Choosing an AEO agency in the UK.

A real answer engine optimisation agency must do four things: measure who the AI recommends today, diagnose why, fix it with your approval, and re-measure to prove the change. Most of what is sold as AEO in the UK today does one of the four. The same firms trade as GEO agencies (Generative Engine Optimisation), AI SEO agencies, AI visibility agencies or AI search agencies: whichever label you searched for, this page's questions apply unchanged. (And to clear up an acronym clash our own measurement keeps finding: this is AI search marketing, not Authorised Economic Operator, the HMRC customs status.)

The questions to demand of anyone selling AEO

• "How many measured answers is your baseline built on?" AI answers change between identical runs, 19% of the time in our own published data, so a screenshot proves nothing. If the answer isn't "hundreds, repeated", keep walking.
• "How many times do you ask each question before quoting a number?" This one sorts the field fastest. A tracker that asks each question once a day is substantially charting that 19% coin flip, not your visibility. The honest method asks the same question repeatedly and quotes a proportion with a confidence range (ours, worked through on real data); "we monitor daily", with no mention of repeats, means the graph wobbles and nobody can tell you why.
• "How will you prove your work caused any improvement?" The honest answer involves before-and-after measurement on the same questions, with untouched control queries, next to a same-day competitor panel so an engine-wide swing cannot be dressed up as progress. "Rankings went up" is an SEO answer to an AEO question, and "AI-referred traffic in your analytics" is a real but tiny, laggy signal that cannot isolate anyone's work.
• "Which engines, exactly?" Engines disagree with each other on 29% of questions in our data. ChatGPT-only visibility says little about Google AI Overviews or Perplexity.
• "What happens if there's nothing worth fixing?" The right answer exists and costs nothing. Ours is: we tell you, free, before you have spent anything.
• "Is your pricing public?" Ours is: from £500 pilot, from £700 monthly. Opacity at the pricing stage predicts opacity at the reporting stage.

Red flags

• Guaranteed placements or promised booking volumes. Nobody controls the engines; the channel is young. Honest sellers prove movement, not miracles.
• A monitoring dashboard sold as a service. Tools like Scrunch and Otterly are good at watching (we compared them), but a dashboard plus "good luck" is not delivery.
• Retainers priced in content volume: a fixed number of "AEO pages per month". Volume is the SEO habit imported into a channel that punishes it: AI engines deduplicate similar sources and keep the more established one, so lookalike pages aimed at answers a bigger rival already owns can hand your best material to them. The right question is never "how many pages", it is "which unowned questions do these pages win", and an honest diagnosis often finds the problem is not content at all.
• SEO retainers with the word AI added. Much overlaps, but if nothing in the proposal mentions measuring actual AI answers, it isn't AEO.

One specific buyer deserves a page of their own: international businesses entering the UK, whose home-market authority the engines cannot yet see. That page is here.

Searched for a different name?

This discipline is young enough that the market has not settled on one name for it. The same work is sold as: GEO agency · AI SEO agency · LLM SEO · AI visibility agency · AI search optimisation agency. The label changes; the questions on this page do not.

Common questions

Updated July 2026