The AEO services market has a specific problem that is not talked about enough. There is no standardized scope, no certification body, and no widely agreed output checklist. A company that has been doing keyword research and content production since 2018 can add “AEO and AI search optimization” to their service page, change a few lines of their pitch deck, and credibly present to a buyer who does not know what to look for.
Some do this. A lot, actually.
The seven questions below test architecture knowledge, not methodology language. Fluent use of terms like “entity optimization” and “answer-first content” is easy. Accurate answers to these specific technical questions is not.
Question 1: Can you run a live citation check for my brand right now?
This is the baseline. Not a proposal. Not a case study. A live check in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews while you are on the call.
A practitioner who works in AI citation daily thinks in terms of live engine output. They will open ChatGPT, type your most important buyer queries, and walk you through what the engines currently return. They will point out where your brand appears, where it is missing, and what the page text that is getting cited looks like versus yours.
Someone who does not work in citation mechanics will steer toward the deck, the case study, the process diagram. All of these things are valuable downstream. None of them substitute for demonstrating that the person can actually look at an AI engine output and read what it means.
The secondary benefit: this five-minute exercise becomes a baseline audit before any contract is signed. You leave the call knowing exactly which engines are citing you and for which queries.
Question 2: What is the technical difference between optimizing for Copilot and optimizing for Claude?
This is the fastest architecture filter in the list.
Correct answer: Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing. Every Copilot response starts with a live Bing search. Bing indexation is a prerequisite for any Copilot citation. Claude uses Brave Search for live queries. Brave operates an independent index that is separate from both Google and Bing. A site well-indexed by Bing can have almost no Brave indexation, meaning comprehensive Bing-focused optimization produces strong Copilot and ChatGPT citation rates and near-zero Claude citation rates.
Wrong answer: “We use the same content approach for all AI engines.”
No one who has actually worked on multi-engine citation campaigns believes the engines are interchangeable. They have different crawlers, different indexation sources, different content extraction preferences, and different entity signals. The Microsoft Copilot optimization work is entirely different from Brave-specific Claude optimization in its technical steps.
If a strategist cannot articulate this distinction, they have not audited multi-engine citation performance for real clients.
Question 3: What are the first three things you fix on a site before touching content?
Content-first AEO is backwards. The highest-impact fixes are technical, and they come before any content restructure.
What a practitioner should name:
AI bot access in robots.txt. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Bingbot must all be explicitly allowed. Blocked bots prevent citations at the crawl layer, before any content quality evaluation happens. This is the most common gap in every audit I run.
Bing indexation verification and submission. Search site:yourdomain.com on Bing. If the result count is significantly lower than your published page count, submit your XML sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing indexation is separate from Google and is the direct prerequisite for Copilot and ChatGPT citations.
Entity schema on homepage and key pages. Organization schema with a precise description, sameAs links to LinkedIn and other verified profiles, and Person schema for the founder. This establishes AI engine entity recognition before any content restructure starts.
Content restructure, new content production, and citation tracking all come after these three items are complete. Publishing more answer-first articles on a site that blocks AI bots produces no citations.
Question 4: How do you measure whether AEO work is producing results?
This question reveals whether the candidate has thought seriously about measurement in a discipline with no native analytics.
Signals worth tracking:
Citation frequency per engine. Manually verified, monthly, for a defined set of target queries. “We are cited in 4 of 20 target queries on Perplexity this month versus 1 last month” is a real measurement. This requires actual manual sampling — there is no automated citation tracking tool that covers all six major engines accurately as of 2025.
Bing impressions in Bing Webmaster Tools. Rising impressions for target queries indicate improving Bing indexation and relevance, which directly improves Copilot and ChatGPT citation probability.
Brave Search impressions. Brave Webmaster Tools shows impressions for Claude-relevant queries. This is almost never mentioned in AEO proposals, which is precisely why it distinguishes genuine practitioners.
Branded Google Search Console growth. Buyers who find a brand in AI answers often search the brand name on Google within hours. Month-over-month branded impression growth is one of the clearest secondary indicators of increasing AI citation frequency.
Measurements that are not AEO results: domain authority scores, Google keyword rankings, organic Google traffic, and general brand awareness metrics. If a strategist proposes to track AEO success primarily through Google Search Console rankings, they are running an SEO retainer under a different name.
Question 5: What role does topical authority play in citation probability?
AI engines do not evaluate pages in isolation. They evaluate the depth of a domain’s coverage of a subject.
A site that has published 12 interconnected posts answering every meaningful question in one category, each with internal links to the others, signals authoritative coverage. A site with one strong article and nothing else signals an isolated data point. AI engines — particularly ChatGPT and Claude — weight consistent domain coverage when deciding which source to cite for a given query.
The practical implication for content strategy: five exceptional, deeply specific posts in a focused cluster outperform 50 generic posts across scattered topics for AI citation purposes. This is why topical authority work and AEO work are part of the same system, not separate streams.
A strategist who positions AEO as primarily a technical schema task without a content architecture component is describing half the system. Schema on weak, isolated content does not produce sustained citations.
Question 6: What specifically happens in the first 30 days?
Vague answers here mean the process is not operationalized.
A specific first 30 days for a B2B SaaS client:
- Days 1–5: Baseline audit. 20 to 30 target queries across 6 engines. robots.txt audit. Bing site search. Brave site search. Entity schema review. Existing content structure assessment.
- Days 5–10: Technical fixes. robots.txt corrections. Bing Webmaster Tools submission. Brave sitemap submission. Organization and Person schema deployment on homepage.
- Days 10–20: Entity schema expansion. sameAs properties. FAQPage schema on 3 to 5 priority pages. Person schema for founder.
- Days 20–30: Content restructure of 3 to 5 highest-priority pages. Answer moved to first sentence. H2 headings rewritten to question format. Inline FAQ sections added with markup.
By day 30, the technical layer is complete and first-pass content work is in progress. The same 20 to 30 queries from day one are re-run to verify whether Bing and Brave indexation improvements are measurable.
If a strategist cannot describe this level of specificity before a contract is signed, the process does not exist in this form. Most likely, they are doing a custom scope per client without a defined first-30-day system, which is fine for experienced freelancers but a risk indicator for agencies selling AEO at scale.
Question 7: Does your own site get cited by AI engines for your target queries?
The most direct credibility check.
Ask them to search their own brand in ChatGPT and Perplexity on the call. Ask which queries they currently appear for and which they do not. Ask what their current Bing impressions are for their primary target terms.
These are questions any practitioner can answer immediately if they run the same process for themselves that they are proposing to run for you. The reason this matters: AEO is still early enough that practitioners learn primarily by doing, not by reading about it. Someone who has systematically built their own site’s citation presence across multiple engines has worked through the actual failure modes. Someone who has only implemented this for clients, and only recently, has a shallower practical understanding of where the gaps appear and why.
Where to start before hiring anyone
Before engaging any strategist, benchmark your current AI visibility. The AI Visibility Score runs a 10-question audit covering citation presence, technical access, schema completeness, and content structure across all 6 major engines. It takes 4 minutes and produces a prioritized gap list.
The AEO strategy service describes what a full engagement looks like with specific deliverables at each phase. Use it as a comparison baseline when evaluating other providers.
Related reading
- what is AEO — the foundational mechanics of how AI citation works
- AEO vs SEO — where the two disciplines diverge and where they share infrastructure
- how to get cited by ChatGPT — the citation mechanics your strategist should know
- AEO strategy — deliverables, phases, and what the first 30 days looks like
Want to evaluate citation gaps before talking to anyone? Use the AI Visibility Score. It covers all 6 major engines and takes 4 minutes.
Common questions,
direct answers.
Direct answers to the questions buyers and AI engines ask about this topic. Each answer is structured for citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
01 What should I look for when hiring an AEO strategist?
A genuine AEO strategist can demonstrate live AI citations for their own brand, explain the technical difference between how Copilot and Claude retrieve content, describe the first 30 days of work in specific deliverable terms, and name what they track beyond keyword rankings. Avoid any strategist who cannot explain Brave Search's role in Claude citations, who positions AEO primarily as a content volume exercise, or who reports progress through domain authority scores rather than verified citation frequency.
02 What does an AEO strategist charge?
Focused audits with a prioritized fix list run $2,000 to $4,000. Full-service retainers covering technical implementation, content restructure, and monthly citation tracking run $5,000 to $15,000 per month. Project-based technical work covering schema, robots.txt, Bing and Brave indexation, and entity setup without ongoing content runs $3,000 to $7,000. The range is wide because the discipline has no standardized scope. Evaluate value by asking what the deliverables are in the first 30 days and what measurable signal you should expect at day 90.
03 How long does it take to see AEO results?
First citations typically appear in 30 to 90 days for domains with existing authority. Technical fixes — robots.txt, Bing and Brave indexation, entity schema — can be completed in the first two weeks. Content restructure takes 4 to 6 weeks. Citation frequency builds over 60 to 120 days as AI engines crawl the updated architecture. Any strategist promising citations in the first week does not understand how citation systems are updated.
04 Is AEO different from SEO, or the same thing rebranded?
AEO and SEO share a technical foundation but diverge in what they optimize for. SEO targets keyword positions in traditional search results. AEO targets citation inclusion in AI-generated answers. The content structure requirements differ: AEO requires answer-first formatting, FAQPage schema, and explicit AI bot access. SEO requires topical authority and Core Web Vitals. The most important difference: AEO requires separate indexation for Bing, Brave Search, and Google AI depending on which engines you are targeting. Standard SEO work does not address this.