Wondering how to choose an AEO agency without buying repackaged SEO? Here are the 5 signs of snake oil, 10 questions that expose real capability, the red flags that should end a sales call, and what realistic results look like month by month.
Every agency in Australia suddenly sells AEO. The same providers who were pitching you "SEO packages" eighteen months ago now have an "AI search optimisation" page, and from the outside you cannot tell who actually knows how answer engines work and who renamed a service and doubled the price. That is the real risk when you are comparing providers: not paying for AEO and getting nothing, but paying for AEO and getting 2019 SEO with new labels.
This guide is the filter. We wrote it as an AEO agency ourselves, which means two things: we know exactly what the work involves, and yes, we have an interest. So the whole post is built on questions and evidence you can verify independently, whether you shortlist us or never talk to us. If you are still building your shortlist, our top 10 AEO agencies in Australia roundup is the companion piece, and our older guide on questions to ask before hiring an SEO agency covers the general agency hygiene that still applies. This post covers what is specific to hiring for answer engine optimisation: the tells, the questions, the reporting, and the realistic timeline.
One honest way to test any agency, including us: request a free AI citation audit and compare what comes back against the standards below.
TL;DR
- The biggest risk when hiring an AEO agency is paying a premium for old SEO with new labels. The tell is deliverables: if nothing in the proposal mentions citation tracking, prompt panels, entity work, or AI crawler access, it is repackaged SEO.
- Ask ten specific questions before signing: how they track citations, what their prompt panel looks like, how they handle llms.txt and schema, which engines they prioritise, and what their realistic timeline is.
- Walk away immediately from guaranteed rankings in ChatGPT, cherry-picked screenshots as proof, and any engagement that starts without a baseline measurement.
- Fair AEO reporting shows citation share against a fixed prompt panel, month over month, across multiple engines, including the prompts where you do not appear.
- Realistic results: baseline and technical foundation in month one, first citation movement by months two to three for established sites, meaningful citation share by months four to six. Faster claims deserve scepticism.
- Good AEO includes traditional SEO fundamentals rather than replacing them, so an agency that trashes all SEO is as suspect as one that only does SEO.
Why choosing an AEO agency is harder than choosing an SEO agency
SEO has two decades of established norms. You can check an SEO agency's own rankings, audit their backlinks, and benchmark their pricing against a mature market. AEO has none of that maturity. The discipline is young, the tooling is new, there is no AEO equivalent of two decades of case studies, and the engines themselves change quarterly. That vacuum is exactly where overclaiming thrives.
It also means the evaluation burden shifts to you. You cannot rely on the market having already filtered out the pretenders, because it has not. What you can do is understand what real AEO work consists of, then test every provider against it. The work itself is not mysterious: we lay the whole methodology out publicly in our GEO complete guide, and a legitimate agency should be able to explain their version of it without hiding behind proprietary-sounding vagueness.
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The 5 signs an "AEO service" is just old SEO relabelled
These are the patterns we see most when reviewing proposals that prospective clients bring us for a second opinion.
1. The deliverables list is a keyword deliverables list
Read the proposal's actual line items. If they are "keyword research, on-page optimisation, monthly blog posts, backlinks, ranking report", that is an SEO retainer, whatever the cover page says. Real AEO deliverables include things like a citation baseline, prompt panel design, AI crawler and llms.txt configuration, entity and schema markup implementation, content restructuring for citability, and citation share reporting. Some SEO line items belong in an AEO scope too, because the disciplines share a foundation. But if none of the AI-specific items appear, nothing AI-specific is being done.
2. They cannot explain how they measure AI visibility
Ask "how will I know it is working?" and listen. If the answer is rankings and traffic, they are measuring SEO. AI answers frequently produce no click at all, so an agency measuring only clicks is blind to the thing you are paying for. The right answer involves citation share: running a fixed panel of real customer prompts across engines each month and reporting how often you are named.
3. Every engine is treated as one thing called "AI"
ChatGPT retrieves through Bing. Google AI Overviews and Gemini read Google's index. Perplexity runs its own crawler and shows sources aggressively. An agency that talks about "ranking in AI" as a single undifferentiated activity has not done the work at engine level. You do not need them to lecture you on architecture, but they should be able to tell you which engines matter most for your market and why the tactics differ.
4. No interest in your entity or your wider web presence
AEO is heavily about whether engines can verify your business as a consistent, trustworthy entity across your site, your Google Business Profile, directories, reviews, and brand mentions elsewhere. A proposal that never leaves your website is doing at most half the job.
5. The price went up but the team did not change
Fair question for any provider who added AEO to the menu recently: what did you change? New tooling, new process, staff who specialise in it, published thinking on the topic? "We have always done this really" is an honest answer only if their old deliverables genuinely covered it, which you can now check against sign number one.
The 10 questions to ask an AEO agency
Take these into every sales call. The point is not to catch anyone out with trivia; it is that each question has answers that separate practitioners from packagers.
- "Show me a citation tracking report for an existing client, anonymised." The single best question. A real practitioner has these and will show you the format in two minutes. A packager will describe a report that does not exist yet.
- "How do you build the prompt panel for a business like mine?" Good answer: from your real customer questions, phone enquiries, and service lines, fixed at baseline so results are comparable month to month. Bad answer: vague talk of "monitoring AI mentions".
- "What is your baseline process before work starts?" Non-negotiable. If they do not measure where you stand across engines before starting, every future claim of improvement is unverifiable.
- "Which AI crawlers will you check and configure, and will you implement llms.txt?" Listen for specifics: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bing indexing. This is basic technical AEO hygiene.
- "What schema and entity work is included?" You want depth here: Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article, plus consistency work across your profiles and citations, not just "we add schema".
- "Which engines will you prioritise for us, and why?" Tests whether they think at engine level and whether they have thought about your market at all.
- "How does your AEO work interact with our existing SEO?" The right answer is that they share a foundation and compound each other, as we cover in the AEO vs traditional SEO ROI breakdown. An agency that says SEO is dead is selling a story, not a strategy.
- "What does a realistic timeline look like for a site like ours?" Compare their answer with the month-by-month expectations later in this post. Wild promises here predict wild reporting later.
- "What happens to the work if we leave?" Schema, content, llms.txt, and profile improvements should live on assets you own. Beware anything that lives in a proprietary platform that leaves with the agency.
- "What do you publish about AEO?" Practitioners tend to have public thinking: guides, breakdowns, tools, talks. It is not mandatory, but an agency selling expertise with zero published evidence of it is asking for a lot of trust.
When a customer asks ChatGPT who to call, whose name does AI give?
Red flags that should end the conversation
Some things you learn about an AEO agency are not "weigh it up" issues. They are walk-aways.
- Guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or any AI engine. Nobody controls what a generative model outputs. Guarantees of "position one in ChatGPT" are the AEO version of the guaranteed-rankings scam SEO spent a decade outgrowing.
- Screenshots as proof. AI answers vary by phrasing, session, account, and day. A screenshot of one favourable answer proves one favourable answer happened once. Real evidence is repeated measurement against a fixed prompt panel over time.
- No baseline, straight to retainer. If they will not measure the starting point, they cannot demonstrate progress, and that is usually the intent.
- Pressure around a closing window. "AI search is moving fast" is true. "So sign this week" does not follow. The opportunity is real and it will still be real after you have done due diligence.
- Secret methodology. There are genuinely proprietary tools in this space, but the methodology itself, the one we outlined above, is public knowledge. "We cannot tell you what we would do" almost always means "we would not do much".
- They will not name the work on your invoice. Line items should map to deliverables you can verify: pages restructured, schema deployed, prompts tracked, mentions earned.
What fair AEO reporting looks like
You are entitled to reporting that would survive an audit by a sceptic. Concretely, a monthly AEO report should show:
- Citation share against a fixed prompt panel. The same 20 to 50 prompts, run across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, with your appearance rate per engine, per month. Including the prompts where you did not appear. Selective reporting is the polite version of the screenshot trick.
- Accuracy, not just presence. When engines mention you, is what they say correct? Wrong pricing, dead services, and stale details in AI answers are findings, not footnotes.
- Work completed, mapped to the plan. What was shipped this month and which signal it targets.
- Leading indicators. AI referral traffic, brand mention growth, Bing and Google index health, crawler access status.
- Honest movement in both directions. Citation share fluctuates as engines update. A report that only ever goes up is a report that is being curated.
If a prospective agency's sample report matches that description, you are probably talking to a practitioner.
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Run my free audit →Realistic results, month by month
Timelines vary with your starting authority, your market, and your competition, but here is the honest shape for an established Australian service business site. Treat large deviations from this, in either direction, as something to question.
| Period | What should be happening |
|---|---|
| Month 1 | Baseline citation audit, prompt panel fixed, technical foundation shipped: crawler access, llms.txt, schema, indexing in Bing and Google. |
| Months 2 to 3 | Core pages restructured for citability, entity consistency fixed across profiles and directories, first content shipped. First citation movement often appears here for established sites. |
| Months 4 to 6 | Citation share trending up on the panel, appearing for a growing set of prompts, AI referral traffic measurable. This is where you judge whether the engagement is working. |
| Months 6 to 12 | Compounding: topical depth built out, mentions earned across third-party sources, citation share defended as competitors wake up. |
New domains sit behind that curve by a few months, because engines need time to learn the entity exists. And a genuinely competitive national keyword set moves slower than local service queries, where the candidate pool is small. An agency that sets these expectations unprompted is showing you how they will behave for the whole engagement.
Weighing cost against capability
Price alone tells you little when comparing AEO agency quotes in an immature market: we have seen thin offerings at premium prices and serious work at modest retainers. What matters is whether the fee maps to the deliverables and reporting standards above. We have published a full breakdown of AEO pricing in Australia covering typical ranges and cost drivers, so use that as your benchmark, and treat any large gap between price and demonstrated capability, in either direction, as a question to ask rather than a bargain to grab.
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Run my free audit →Frequently asked questions
How do I know if an AEO agency is legitimate?
Check three things: their deliverables include AI-specific work (citation tracking, prompt panels, llms.txt, entity and schema depth) rather than relabelled SEO line items; they measure a baseline before starting and report citation share against a fixed prompt panel including misses; and they set realistic timelines of months, not weeks. An agency that fails any of the three is selling packaging, not practice.
What is a fair way for an AEO agency to prove results?
Repeated measurement against a fixed panel of real customer prompts, run monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, showing your citation rate over time including the prompts where you do not appear. One-off screenshots are not proof, because AI answers vary between sessions and phrasings. Accuracy of what engines say about you should be reported alongside presence.
Can an agency guarantee my business will appear in ChatGPT?
No. Generative engines decide their own outputs, and answers vary by phrasing, session, and model version, so no one can guarantee placement. What a competent agency can do is systematically improve the signals engines use, measure your citation share honestly, and grow it over time. Treat any guarantee of a specific position in an AI answer as a red flag serious enough to end the conversation.
How long before AEO shows results?
For an established site, expect the technical foundation and baseline in month one, first citation movement around months two to three, and meaningful citation share growth by months four to six. New domains typically run a few months behind that because engines need time to learn the entity exists. Anyone promising significant AI visibility inside a few weeks is either targeting trivially uncontested prompts or overclaiming.
Should I hire separate agencies for SEO and AEO?
Usually not. The disciplines share most of their foundation: engines retrieve from traditional search indexes, so rankings, technical health, and content quality feed both. Splitting them across two agencies creates duplicated work and conflicting changes to the same pages. The better model is one provider running an integrated program, like a combined SEO and AEO engagement, with AI-specific measurement layered on top.
What should AEO cost in Australia?
AEO is typically priced like SEO retainers, commonly in the low thousands per month depending on scope, competition, and locations, with one-off audits and technical projects priced separately. Our AEO pricing guide breaks down the typical ranges and what should be included at each level. Judge any quote against deliverables and reporting standards, not against the label on the service.
The right AEO agency will survive every question on this list without flinching, show you their reporting before you ask, and talk you out of unrealistic expectations rather than into them. Test us against it. Book a free AI citation audit and you will see our baseline process and reporting format before a dollar changes hands, or read more about how we run AEO engagements first.