Evaluating AEO
Best AEO Marketers: What to Look For in 2026
Look for people who connect technical SEO, content, entities, source quality and measurable outcomes. Ignore generic AI search expert claims.
Written by Younus Fardeen, Marketing Manager at Masai School.
Last reviewed · 4 sources
What AEO involves
AEO is making a page easy for a machine to quote accurately. Google treats it as SEO applied to a new surface.
- One self-contained answer per page
- Entity clarity: which company, person or product
- Structured data that matches the page
- Source quality, since assistants inherit what they cite
- Crawler access for each engine
- A baseline, because citation is not ranking
7 criteria I would actually use
- 01
They can explain retrieval
Ask how a named engine finds and selects a passage. Content volume as an answer describes blogging.
- 02
They start with the fundamentals
If the site is not crawlable and the entity is unclear, AEO is not the first problem. Good practitioners say so.
- 03
They separate citation from recommendation
Being quoted and being suggested have different causes. Conflating them is the commonest measurement error.
- 04
They keep a baseline habit
What do assistants say today, and how was it captured? Without that, later numbers cannot be checked.
- 05
They are specific about platforms
ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini retrieve differently. One package for all is pricing, not strategy.
- 06
They show published thinking
Working notes written before they knew the reader are cheaper evidence than curated case studies.
- 07
They tell you what not to do
Anyone who says every channel matters is selling capacity.
Questions to ask before hiring one
Tick them off as you ask. Copy the list into your brief.
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Claims to doubt
Claims I would be skeptical of.
Includes claims I could make myself. Flip a card for the reason.
Claim
Guaranteed AI citations
Claim
AEO is completely different from SEO
Claim
A dashboard that scores your AI visibility
Claim
llms.txt will get you cited
Claim
Four years of AEO experience
Worth evaluating alongside me
Technical SEO consultants
Right when the problem is crawlability, migrations or a manual action. AEO sits downstream.
In-house, with an advisor
Teams that publish well often need decisions, not a delivery partner. Cheapest, and rarely sold.
Full-service agencies
Worth it when production capacity across many contributors is the constraint.
Specialist AI-visibility tools
Tracking gives you the baseline to judge any engagement against.
Where I fit
The part where I make a caseI work on AEO inside a wider organic growth system. My background is hands-on marketing, SEO, content and social.
AI visibility still rests on clear information, strong content, credible sources, technical access and a recognisable entity.
I have four years of experience, not fifteen. For classical technical SEO on a large legacy site, hire the longer record. On how answer engines retrieve and cite, nobody has fifteen years.
Questions
Asked most.
Is AEO worth paying for yet?
If buyers research before contacting you, yes, and the cheapest route is inside work you already fund. For impulse purchases, probably not this year.
How long before it shows?
Months, not weeks. A page must be crawled, indexed and then selected, and selection moves on its own schedule.
Can our SEO agency do this?
Often yes, and it is the cheapest arrangement. Test them with the first criterion: how does retrieval work?
What should this cost?
Less than a mid-tier agency retainer and more than per-article freelancing, since the output is decisions. Be wary of a quote given before anyone sees the site.
Evidence, labelled
What is confirmed, what is reported, what is a hunch.
Each claim is labelled and sourced. Google rows speak only for Google.
Last reviewed · 4 sources
- Confirmed
- Stated in the platform's own documentation or measured in published data.
- Not required
- The platform says you do not need it. It may still be harmless.
- Reported
- Third-party study or vendor data. Method and conflicts noted.
AEO is mostly SEO work with a different output.
Confirmed
Google's guide says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. It speaks only for Google.
Ask how the engine finds the passage.
Reported
Preprint: every page ChatGPT cited was first retrieved by its own search. Sub-query coverage matters.
One package works for every engine.
Reported
Google AI Mode and AI Overviews shared 13.7% of cited URLs. Engines pick different sources.
llms.txt is a lever.
Not required
Google ignores such files. SE Ranking found no citation effect across nearly 300,000 domains.
Google, AI optimization guide (opens in a new tab) source 1SE Ranking llms.txt study (opens in a new tab) source 2
Sources, fetched 19 October 2026
- 01Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (opens in a new tab)Google Search Central · Updated 10 Jul 2026
- 02What Drives AI Citations? Content, Retrieval and Model Knowledge (Chen and Koudas) (opens in a new tab)arXiv 2610.15033 (preprint) · 10 Oct 2026
- 03AI Overviews vs AI Mode: how their citations differ (opens in a new tab)Ahrefs · 15 Dec 2025
- 04Does llms.txt impact your AI visibility and citations? (opens in a new tab)SE Ranking · Page shows 15 Oct 2026
By market
- BangaloreSEO and AEO for startups and engineering-led companies.Learn more
- IndiaVernacular and Hinglish retrieval, DPDP, and a market where agencies sell the category.Learn more
- UAEBilingual structure, GCC regulation and a live page-one hospitality build.Learn more
Worked with
- Masai School
- Sparkling Sandset
- Under 25
- Snapchat India
Next step
Put these questions to me.
Use the questions above on me too. Send any in writing and I will answer plainly, including where someone else is the better hire for "best AEO marketer".