CHECKLIST · 6 MIN READ

How to choose an AEO or GEO optimization agency

By the Seamwire team · Updated 19 October 2026

THE SHORT ANSWER

A good AEO or GEO optimization agency does four things: makes your site readable to AI crawlers, writes answer-first pages an engine can quote, earns mentions on the sites those engines trust, and measures how often you are named across many runs. Choose the one that can show you that measurement on your own market before you sign, ships the page changes itself, and refuses to guarantee a placement.

What AEO and GEO services should include

An audit of AI crawler access: robots.txt, firewall and bot settings, and whether your pages render without JavaScript.
A question map: the 20 to 50 questions your buyers ask an assistant before they call anyone, and which engines name you today.
Answer-first pages: one clear page per service, industry and common question, each opening with a quotable answer.
Earned mentions: reviews, directories, lists, trade press and communities where your buyers' questions get answered.
Measurement: your share of answers across repeated runs on each engine, plus the visits and leads that AI referrals bring.

Questions to ask before you sign

How do you measure being named? A single screenshot proves nothing; answers change from run to run.
Who writes and ships the page changes? An agency that only sends recommendations leaves the hard half to you.
Which sites would you earn mentions on for our market, and why those?
What will the monthly report show, and which number tells us it is working?
What will you not do?

Red flags

A guaranteed placement or a guaranteed position in ChatGPT. Nobody controls that.
A proprietary “AI score” with no link to visits or enquiries.
llms.txt or schema markup sold as the whole answer. Both are cheap hygiene, not a strategy.
Content at volume: dozens of thin pages written for engines rather than buyers.

How Seamwire approaches it

We start with a free AI visibility check on your own market: the questions, the engines, and who gets named today. If there is no gap worth closing, we say so. If there is, we fix the technical side, build the pages ourselves, earn the mentions, and report your named-share and AI-referred leads every month.