The short answer
An AI SEO agency helps your business get named inside the answers AI tools write — ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot — rather than only ranking in a list of blue links. Most of the work is unglamorous: making your business facts consistent everywhere, earning genuine reviews, and writing pages that answer a question directly enough to be quoted.
The label is new and not yet settled. You will see the same service sold as Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, AEO, LLM SEO and AI search optimisation. Judge the work, not the acronym.
“AI SEO” means three different things — check which one you’re buying
This is the single most useful thing to sort out before you talk to anyone. The same two words are used for three genuinely different services, and only one of them is what most businesses actually want.
| What it actually means | What you get | Worth paying for? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Optimising for AI answers | Work that makes AI tools more likely to name and cite your business | Being recommended when someone asks an assistant for a supplier | Yes — this is the real thing |
| Using AI to produce SEO work | An agency generating content and reports with AI, faster and cheaper | More pages, produced quickly | Sometimes — but ask who edits it |
| AI-branded tooling | Ordinary SEO with an AI dashboard attached | Charts. Occasionally useful ones | Rarely, on its own |
If an agency cannot tell you plainly which of those three they do, that is your answer. Plenty sell the second while letting you believe you are buying the first.
What the work actually involves
Nobody can make an AI recommend you. What a competent agency does is stack the odds, and the levers are concrete enough to hold someone to:
- Making sure the AI crawlers can reach you at all. More sites block them by accident than you would think, and not in robots.txt where you would look — hosting-level bot protection can refuse them before the request touches your site, leaving nothing in your logs.
- Entity consistency. Identical name, address and phone everywhere, proper organisation and service schema, a Google Business Profile that agrees with your website. AI systems look for corroboration before naming anyone; contradictions read as uncertainty.
- Reviews. When an assistant recommends a local business it is largely synthesising what other people said about you. Nothing substitutes for this.
- Restructuring key pages to answer questions directly. Answer first, specifics second. Content written to be extracted reads differently from content written to rank.
- Presence on the sources these systems retrieve from. A narrower set than Google ranks — established directories, review platforms, trade bodies, local press.
- Getting indexed in Bing. It feeds both ChatGPT’s search and Microsoft Copilot, and it is the step most UK businesses have never checked. See our ChatGPT and Perplexity guide for why.
Notice how much of that is ordinary local SEO done properly. That is the honest headline: for most businesses, AI SEO is less a new discipline than a reason to finally finish the fundamentals. The overlap with traditional SEO is larger than the difference.
Questions worth asking before you hire
Ask these in a first call. The answers separate people who do the work from people who have read about it.
- “Which of the three definitions above is your service?” A direct answer, without a detour into jargon, is a good sign.
- “How will you measure this?” The honest answer involves asking the assistants your customers’ questions on a schedule and logging whether you are named and which sources get cited. Anyone claiming a precise AI ranking score is overselling.
- “What will you do in month one?” Should be diagnostics and fundamentals — crawler access, profile and citation consistency, a measurement baseline — not a content calendar.
- “Can you show me a business you have done this for?” The field is young, so a short answer is fair. An evasive one is not.
- “What happens if I stop?” Honest answer: entity and schema work largely persists, review velocity and third-party presence decay. Anyone promising permanence is guessing.
- “Who actually writes the content?” Fine if AI drafts it. Less fine if nobody with subject knowledge edits it.
And one for you rather than them: know your own numbers first — what a customer is worth and how many you can handle. It changes what “worth it” means, and it stops you buying a package sized for someone else.
Red flags
- Guaranteed rankings in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. Nobody controls these. Google states plainly that no structured data guarantees an Overview citation.
- A precise percentage attached to a tactic. “Do X for a 40% uplift” is marketing. The genuinely useful research in this field is thin and rarely that tidy.
- Selling llms.txt as a strategy. It is cheap, harmless and worth adding, but it is an emerging convention no major engine currently depends on. If it is the headline of the pitch, the pitch is thin.
- No mention of your Google Business Profile or reviews. For a local business these are the highest-leverage inputs. Skipping them means they are selling something else.
- Long lock-ins with vague deliverables. The work is ongoing, but the first months should have specific, checkable outputs.
- Volume of content as the plan. Thirty thin pages is a liability now that AI systems weigh source quality, not an asset.
None of these mean an agency is dishonest. They usually mean the service was packaged before the field settled, and nobody has revisited it.
Do you need an agency at all?
Often, no — at least not to start. The highest-value work costs time rather than money: complete your Google Business Profile, make your details identical everywhere, ask customers for reviews properly, and rewrite your main pages so the answer comes first. A capable owner can do all of that.
Where an agency earns its money is the part that is fiddly and ongoing: auditing citations across dozens of sources, technical and schema work, building third-party presence, and running the measurement baseline every month. If you would rather see the pricing before the pitch, ours is published on the AI SEO service page, and we break down what UK local SEO actually costs in a separate guide.