way?
Everything above is a test you can run on us. Ask for the questions we measured, the answers we captured and the businesses we found in your place. We publish the shape of our own measurement, including the case where a client is named in the AI answer but cited in none of the answers, because that distinction is the work.
The GMI Custom Grinders case study shows the before and after in full. If you want to see where you stand first, request the free report and you will get the answers for your own buyer questions.
Where to go next
If you run a clinic, the two most specific pages we have are med spa SEO and dental clinic SEO. For the wider picture of the service, AI visibility and AI SEO sets out what we do and how it is measured.