Every panic in marketing births a thousand agencies overnight, and AI search is the biggest panic since mobile. Most of the new "AI SEO agencies" are last year's link sellers with a new homepage. These seven questions expose them in one call, and yes, we answer each one for ourselves at the end, in writing.
Question 1: can you guarantee citations or rankings?
The only correct answer is no. Nobody outside Google controls Google, and nobody controls what an AI answer composes. A confident yes here isn't optimism, it's a tell: the agency's real product is the contract, and the guarantee is how it gets signed.
Question 2: show me YOUR site's AI visibility
Ask them to search their own agency in AI Mode and ChatGPT, live, on the call. An ai seo agency that AI can't verify or cite is a bakery that buys its bread. Watch for deflection to client work "under NDA"; their own site has no NDA.
Question 3: what exactly do you measure, given what the tools can't
show?
A real practitioner knows Search Console's Generative AI report is impressions-only, no queries, no clicks, and will tell you so unprompted, then describe the manual layer: logged citation checks of your money queries on a schedule. A fake quotes "AI traffic dashboards" with metrics the platforms don't expose. If they claim a tool shows AI clicks by query, the call can end early.
Question 4: which schema types would you use on my site, and why?
You're listening for specifics tied to your business (Product with real prices and availability, LocalBusiness, FAQ on authored pages) and for the honesty that markup clarifies rather than reclassifies. Bonus red flag: anyone proposing forum schema on your blog posts just told you they'll cheat on your behalf, until you're the one caught.
Question 5: what's the first thing you'd check?
Right answer territory: access. Logs, firewall behavior toward AI crawlers, robots.txt sanity, because blocked bots nullify everything else. Wrong answer territory: "content calendar" in the first sentence. Content built behind a closed door is decoration.
Question 6: how long until results, honestly?
Honest shape: technical fixes in weeks, citation movement over weeks to a couple of months where slots are winnable, competitive authority in months. Precise promises ("page one in 30 days", "cited in two weeks, guaranteed") are horoscopes with invoices attached.
Question 7: what happens when something doesn't work?
The quiet killer question. You want to hear about reporting that shows misses, tactics retired, and dashboards you both read, the same ones. Agencies die by surprise; the good ones price honesty into the relationship from day one.
Our own answers, on the record No guarantees, on principle; our site's AI visibility is checkable live and we'll do it on the call. We measure via the Generative AI report read with its limits plus a monthly manual citation log. Schema: only truthful types, never forum costumes. First check is always logs and firewall. Timelines: weeks for technical, two to six weeks for vacated citation slots in our own work, months for competitive authority. And misses go in the report, because the whole practice is built on receipts, our methods and our numbers are published across this blog, including the ugly ones.
The decision checklist
• Said no to guarantees without flinching
• Survived the search-your-own-agency test
• Named the measurement limits before you did
• Proposed schema you're entitled to, with reasons
• Started at access, ended at honest timelines, and described what failure reporting looks like
Five of five, and you've found a practitioner. Patterns, note, never names: this market has enough fakes that pointing at individuals would be a full-time job.
FAQ
Is "AI SEO agency" even a real category or a rebrand? Both exist: the work is real (access, entity, extractability, citation tracking), and so are the rebrands selling it. The seven questions separate them regardless of what the homepage says.
Should I prefer a big agency or a specialist for AI SEO? Prefer whoever passes the questions; size predicts little here. The field is young enough that seniority in it is measured in shipped experiments, which the answers reveal fast.
What should AI SEO cost? Scoped to the situation; a local profile fix and a SaaS category fight differ by an order of magnitude. Distrust public menus that price "citations" like ad slots: those slots are literally the ones money can't buy.
Can my current SEO agency just add this? If they can pass the seven questions, yes, the fundamentals transfer. Run the interview on them anyway; incumbency isn't a credential.
What if an agency fails one question but seems strong otherwise? Depends which: fumbling timelines is human, while guaranteeing citations or proposing fake schema are character findings, not knowledge gaps. The checklist's first and fourth items are the non- negotiables.
Run question 2 on us right now
And run the free checker on yourself; both take minutes and neither can lie to you.
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