8 Questions to Ask Every AEO Agency Before You Sign the Contract

By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | June 15, 2026

These eight questions expose whether an agency actually does AEO — or just renamed their old SEO pitch deck. Ask them before you write a single check.

1. "What metric do you use to measure AI visibility — specifically, not rankings?"

A real AEO agency will answer with citation rate, AI mention rate, or a documented prompt-testing protocol — something that tells you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews are actually surfacing your brand. A bad answer is anything built around impressions, rankings, or organic traffic, because those numbers don't tell you what AI does with your site. Rankings measure Google's index. AI visibility is a different thing entirely, and confusing the two means the agency doesn't understand the problem they're charging you to solve.

2. "Which schema types do you implement and for what purpose?"

Expect specifics: FAQPage for question-framed content, HowTo for process-based pages, ItemList for category and comparison content, Product schema for your catalog, Article for editorial content. Each type signals something different to AI models about what your content is and how to use it. If the answer is vague — "we handle structured data" or "we use schema markup" — that's not an answer. It's a deflection. Any agency doing real AEO work can name the schema types and explain why they chose them for a specific page type.

3. "How do you structure content for AI extraction?"

Good agencies write direct answers at the top of every section, use question-framed headings, and build FAQ blocks that mirror how people actually query AI tools. They treat the first sentence of each section as the answer an AI might pull and quote directly. A bad answer is "we write SEO-friendly content." That's not what you asked. Google's structured data documentation and Schema.org's implementation guides are both public. If an agency can't explain how they apply them to content structure, they haven't been doing it.

4. "Can you show a store that went from zero AI citations to being cited?"

This is the one question most agencies can't answer. A good answer is a specific before-and-after: store category, what they changed, which AI platforms started citing them, and a rough timeframe. Anonymized is fine. Generic is not. If the agency pivots to organic traffic growth or domain authority or any other proxy metric, they don't have an AEO case study — they have an SEO case study with a new label. I've run enough audits to know that real AI citation improvements are traceable and specific. An agency doing this work should be able to show you exactly what changed and what happened next.

5. "How do you track when an AI model recommends a client's product?"

The answer should involve a prompt-testing schedule and some form of brand mention monitoring — running target queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI tools on a set cadence to see whether a client's products, pages, or brand name appear in the response. Perplexity and ChatGPT both surface citations directly, which makes this trackable if you're actually doing it. "We check rankings" is not an answer. Rankings and AI recommendations are generated by completely different systems with completely different criteria.

6. "How often do you run structured prompt tests to check AI visibility?"

Weekly or monthly, with documentation. That's what a real testing protocol looks like. The agency should be running a defined set of prompts — the kind your customers actually ask AI — and recording whether your brand appears, how it's described, and whether the citation links back to your site. No answer means no protocol. And if there's no protocol, there's no measurement. You're essentially paying for work with no defined way to know if it's working. That's a red flag regardless of how polished the proposal looks.

7. "What's the difference between your GEO and SEO deliverables?"

Generative Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimization are related but not the same. Research on GEO makes clear that the factors driving AI citation — direct phrasing, source authority, entity specificity — overlap with SEO but diverge in meaningful ways. A real agency can describe both and tell you what's different in their deliverables: what they write differently, which technical elements are GEO-specific, how they measure each separately. If the answer is "it's all the same thing" or "we do both," that's almost certainly an agency that does one and calls it two. Ask for a sample deliverable from each.

8. "Who specifically on your team does the AEO work and what's their background?"

Name a person. Background in structured data, content architecture, AI model behavior, or search engineering — any of those are valid. What's not valid is "our team" or "our specialists." Vague team references usually mean the work gets handed to whoever is available, or it gets templated and auto-generated. AEO is still early enough that most practitioners learned it recently — that's fine. But there should be a real person with a traceable background doing the actual work. Ask for their name. Ask what they've shipped. If the agency hesitates to tell you, that tells you something.

How We Chose This List

These questions came directly from conversations with Shopify operators who got burned by agencies selling AEO as a rebranded SEO service. Every item on this list maps to a specific way that pitch gets dressed up to look like something it isn't.

FAQ

If you want to know whether your Shopify store is visible to AI shopping tools — and what it would take to fix it — start at wrkngdigital.com/agentic-commerce-landing-page.