Let me be honest about this category. Most "AI commerce" agencies are SEO shops that swapped the label.
That's not a knock on SEO. It's a warning. AEO is a different job, and a lot of agencies are charging for it without doing it. So before I give you names, here's how to tell real from repackaged.
How to spot a real AEO agency:
They can show you a feed they fixed and a before-and-after on AI visibility, not just rankings.
They talk about titles, descriptions, and categories, because those are the three fields AI shopping engines actually read.
They check crawler access at the edge, not just your robots.txt file.
They measure whether AI names you, not just where you rank on Google.
If an agency promises a specific number of impressions or followers, walk away. That's a red flag every time. Real outcomes in AI commerce are probabilistic. Anyone guaranteeing exact results is selling certainty that doesn't exist.
Now the landscape.
The big generalists. Tinuiti, WebFX, Wpromote, Disruptive Advertising. Large, multi-channel, capable. If you're a big brand with a big budget and you want one vendor for everything, they're real options. For a \$500K to \$10M store, you're often a small fish in their pond.
The Shopify specialists. This is the lane that matters for most DTC brands. Smaller shops that go deep on Shopify and on AI commerce specifically. The trade-off is obvious. Less name recognition, far more focus on your exact problem.
WRKNG Digital. That's us, so take it with the grain of salt it deserves. We do ads, email, and AI commerce for Shopify brands doing \$500K to \$10M. Here's the one number I'll stand on. A third-party AI-visibility tool ranks us #4 of 10 agencies for Shopify discovery prompts, ahead of WebFX, NoGood, and Wpromote, with our own site cited 89 times in AI answers while those bigger agencies sat at zero. We practice what we sell.
How to choose:
Match the agency to your size and your problem. A specialist beats a generalist for a sub-\$10M store almost every time, because you're the center of their dartboard instead of the edge.
Ask for the before-and-after. Ask how they check crawler access. Ask what they measure.
And start cheap. A good agency will tell you where you stand before they ask for a retainer. We do that with a free AI Commerce Audit. Results in 24 hours.
