Key facts
- Clients increasingly ask how they appear in ChatGPT and Google AI.
- AEO builds on skills SEO teams already have.
- An audit is the easiest first offer.
- Monthly reporting turns AEO into recurring revenue.
Why agencies should offer AEO
Clients see AI answers every day and want to know where they stand. If their agency cannot answer, another one will. The good news is that AEO uses skills SEO teams already have: technical audits, content strategy, digital PR and reporting. What is new is measuring answers instead of rankings, and working on the sources AI trusts.
Services to offer
- AI visibility audit: where the client is named, missing or described wrongly.
- Prompt research: the buyer questions to track.
- Technical AI readiness: crawler access, rendering, schema and llms.txt.
- Content for AI: answer first pages, comparisons and FAQs.
- Source outreach: reviews, lists, directories and digital PR.
- Monthly tracking and reporting across engines and markets.
How to package it
- 1Starter audit: a one time snapshot with a list of fixes.
- 2Growth retainer: monthly tracking, content and outreach for one market.
- 3Enterprise program: several brands or markets with weekly reporting.
Price based on the number of prompts, engines, markets and the content and outreach included. Many agencies bundle AEO into existing SEO retainers as an upgrade.
How to report
- Share of voice against named rivals, by engine and market.
- Visibility trend with a likely range.
- Wins: prompts where the client is newly named or moved up.
- Sources: new citations and the pages behind them.
- AI referral traffic and conversions from analytics.
- Next month's priorities.
Common pitfalls
- Promising guaranteed AI rankings.
- Reporting single screenshots as proof.
- Ignoring third party sources.
- Tracking too few prompts to see real change.
Put this into practice with Variask AI visibility, Variask AI Mode and the free AI visibility ROI calculator. See Variask pricing or read the Variask FAQ.