By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | November 2, 2026
The thing that separates a real B2B AEO agency from an SEO shop with a new label is simple: a real one can show you whether AI assistants actually name your brand in their answers, and an SEO shop can only show you rankings. Ask for the first. If they hand you the second, you have your answer.
I spent $5M of my own money on ads and built a company to $10M a year before I ever ran an agency. I've sat on both sides of this table. So here are the seven questions I'd ask before signing anything.
1. How do you measure whether AI assistants actually cite us?
This is the whole game, so ask it first. A good answer sounds like: "We run your buyer's real questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews on a schedule, and we track mention rate and citation rate over time." The red flag is any answer that drifts back to keyword rankings and organic traffic, because that means they're measuring the old internet.
2. Which AI platforms do you optimize for, and how are they different?
Each assistant pulls its answers differently, and a real agency knows that. Perplexity leans hard on live citations, ChatGPT blends its training with web results, and Google's AI Overviews sit on top of its index. A good answer names these differences out loud. The red flag is "we optimize for AI" as if it's one box.
3. What do you change on the page, not just in the keyword plan?
AEO happens in the content, not the spreadsheet. A good answer is specific: direct answers in the first two sentences, clear question-based headings, and facts stated plainly enough for a machine to quote. The red flag is a deck full of keyword clusters and nothing about how the actual page reads.
4. How do you handle structured data and schema for our product?
AI assistants trust pages they can parse, and schema markup is how you hand them clean facts. A good answer covers things like Organization, Product, and FAQ schema, and how they'd validate it with Schema.org's validator. The red flag is a blank stare, because schema is table stakes for getting cited.
5. What does a monthly report look like, and what do you promise?
Ask to see a real report before you sign. A good one shows which prompts you're now cited on, which competitors show up next to you, and what's planned next. The red flag is a guarantee of a specific position or a specific number of citations, because nobody controls what a model says. We tell clients the same thing: we don't promise specific results, we promise exactly what our team will do.
6. Do you understand our buying committee and sales cycle?
B2B isn't one shopper clicking buy. It's a committee of five to seven people asking an AI different questions at different stages, and Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey backs that up. A good answer maps content to those roles and stages. The red flag is a plan built for a single buyer typing one query.
7. Can you show a live example where you moved the needle?
Talk is cheap, so ask for proof you can see today. A good answer pulls up a live AI assistant, types a real buyer question, and shows their client's brand named in the answer. The red flag is case studies made only of traffic charts, because traffic going up doesn't mean a single buyer heard your name in an answer.
How We Chose These Questions
These came from actual vetting calls with B2B marketing leaders and from watching which agencies could back their claims with a live screen versus a slide. The test for every question is the same: does the answer prove they understand the AI answer layer, or are they selling you 2018 SEO in a new jacket.
FAQ
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO gets your page to rank in a list of blue links. AEO gets your brand named inside the answer an AI assistant writes. The second one is what buyers see first now, so the tactics differ even when the content looks similar.
How do you measure AEO results for B2B?
You track whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews cite your brand for the questions your buyers ask. Run the same prompts on a schedule and watch mention rate and citation rate move over weeks.
How long does AEO take to work for B2B?
Expect the first citation gains in 60 to 90 days once content and schema are fixed. B2B sales cycles are long, so the real test is pipeline influence over two or three quarters.
Can my current SEO agency just do AEO too?
Maybe. But only if they can show you how they measure AI citations and what they change on the page to earn them. If they just renamed the SEO package, you're paying for old work with a new label.
If you want to see what these answers look like when an agency can actually back them up, see how WRKNG Digital approaches AI search and agentic commerce here.
