Before you ever get on a call with an agency, you can learn most of what you need to know just by looking at how they present themselves. This is about the homework you do before the sales conversation starts, the filtering that narrows a long list down to a few worth actually talking to. What to ask once you're on the phone with them is a separate question, covered elsewhere on this site.
Look at their own site before you trust anything they say about yours
An agency that claims expertise in AI-era search should show some evidence of applying that expertise to itself. Check whether their own content shows up in AI tools when you ask a relevant question. Try typing a question close to their core service into ChatGPT or Perplexity and see if their name or content comes up. It's not a perfect test, since not every legitimate agency will show up for every query, but an agency that pitches you on getting cited in AI answers and has no visible presence in AI answers themselves is worth a second look.
Read a few of their blog posts with a critical eye. Is there a real point of view, specific examples, actual numbers, or is it the same generic framework you could find on fifty other agency sites with the company name swapped out? Agencies that are good at the work they sell tend to write about it with some actual texture: a mistake they've seen clients make, a genuine disagreement with a popular tactic, a specific example of something that didn't work before it worked. Agencies that are newer to the space, or treating "AI SEO" as a label slapped onto an existing service list, tend to write in the same safe, hedge-everything register you see everywhere.
How to vet their claims, not just read them
Case studies are the most useful artifact an agency can show you, and also the easiest to present misleadingly. Ask for context, not just the headline number. A "300% increase in organic traffic" means very little without knowing the starting baseline; going from 10 visits a month to 40 is a 300% increase and also basically nothing. Ask what the client's situation was before the engagement, what specifically changed, and over what time period.
Ask if you can speak to a past or current client directly, not just read a quote the agency selected and approved. Plenty of legitimate agencies will arrange this for a serious prospect. If an agency has worked with dozens of clients and can't produce a single one willing to have a short call with you, that's a meaningful gap, not a privacy concern, since you're only asking for a conversation, not contact information.
Be skeptical of any number presented with suspicious precision and no source. A specific-sounding year-over-year traffic jump or a precise adoption percentage circulating on agency blogs rarely traces back to a named, checkable source. If a stat is real and sourced, the agency can point you to where it came from in under a minute. If they can't, or the explanation is vague, treat the number as decoration rather than fact.
Years of experience and awards are commonly used credentials that are worth scrutinizing specifically for AI search. Dedicated optimization for AI-generated answers, as a distinct discipline, is genuinely new. An agency claiming extensive specific experience in AI search optimization specifically (not general SEO, which can be a decade or more old and entirely legitimate) should be able to describe what they were actually doing with AI search before it became a popular thing to advertise. Vague claims about tenure or unverifiable award lists aren't evidence of anything in particular; ask what the award was for, who issued it, and whether it's checkable, rather than taking a badge on a webpage at face value.
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The clearest signal is whether the agency can explain, unprompted and in specific terms, how AI tools select and cite sources, and what that means practically for how content should be structured. This is explainable in plain language by anyone who's actually done the work. If an agency's answer is a string of buzzwords with no actual mechanism behind it, that's a tell.
Look at how they talk about traditional SEO within their AI SEO pitch. Agencies that genuinely understand the space treat AI optimization as additive to solid fundamentals, not as a replacement for them, because in practice it is additive. An agency that implies traditional SEO is now obsolete, or that frames everything as a wholesale pivot away from what came before, is usually selling novelty rather than describing reality.
Ask what tools or methods they use to track AI citation and visibility specifically. The honest answer right now involves some mix of manual checking, AI referral traffic analysis, and newer, still maturing tracking platforms, because the tooling for this space genuinely hasn't matured to the point of Google Analytics-grade reliability yet. An agency that claims a flawless, fully automated way to measure AI citation across every model is overselling what currently exists in the market. An agency that's upfront about the limits of current measurement, while still showing you a reasonable method, is being straight with you, and that honesty is itself a useful signal about how they'll talk to you later when something doesn't work as planned.
Finally, pay attention to whether their pitch is actually about your business or a templated version of AI SEO services with your company name inserted. A few minutes into a real conversation, an agency that's done its homework will reference something specific about your industry, your competitors, or your existing content. One that hasn't will stay generic no matter how long you talk.
None of this guarantees you'll pick the right agency. But it filters out most of the agencies that would have wasted your time and your budget, before you ever have to sit through a sales call to find out.
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