As with many things, the best way to choose an agency AEO (answer engine optimisation) is to ensure you ask the right questions.

Here is a list of FOURTEEN key questions from a 20 year SEO and digital marketing specialist to ask your potential agency:

1. Are you actively experimenting with AI search and AEO? What experiments are you currently conducting, and what have you learned from them?
2. How do you measure and report on AEO success? Do you monitor AI citations, brand mentions, answer-engine visibility, referral traffic, branded searches, enquiries and revenue?
3. What do you believe are the three most important AEO strategies? Their answer should extend beyond simply adding schema or publishing more content.
4. How many clients do you currently work with in my industry? Will you also be helping my direct competitors?
5. Who will actually work on my campaign? Will I have access to a senior specialist, or will the work be passed to junior staff after I sign?
6. How does your AEO strategy connect with traditional SEO? Strong technical SEO, crawlability, site architecture, internal linking and search-intent alignment remain essential.
7. How will you strengthen our brand as a recognised entity? This should include authoritative mentions, quality links, Digital PR, branded searches, reviews and consistent information across the web.
8. How will you build topical authority? Ask how the agency identifies content gaps and demonstrates genuine experience, expertise and relevance across your most commercially important topics.
9. What is your approach to content quality? Are they producing genuinely helpful, original content, or simply publishing large volumes of generic AI-generated copy?
10. How will you improve our visibility beyond our own website? AI platforms frequently reference third-party publications, industry websites, forums, videos, reviews and other trusted sources.
11. Can you show real examples of AEO or AI visibility improvements? Ask what changed, how it was measured and whether the increased visibility produced qualified traffic, enquiries or revenue.
12. What can you realistically guarantee? Be cautious of anyone guaranteeing inclusion in AI-generated answers. No legitimate agency controls what an answer engine chooses to cite.
13. How will you prioritise the work? The agency should focus on the activities most likely to improve visibility, trust and commercial performance—not simply deliver a long monthly checklist.
14. How are you preparing for continued change? AEO is not a one-off optimisation project. Your strategy must evolve as search platforms, user behaviour and AI-generated answers change.

The strongest AEO agencies understand that this is not about chasing shortcuts. It is about making your business easier for Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and other platforms to understand, trust and reference.

That requires a connected strategy across three essential areas:

• Entity SEO: Strengthening the signals that confirm who you are, what you do and why your business should be trusted.
• Search-intent alignment: Providing clear, useful and accurate answers to the questions your customers are genuinely asking.
• Topical authority and relevance: Demonstrating deep, specialist knowledge across the subjects most closely connected to your products, services and industry.

The terminology may be changing, but the fundamentals remain the same: build a trusted brand, demonstrate genuine expertise and become the most useful and authoritative answer in your market.

Building a brand and focusing on those strategies will help you transition from platform and from one evolution in tech to the next.