How to Vet an AEO Agency: 7 Questions to Ask

Here's something worth saying out loud: a lot of agencies are now selling "AEO" without doing anything different from what they were doing six months ago. The pitch deck has been updated. The proposal template has a new section. The price went up. The work? Same SEO audit.

That's not a swipe, it's the predictable shape of any new acronym in this industry. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is genuinely new and genuinely useful, which means it's also a sticker that's easy to slap on a service that doesn't deserve it. If you're paying for AEO, you should know how to tell the real thing from the relabelled version.

Why this is happening

Three reasons, all boring:

• Clients are asking for it. Business owners are reading about ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews and going to their existing agency saying "what about AEO?" Easiest move: say yes, change the invoice line item, change nothing else.
• The work is harder. Real AEO involves structured data, content rewrites, technical changes that most SEO agencies don't have skin in. Easier to redefine than retool.
• The market doesn't know what to ask for yet. When buyers can't tell the difference, sellers don't have to.

None of that is malicious. It's just inertia. But it's costing business owners money for work that won't move the needle.

What real AEO actually involves

If you've never seen the inside of an AEO engagement, here's what's different from SEO. None of this is exotic, it's just specific.

• Schema mapped to questions, not boilerplate. Real AEO uses JSON-LD to mark up the things AI engines actually ask about, services, prices, FAQs, how-tos, author credentials. Most agencies drop a generic LocalBusiness block in and call it done.
• FAQ, HowTo and Article schema, populated and validated. Not just included, actually filled with content the AI can extract, and tested against Google's Rich Results validator.
• Content rewritten for extractive answers. AI engines pull short, direct paragraphs. That means TL;DRs at the top of pages, scannable Q&A, sentences that work as a standalone answer when lifted out of context. SEO copywriting doesn't write that way by default.
• A robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended. Most agency-built sites block them by default, sometimes deliberately, more often because the template they used did. If the bots can't crawl, you can't be cited. Full stop.
• Citation and referral tracking. Not Google rankings, citations from AI engines and referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot. If your provider can't tell you whether AI is citing you, they can't tell you whether AEO is working.
• E-E-A-T treated as deliverable. Author bios with real credentials, sources cited inline, About pages that establish experience. Not a checkbox, a thing that gets written and shipped.

That's the test. Six items. Any agency selling AEO should be doing all of them.

The 7 questions to ask any agency selling AEO

Forward this list to anyone pitching you AEO. The answers tell you everything.

1. "Show me a site you've optimised, pull up its JSON-LD and walk me through it." If they can't view-source a client site and explain the schema in plain English, they didn't write it.
2. "What does your robots.txt look like for AI crawlers? Allow or disallow?" Trick question. The answer should be "allow", and they should know which bots without looking it up.
3. "How will you measure success? What's the metric beyond Google rankings?" Real answer: AI citations, referral traffic from AI engines, branded query volume. Wrong answer: "we'll see improved organic rankings."
4. "Can you show me an AI engine citing one of your client's sites?" A screenshot from ChatGPT or Perplexity naming a client. If they can't produce one, they haven't done this work before.
5. "What's different about your AEO process vs your SEO process? Be specific." If the answer is vague, "we optimise for AI", they have no process. Specifics: schema types, content patterns, crawler config.
6. "Which schema types do you implement by default?" Should rattle off at least: LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BlogPosting, Person (for author), and BreadcrumbList. Bonus points for HowTo and Review.
7. "How do you write content differently for extractive answers?" They should mention TL;DR boxes, direct-answer paragraphs at the top of sections, Q&A formatting, sentences that work when lifted out of context.

You don't need to grade their answers technically. You need to notice whether they answer at all.

What "good" looks like

A real AEO engagement leaves a trail you can inspect. Schema you can view in the page source. Content you can read aloud as an answer to a question. A robots.txt you can open in the browser. A tracking setup that surfaces AI referrals separate from Google traffic. None of it is hidden. None of it requires you to take their word for anything.

If you're new to all this, start with what AEO actually is and how it stacks with SEO. If you want the metric side, see why AEO is the number one growth metric for local businesses in 2026.

If you want a sanity check

If you're already paying an agency for AEO and you're not sure what you're getting, send us their last report and a link to the work. We'll run the seven questions against it for free and tell you whether it's the real thing. No pitch, no obligation, and if it's solid work, we'll tell you that too. (For context on what we ship under our own AEO service, the page lists every deliverable.)

Get a free AEO sanity check

Or call Adam on 0420 498 037 for a 10-minute conversation.