Picture a discovery call with an agency pitching AI SEO. Ask them to pull up ChatGPT right now and type a question your actual customers ask. \
If the account manager hesitates, or pivots to a slide about keyword volume instead, that tells you everything.
A team that lives in this work daily can show you a live citation in under a minute, because they have already run that exact test on their own accounts a hundred times.
What a real AI SEO agency actually does
The daily work looks nothing like a traditional SEO retainer. It means running a batch of real customer questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini on a schedule, logging which brands get named, and rewriting the pages that should be winning those mentions but are not.
Keyword research and backlink outreach still happen somewhere in the process. They are no longer the main event.
A useful test during any pitch is asking the agency to name three of your competitors and show where each one currently gets cited for a specific question.
An agency running this work seriously already has that answer memorized, because tracking named competitors is the baseline of the job, not an add-on service.
Watch for these signs during the pitch
A rebranded shop describes AI SEO using the exact same language it used for SEO two years ago. The deck mentions ChatGPT once, on a single slide, then moves straight back to keyword rankings and monthly blog quotas.
The work underneath the pitch never actually changed.
A team doing this for real talks about specific sentences, not general topics. They can point to a page on your site right now and explain exactly why a model would skip the third paragraph and quote the fifth one instead.
That level of specificity is hard to fake in a sales call, which is exactly why it is worth asking for.
Three questions worth asking before signing anything
Before hiring an AI SEO agency or consultant, ask questions that reveal how they actually measure and improve AI visibility, not just how they describe it.
1. Which AI engines do you track, and how often?
Different AI platforms produce different answers. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini frequently cite different sources for the exact same prompt, so monitoring only one engine provides an incomplete - and often misleading -view of performance.
2. What changes do you make beyond traditional SEO?
A credible answer should describe specific, technical improvements, such as:
- Isolating important claims into standalone sentences.
- Adding verifiable data and statistics that models can confidently cite.
- Resolving contradictions between the website and older press coverage or third-party sources.
- Improving content structure so key facts are easier for AI systems to extract.
If the explanation never goes beyond phrases like "we optimize for AI," it's worth asking for more detail before moving forward.
3. Can you show a real before-and-after example?
Ask for a documented client example that includes:
- The original prompt submitted to the AI model.
- The original answer before optimization.
- The updated answer after the work was completed.
Teams with proven experience usually have examples like this readily available. Those without them often fall back on broad case studies or general success stories, which don't demonstrate that their work actually changed AI-generated responses.
What the first month of a real engagement looks like
A serious AI SEO engagement starts with a citation audit, not a content calendar.
That means testing a real set of customer questions against every major AI tool and mapping exactly where a brand shows up, where a competitor shows up instead, and where nobody gets cited at all.
The pages that rank well but get zero AI mentions are usually the first ones worth fixing, since that gap represents effort already spent with nothing to show for it in the channel that increasingly matters most.
What working with Ande Media looks like
Ande Media built its GEO practice years before most agencies had a name for the category.
Every account starts with a citation audit in the first week and gets monthly reporting that shows real AI mentions, tracked against named competitors.
- Test a real set of customer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini
- Map where your brand gets cited and where a named competitor wins instead
- Rewrite priority pages so their claims are specific enough to quote
- Fix contradictions between your site and outdated third party mentions
- Report monthly on actual citations, not rank position alone
Talk to Ande Media about your AI SEO strategy. See a live citation test for your brand before you commit to anything.-=
Frequently asked questions
Pricing varies by scope and account size. What matters more than the number is whether the retainer includes citation tracking across multiple AI engines, not just Google rank.
Only if they rebuild the workflow around citation testing and claim structure. Adding a slide about ChatGPT to an existing SEO plan is not the same as doing the work.
Most engagements show a measurable citation audit within the first two weeks and visible changes in AI mentions within one to two months of rewriting priority pages.
Trusting a rank tracking screenshot as proof of AI visibility. Rank and citation are different metrics, and only one of them shows up inside ChatGPT.
