How to choose an SEO agency for AI search

Choose for AI visibility first

Put AI visibility first on your list, because buyers now read an answer before they see a link. Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no summary appeared. On top of that, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly users in October 2025. An agency that only reports blue-link positions is measuring a shrinking share of the places where your buyers form a shortlist.

An agency increases how often AI cites your brand without guaranteeing a citation on any given prompt. AI assistants build each answer from content they can find and trust, so the work involves clear pages that answer buyer questions and mentions of your brand on other sites. Snoika's founder Anton Vedeshin reported to Startup Reporter 1StopVAT's move from 2.7% to 28.3% ChatGPT visibility in 16 weeks. That figure is a share of tracked prompts. It isn't a ranking, and it moved because the content and the mentions changed.

Buyers who research software or finance ask assistants long comparison questions, as do buyers of B2B services. A local plumber's customers still mostly tap a map result, so the importance of AI visibility depends on your category. Before you sign, ask each agency for a baseline of how often your brand appears in AI answers today. If they can't produce one, they can't show you progress later.

Is SEO still worth it

Yes. AI SEO runs on the same foundations as classic search, so the work still pays. Google says so in its guide to generative AI features. Google affirms SEO's relevance with "In short, yes!" because those features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems." A page that Google can't crawl, or doesn't trust, rarely ends up in an AI Overview either.

The traffic that comes through is smaller and worth more per visit. Patrick Stox, Product Advisor at Ahrefs, found that AI search sent Ahrefs just 0.5% of its visitors but produced 12.1% of signups, a conversion rate 23 times higher than traditional organic search. Visitors who arrive from an assistant have already read a comparison and are ready to act.

Agrello, an e-signature company, saw organic search sessions rise 125.6% year over year. 3DPrinterOS reached #1 visibility in ChatGPT for industry-specific queries and now gets 3 to 4 qualified inbound leads a day from AI search. So judge an agency on leads and signups. Sessions alone will look worse every quarter even when the business gets better.

How much agencies cost

Most businesses pay between $500 and $5,000 a month for SEO, and the average agency retainer is about $3,209. Those figures come from an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers, where 63% of buyers landed in that range. The same survey shows how prices differ by type of provider, including agency vs freelancer.

The Ahrefs survey found 78.2% of providers bill on retainer because search results build up over months instead of finishing in one project. AI tracking platforms price by the number of prompts and platforms they monitor. When you compare weekly and monthly prices, convert them to the same period first.

Your price moves with competition and geography. The number of languages and the amount of content the agency has to write also affect the cost. A national campaign in insurance costs more than a local campaign for a dentist. Before you compare quotes, ask each agency how many pages it will publish and prompts it will track each month under the retainer. Ask it to specify the monthly outreach placements and hours as well. Two $3,000 quotes hide different amounts of work.

AI visibility measurement criteria

Measure AI visibility as the share of a fixed prompt set where your brand appears, and rerun that set every week. A single screenshot proves nothing. Rand Fishkin's team at SparkToro ran the same prompts through ChatGPT and Google's AI dozens of times each. They found less than 1 in 100 responses returned the same list of brands. Fishkin's conclusion is that these tools "are probability engines: they're designed to generate unique answers every time."

Repeated measurements across a large prompt set over several weeks give you a trustworthy figure for how often your brand appears, while its position in one answer is noise. Track these four measures in each report.

• Mentions: how often the assistant names your brand.
• Share of voice: your mentions against competitors on the same prompts.
• Sentiment: whether the answer describes you positively, neutrally or negatively.
• Citations: whether the assistant links to your pages as a source.

Snoika's SEO solutions measure those four signals in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, where most AI search traffic happens, with prompt sets that run weekly. Other agencies cover more platforms or fewer. Pick based on where your buyers actually ask.

When you review an agency's method, ask to see the prompt list itself. Check that most prompts are unbranded buying questions ("best VAT compliance software for marketplaces") instead of your brand name. Any assistant will mention you when the prompt already does. Then ask who wrote the prompts and how often the set changes. If the set changes every month, the trend line stops meaning anything.

Content ownership on your domain

Require the agency to publish its content on your domain and give you outright ownership. Authority builds up on the domain that hosts a page. If the agency publishes on its own network of sites, or on a subdomain it controls, that value stays with them when the contract ends. You'd have paid for an asset you can't keep.

Setup varies by agency. Snoika publishes pages through a DNS connection that works with any CMS without a site rebuild or migration. The client approves each page in a dashboard before it goes live. Approval matters as much as hosting because the brand that signs off on every page catches factual errors before an AI assistant repeats them to buyers. Snoika also puts a human review layer on top of its automated workflows. Ask any agency where people check the work, and what exactly they check.

A company that sells in Germany and Brazil needs pages written specifically for those markets. Snoika creates content in 135+ languages and regional variants. Whoever you hire, make them show you a sample page in each language you need.

Check the contract for a clause that assigns copyright to you on payment. Make sure your team holds the admin logins to the CMS and the domain, too.

Off-site authority signals

AI assistants favor brands that other sites talk about, so your agency needs a plan for mentions beyond your own pages. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands in Google AI Overviews. Branded web mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.664 against 0.218 for referring domains, the classic backlink count. In a follow-up across ChatGPT and AI Mode, YouTube mentions showed the strongest correlation, about 0.737. These correlations point toward getting your brand discussed over buying links, while causation remains an open question.

Where those mentions come from depends on your market. Pew grouped Wikipedia and YouTube with Reddit and found that together they made up 15% of sources in Google's AI summaries. A B2B software firm gets more from review sites and analyst roundups, while a consumer brand gets more from video reviews and forum threads.

Ask each agency to name the types of sites it would target for you, and to show past placements it earned for clients. Then ask how it gets them. Digital PR earns lasting mentions through expert quotes and original data. Paid link packages break Google's spam policies and can pull your rankings down.

Reporting transparency standards

A transparent report connects the work done to outcomes, and it pulls its numbers from accounts you own. Figures from your own Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) are harder to cherry-pick than rankings in an agency's private tool. That's why serious onboarding asks for access to your accounts. Snoika, for instance, asks for access to GA4 and Search Console. It also requests Google Tag Manager access, plus CMS access when it will publish pages.

Control what level of access you grant. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says to "only grant read access" to Search Console during an audit and hold off on write access. Raise permissions once the agency has a defined job that needs them, and remove them on the day the contract ends.

A useful monthly report lists the pages published and the technical changes made. It shows AI visibility on the agreed prompt set next to organic clicks. It also reports conversions and leads. Every percentage needs a baseline next to it. Vespia, a fintech SaaS, recorded a 220% increase in AI brand mentions. A figure like that is only useful when the report shows the starting count and the prompts behind it. Ask for a sample report from a current client, with names removed, before you sign.

Contract terms to scrutinise

Of the five areas to review in an SEO contract, check the length and notice period alongside ownership of content and accounts. Review what the retainer includes and any performance promises, then check what happens to your data at exit. The sections below cover them in that order.

Term length and notice period

Six to 12 months is a fair minimum for organic search, since content takes time to get indexed and cited. Longer locks are a risk when the agency hasn't proven itself yet. Look for a 30-day notice period after the first term, and watch for auto-renewal clauses that roll you into another full year. Annual billing can lower the price. Weigh that discount against the flexibility you give up.

Who owns the content and accounts

Require the contract to assign copyright for every page and image to you once you've paid. That assignment must cover every dataset as well. Keep the analytics properties and the domain under your company's ownership, with the CMS admin accounts held by your team. An agency that sets up Google Analytics under its own account can take your history with it when it leaves.

What the retainer includes

Vague scope like "ongoing optimization" lets an agency do less each month without breaching anything. Specify the number of pages per month and prompts tracked in the contract. Set numbers for platforms monitored and outreach targets as well. Also cover how unused work carries over, if at all.

Performance clauses and exit terms

Treat any clause that guarantees positions or citations as a warning sign. A fair contract commits to work you can see and to a reporting schedule. At exit, it obliges the agency to hand over every asset and the prompt history within a set number of days. Before you sign anything long, ask for a small paid pilot, or a free first look.

Red flags to reject immediately

Reject an agency on the spot if it promises outcomes no one controls or hides how it works. Google states, "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Its guidance also warns against firms that are secretive or "won't clearly explain what they intend to do."

• A guaranteed #1 ranking, or a guaranteed citation in ChatGPT.
• Claims of a "special relationship" with Google or OpenAI.
• Proof of AI visibility that consists of one screenshot of one answer.
• Content hosted on the agency's own domains or private blog network.
• Link packages priced per link.
• A refusal to share the prompt list or the source of the data.
• A report built only from the agency's own tool, with no access to your Search Console.
• Unsolicited email offering to "fix" your rankings.

Any one of these is enough to walk away. You won't fix it later in contract talks, because each one shows how the agency plans to work.

Questions to ask shortlisted agencies

The best questions make an agency show its method and its evidence. Ask the same questions of every finalist and compare the answers side by side. The groups below test the three things that matter most for AI search.

Questions that test AI search knowledge

Ask which AI platforms your buyers use and how the agency found out. An agency demonstrates its knowledge by naming platforms and explaining its choices; "all of them" is a weak answer. Next, ask how AI Overviews choose their sources and how that differs from ChatGPT. Require an explanation of the search index and brand mentions on other sites. Then ask what they would change on your three most important pages so an assistant can quote them. Concrete edits, like a direct answer near the top or clear headings, show real practice.

Questions about measurement and proof

Ask to see a sample prompt set for your category, and ask how often they rerun it. Request a client case that shows the work done and the change over time against a baseline. ABS Technologies saw 6x SERP impressions and better keyword indexability within the first 30 days. 3DOS reached top visibility in ChatGPT for targeted industry queries and doubled its registered users. Results told with a timeframe and a named metric can be checked. Then ask what they'd consider a failure at month 6. An agency that can define failure has thought about success.

Questions about the working relationship

Ask who does the in-house vs agency work day to day, and whether that person will join the pitch call. Ask what access they need in the first week and why. Find out how you approve content before it goes live, too. Finally, ask what you'd receive if you ended the contract next quarter. The answer tells you whether they plan to earn your renewal or lock it in.

Checklist before you buy

Before your first sales call, build your own baseline. Write 20 unbranded questions your buyers would ask. Run each one in ChatGPT and Google three times and note where your brand and your competitors appear. Then make every agency explain what it would change and how it would measure that list. That one exercise settles how to choose an SEO agency better than any pitch deck, because you'll know the starting point before anyone sells you a result.

We track brand visibility in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, and we publish reviewed content on your own domain. To check your baseline against what an agency promises, talk to an AI search expert.