Most AI SEO agencies are a year old. Some grew out of good SEO shops and know what they are doing. Some are a landing page and a ChatGPT subscription. Seven questions tell them apart.
Show me a site you grew from zero
Ask for the domain, the launch date and the Search Console graph rather than a client logo and a percentage. If the agency owns a site of its own, better still, because it can show everything. We show Gridly for that reason. Zero to 400 visitors a day in five months, 1.4 million impressions, almost 18,000 clicks, and the mistakes along the way.
An agency that cannot show one site it grew has not done the work yet. It can still be good, but you are paying for it to learn.
How do you measure citations in AI answers
Search Console does not count them. The agency needs a tool such as Ahrefs that reports AI answers by platform. It must be able to show you a baseline for your site before any work starts. If the answer is “we track rankings”, the agency is selling 2019 SEO with a new name.
Show me the rules your AI content follows
A written standard that covers sentence length, defined terms, cited sources and the phrases that mark text as machine written. Ask to read it. Ask what happens to a draft that breaks it. If there is no document, the content is whatever the model produced that day.
Who reads each page before it publishes
You want a name rather than a process. AI drafts well and makes confident mistakes. A person must read every page before it goes live under your business name. Ask who that person is and how many pages they review a day. A number above about thirty means nobody is reading.
What did you tell your last client not to do
A good agency talks clients out of work. Programmatic pages where no public data exists. A cluster in a market with no search volume. AI content for a business with three customers a year.
How is the price built
A fixed setup and a monthly fee, each explained, is the right shape for AI SEO. A flat retainer with no end is the old shape. Our pricing guide covers the typical ranges and what each part buys.
What happens when we want to run it ourselves
The right answer is that you can. The agency trains one person in your business to review and approve pages. It hands over the scripts and the ruleset, then drops to a small fee for changes and measurement. An agency that cannot hand over is renting you a system it will keep.
The answers that must worry you
A guaranteed ranking. Google’s own starter guide warns against anyone who offers one. Hundreds of pages in the first week. A case study with a percentage and no starting number. A proposal with no ruleset and no named reviewer. Any one of these ends the conversation.
How we answer the same questions
Every question above is one we ask ourselves. Our answers are on the AI SEO agency page, with the Gridly numbers in full. Our guide on choosing an AI consulting firm applies the same tests to an AI consultant.