This is one of the most underrated levers in AEO, and most traditional agencies don't touch it.
AI tools build a model of what your business is — your name, your category, your location, your expertise — from signals across the entire web, not just your website. If your business is described inconsistently across your site, Google Business Profile, industry directories, and social profiles, that ambiguity reduces the confidence AI tools have in citing you.
An AI SEO agency audits and standardises your entity presence so that machines understand your brand clearly — and are more likely to surface it confidently.
It structures your data for AI indexability
Schema markup is the technical backbone of AEO. FAQ schema, Article schema, Product schema, HowTo schema — these are the signals that help AI tools extract structured, reliable information from your pages. Most websites have significant gaps here.
Identifying and implementing the right schema for your content type and business model is a core deliverable of any credible AI SEO engagement. It's also one of the highest-leverage technical changes you can make for LLM visibility.
It closes the content question gap
AI answer engines are built around questions. When your customer asks ChatGPT something, it's trying to find the best available answer across everything it has indexed. If the question your customer is asking isn't addressed clearly — and directly — in your content, someone else's answer gets used instead.
An AI SEO agency maps the questions your audience is actively asking, identifies which ones your content currently answers poorly or not at all, and builds a content plan around closing those gaps systematically.
The compounding advantage of starting now
Here's something that doesn't get said enough in this conversation: AI visibility is not a level playing field, and it's getting less level over time.
LLMs are trained on data. The more your brand appears as a cited, credible source across the web — in quality content, in earned media, in structured and consistent form — the more likely you are to be included in future model training sets and in real-time retrieval results.
Businesses that build their AEO presence now are accumulating a form of authority that lags behind early movers in a way that's very similar to how domain authority works in traditional SEO. The businesses that started building backlinks in 2012 still benefit from that head start. The same dynamic is playing out with LLM visibility right now.
Waiting six months costs more than the six months suggests.
What to look for in an AI SEO agency
Not every agency that claims to do AI SEO actually has the capability. The space is new enough that there are plenty of traditional SEO shops rebranding themselves without meaningfully changing their practice.
Ask the right questions before you commit:
Do they have an AI tracker to measure LLM visibility? If they can't show you how your brand currently appears across AI answer engines — with data, not anecdotes — they're not operating at the right level.
Do they understand the difference between AEO and SEO? These are complementary disciplines, not interchangeable terms. An agency that uses them synonymously doesn't understand the space.
Can they point to structured data and entity work in their process? If their deliverables are content and links only, they're missing a significant portion of what drives AI visibility.
Do they think in questions, not keywords? The shift from keyword-centric to question-centric content strategy is fundamental to effective AEO. The best agencies have already made that shift in how they plan and brief content.
Do they integrate with your existing SEO work? AEO doesn't replace your current SEO investment. A credible AI SEO agency builds on top of it, not against it.
Is it right for your business?
The honest answer: it depends on how much of your growth relies on organic search, and how quickly your industry's buyers are shifting toward AI tools as their first source of answers.
If you're in B2B SaaS, professional services, e-commerce, or any category where buyers do meaningful research before converting — the shift is already well underway. Your customers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview the kinds of questions that lead them to products and services like yours. Whether your brand shows up in those answers is increasingly a commercial question, not just a marketing one.
If you're still entirely focused on traditional SEO metrics, you're measuring your visibility accurately for the channels you already understand — and not at all for the channels that are growing fastest.
That's the case for an AI SEO agency in plain terms. Not a replacement for what's working. An extension into the territory that isn't covered yet.
Hertz is an AI SEO platform that tracks your brand's visibility inside LLMs and AI answer engines — and tells you exactly how to improve it. Use our AI tracker to see where you stand, then decide what to do next. Start free at tryhertz.com.
