Your SEO Agency Says They Do AEO Now: Five Checks

Why This Conversation Comes Up

Sometime in the last year your agency sent an email. New service, AI search optimisation, included in your existing retainer. You said great and went back to running your business.

Now you want to know whether anything happened. That question feels awkward to ask, which is exactly why most owners never ask it. In thirty-five sales calls we ran between March and August, the single most common thing owners told us was not that marketing costs too much. Price came up once. What came up over and over was that they could not tell whether the money was working, so they could neither fire the incumbent nor confidently hire anyone else.

That stuck position is the real problem. These five checks break it. Every one produces a plain yes or no from evidence you generated, not evidence handed to you in a slide.

None of this assumes your agency is lying. Most are not. AEO is genuinely new, plenty of shops added the words to the site before they built the capability, and a good agency will be relieved you asked. The bad ones get vague. That difference is the whole point.

Check 1: Run the Query Yourself

Open ChatGPT in a fresh chat with no history. Type the sentence a customer would type. Not your business name. The problem: emergency plumber in Tucson, best family dentist Scottsdale, water damage restoration near Green Bay.

Read what comes back. Are you in it? Are your competitors? Run it three times across three days, because these models vary. Three misses in a row is a signal, not bad luck.

Then do the same in Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Different pipes, different results. A business can own Google rankings and be invisible in ChatGPT, and the reverse happens too.

This is the check nobody can spin. If your agency sent a screenshot of you appearing, ask for the exact prompt and type it yourself. Proof that survives being rerun by the client is proof. Everything else is a picture.

Check 2: The Foursquare Listing

Go to foursquare.com and search your business name and city. You want to know three things: does a listing exist, is it claimed, and is anything on it wrong.

Most owners have never looked. Foursquare feels like a 2012 app for checking into coffee shops. It also happens to be a data source ChatGPT leans on for local business facts, which makes an unclaimed listing with a dead phone number an expensive piece of neglect.

We audit this on almost every new client and find the same picture: strong Google Business Profile, tidy website, Foursquare either missing or holding an address from two moves ago. Claiming it takes twenty minutes and costs nothing.

An agency doing real AEO work handles this in week one. It is the cheapest, fastest win available. If nobody touched it, the ChatGPT channel has not been worked, whatever the scope document says.

Check 3: The Schema on Your Pages

Schema markup is structured data that tells machines what your page describes. Language models read it. Without it they guess from your prose, and guessing goes badly for a plumber whose homepage opens with a paragraph about family values.

Paste your homepage URL into Google Rich Results Test. It reports what it finds. On a local service site you want LocalBusiness, Service on your service pages, and FAQPage anywhere you answer questions.

Check three pages: home, your highest-value service page, and one location page if you run them. Coverage on the homepage alone is a template default that came with the theme, not work anyone did on your behalf.

This one gets defended with talk of technical complexity. It is a solved problem with plugins and free tools. Two hours of work for a small site. If a page charging you money has no schema on it, that is the answer.

Check 4: The Citation Set

Language models weight sources they consider trustworthy. For a local service business that means industry directories, trade association memberships, licensing bodies, chamber listings, and the specialist review sites in your vertical.

Search your business name in quotes and note where it appears beyond your own site and Google. Then search your strongest competitor the same way. Compare the two lists.

If the competitor sits on eleven sources and you sit on three, you have found the gap. Building citations is unglamorous, slow, and the closest thing to a reliable lever in this channel.

Ask your agency for the list of citations built in the last six months, with links. Real work produces a list in an hour. Our post on checking an agency's case studies yourself applies the same test to the proof they use when selling.

Check 5: Can the Report Name One Lead?

Pull your last three monthly reports. Look for one customer, by first name and date, who found you through an AI assistant. One.

Most owners cannot find it. They find impressions, citation rates, visibility scores, sometimes thirty pages of charts. Attribution in this channel is genuinely hard, so nobody attempts it, and everyone reports proxies as if a proxy were a result.

You can fix this without your agency. Add one line to your intake script: how did you hear about us. Write the answer next to the name, date and job value. Six weeks of that beats every dashboard, because a customer saying they asked ChatGPT is the only evidence that pays.

Report the same three numbers back monthly: phone rang, jobs won, money cleared. If your agency cannot connect its work to those, ask what would need to change so it can. That is a fair question with a real answer, covered further in our piece on what should be visible by day 30.

The Five-Check Scorecard

What to Do With Your Score

Four or five passes: stay put and go deeper. Your agency is doing the work. Ask what the next ninety days target, and get the query list added to your monthly report so you can rerun it. Do not go shopping for a second vendor.

Two or three passes: add, do not replace. The foundation exists and the depth does not. Send the results, ask for a written thirty-day plan, and consider a second vendor scoped to AI search only. Our guide on running two vendors without breaking either covers how to split the work so nobody trips over anybody.

Zero or one pass: the work has not started. Nothing shipped, whatever the invoice line says. That still does not mean fire them today. Send all five results in one email, ask what has been done and what happens next, and give them thirty days against a written plan. A capable shop responds with specifics in a day. Vagueness or silence answers the question for you. Before you switch anyone, read when switching is worth it and when you are restarting the clock.

Neither, because you have no agency at all. Then these five checks are your baseline. Run them, write down the results, and you know exactly what to buy and what to ignore when someone pitches you.

The one thing worth carrying out of all this: you never needed permission or a login to find out. Forty minutes and your own eyes settle a question that has probably been bothering you for months.