An AI SEO agency, in both senses.
An AI SEO agency does one of two things. Some optimise your business for AI search, so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews name you when a buyer asks a question in your category. Others use AI to do the SEO itself: research, drafting, and measurement at a pace a manual team can't hold. We're both. One retainer covers Google and the answer engines, and it runs on AI tooling we built in-house, with a senior human approving everything before it ships.
The two meanings of AI SEO
The phrase gets used loosely, so here's the split. Meaning one is SEO for AI: making your business visible where assistants answer buyers directly. That discipline also travels as AEO and GEO. Meaning two is SEO with AI: using the technology to run the search work itself. Most agencies pick one and wave at the other. We think the split is artificial. The engines deciding whether to cite you are built from the same technology that now does the best search work, and a team fluent on one side reads the other side better.
What the work involves
Both surfaces, one program. On Google: technical health, content, and the authority signals that still decide rankings. On the answer engines: an audit of what the machines currently say about you, content structured to be lifted and quoted, and the third-party corroboration the engines trust. Every month you'll see which buying questions name you, which name competitors, and what we're doing about the gap.
How we use AI, and where we don't
Our research, drafting, and measurement run on tooling we built ourselves, because nothing off the shelf tracked the answer engines the way we wanted. That's why the work moves faster than a manual team at the same price. What the AI doesn't do here is decide. A senior person reviews everything before it touches your site, every time. The machines produce the volume, the humans produce the judgment, and you get both.
What it costs
The Search and AI Visibility retainer runs $2,000 to $10,000+ a month, both surfaces included. Where you land depends on how contested your category is and how much content the plan needs. Complex scopes can go beyond it, and we'll say so upfront. The full market breakdown, ours included, is in our pricing guide.
What we won't do
We won't ship a page no human has read: AI volume with no editor is how sites get flattened in a core update. We won't sell AEO back to you as an add-on, because search work that ignores the answer engines is half a service. And we won't hide how the work gets done. You'll know what's machine-drafted, what's human-made, and who signed off on it.
How you will know it is working
Three numbers, alongside the rankings you already track. Citation share: how often the engines quote you on the questions that matter in your category. Accuracy: whether what they say about you is actually right, which is a separate problem and often the more urgent one. Displacement: who is holding the space you used to hold. We publish the same measurement at industry scale in the AI Visibility Index, and AltIndex runs it continuously for a single business.
How long it takes
Expect early movement in the first three months and real compounding from around month six. Questions using your brand name move first, because the engine only has to confirm what it already half knows. Category questions, the ones with commercial value, take longer: an engine needs corroboration from sources that are not you before it will recommend you to a stranger. The month-by-month shape is in how long AEO takes.
AI SEO, AEO and GEO are the same work under three names
You will be sold all three. Generative engine optimisation, answer engine optimisation, AI SEO, LLM SEO: the labels differ, the work underneath does not. We say AEO and explain why in AEO vs GEO. What matters is not the acronym on the proposal but whether the team can show you what the engines say about you today, and what changed after ninety days. Our own AEO practice is run as one program with classic search, not as an upsell beside it.