What Are AI SEO Services, and Who Really Does Them?

Every SEO company in the country added the letters AI to its proposal in the last year. Some of them changed what they do. Most of them changed the cover page. If you own a business and someone is selling you AI SEO services right now, you have a fair question: what am I actually paying for, and how would I know if I got it?

I run AI search and SEO work for small businesses nationwide, and owners forward me the proposals they are looking at before they sign. The gap between the companies doing the work and the companies that renamed it is wide, and it is easy to spot once you know what the work consists of. This post is the plain English version: what AI SEO services are, what should be on the invoice, what proof to ask for every month, and the tells that give a repackaged deck away.

What are AI SEO services, in plain English?

Here is the thing to hold onto. An AI tool can only recommend a business it can read, understand and trust. Every real AI SEO service is one of those three jobs, and there are six pieces of work that do them.

Content written as answers. Pages and posts that answer the exact questions your buyers ask, in plain language, with the answer near the top. That is the text an AI tool lifts when it writes a recommendation. A page that talks about your company for six paragraphs before it answers anything gives the tool nothing to quote.

FAQ and schema markup. Structured data behind the page that tells a machine who you are, what you do, where you do it and what each question on the page is asking. The tool does not have to guess, so it does not.

Open access for AI crawlers. The files on your site that tell the AI crawlers what they may read, plus the security headers that make the site look trustworthy. A surprising number of business sites block the crawlers by accident and never get named for that reason alone.

Matching business details. Your name, address and phone, the same everywhere they appear. A tool that finds three different phone numbers for you loses confidence and moves on to the competitor whose details line up.

Indexing on Google and Bing. Bing matters more than most owners think, because it feeds Microsoft Copilot and the search side of ChatGPT. A site nobody submitted to Bing is invisible to a large share of the AI answers.

Links and mentions from other sites. Real websites in your industry pointing at you, directory listings that agree with your site, and press. That is how a tool learns other sources vouch for you.

You will hear these six things sold under different names. GEO, AEO, LLM SEO and AIO all describe the same work, and our what is AIO page walks through why the acronyms multiplied. The names change. The six pieces do not.

How is AI SEO different from the SEO you already pay for?

The overlap between good SEO and good AI SEO is enormous, and some companies use that overlap to sell you the same work twice. The honest difference is three additions, not a second service.

The first addition is how the content is built. A page written for Google can bury the answer and still rank on the strength of the site around it. A page written for an AI tool needs the answer stated early and cleanly, because the tool is looking for text it can quote. Our sister agency published a practical piece on how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity that covers the mechanics, so I will not repeat them here.

The second addition is access. Google has been crawling your site for years. The AI crawlers are newer, and the files that govern them are ones most web designers never touched. Setting them up is a small job that a lot of sites have simply never had done.

The third addition is the one that matters most for you as a buyer: tracking. A Google ranking is a position, one number per keyword. An AI answer is a yes or a no, per question, per tool, and it changes from week to week. If a company cannot show you that second kind of record, it is not doing AI SEO. It is doing SEO and calling it something new.

What should be on the invoice?

I tell owners the same thing about every SEO proposal, and it applies double here: read the invoice for nouns. Verbs are free. Optimize, enhance, monitor, position, future proof. None of those describe a thing you could open on your website and look at. Nouns cost money and time: a page, a post, a fix, a link, a corrected listing, a tracked question.

Line the proposal up against the six pieces of work above. Every item should map to one of them. Content is being published, and you can be told how much and where. Markup is being added, and you can be told to which pages. The crawler files are set up, once, and you can see them. Listings are being corrected, and you can be told which ones. Links are being earned, and you can be told from where. Questions are being tracked, and you can be told how many and on which tools.

The line I would question hardest is AI optimization with nothing under it. It is the most common line I see and the least defined. Ask what it produced last month for a client. If the answer is a report rather than a published page, you have your answer.

If you want to see how this reads when it is done properly, our how it works page lays out the month, and a previous post covers what done for you SEO should include piece by piece. Compare any proposal against that list and the padding shows up fast.

What proof should an agency show you every month?

The screenshot problem deserves its own paragraph, because it is how the weakest companies in this space sell. Someone opens ChatGPT, asks a question, gets an answer that happens to name the client, and takes a picture. It looks like proof. It is not. AI answers move from session to session and day to day. One lucky answer is a coin that landed heads.

Real proof is boring. It is the same list of questions, asked of the same tools, on the same day every week, with the result recorded. Over a month you can see whether the yes count went up. That is a record, and a record is the only thing that separates a company that moved the needle from a company that got lucky once.

For comparison, here is how we do it. We build a list of the questions your buyers actually ask, from your keywords, your Search Console data and the calls your business gets. Then we run every one of them through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Meta AI once a week and record which ones name you. The number of questions tracked scales with the plan, from 60 on Starter to 250 on Dominate, and the record sits in your dashboard next to your Google rankings. Our sister site published a look at what a weekly AI visibility report should show, and it is a useful yardstick whoever you hire.

You can run a rough version of this check yourself before you talk to anyone. Ask the tools your customers’ questions in a fresh session and note who gets named. If a competitor keeps coming up instead of you, I wrote about why ChatGPT recommends your competitor and what fixing it involves.

How can you tell an agency is repackaging old SEO as AI SEO?

They cannot name the tools. Ask which AI tools they track and how often. A company doing the work says the names without pausing. A company that renamed its deck says “all the major platforms” and moves on.

They have no question list. The whole point of AI SEO is getting named for specific questions. If they cannot show you the questions, they are not tracking anything, and whatever they report next month will be a feeling.

Acronyms sold separately. A proposal with a GEO line, an AEO line and an LLM SEO line is charging you three times for one set of pages. Ask what each line delivers that the others do not. The answer is usually a longer silence than you would expect.

A promised mention. Nobody controls what ChatGPT says. A company that promises a mention is either planning to hit it with tricks that will not last or planning to redefine the promise when the date arrives. We guarantee the work. We never guarantee the result, and neither should anyone selling to you.

An audit as the product. A report that scores your AI readiness is a reasonable first step. It is not a service. If the proposal ends at the audit, nothing gets published on your site and nothing changes in the answers. Ask what happens in month two.

Most of the red flags I listed for choosing an SEO company apply here too, especially the ones about contracts and who owns the content if you leave. AI SEO does not exempt anyone from the basics.

Do you need to buy AI SEO separately from regular SEO?

I get asked this every week, and I understand why. The industry has spent a year making AI search sound like a separate discipline with its own experts and its own price. It is not. The page that ranks on Google and the page that gets quoted by Gemini are, in almost every case, the same page, built the same way, supported by the same links and the same clean listings.

That is why our AI SEO services are in every plan rather than sold as an add-on. The plans differ in how much content gets published, how many links and pages get built and how many AI questions get tracked, not in whether the AI work is included. You can see every line of every plan side by side on the plans page. Setup is waived and the first seven days are free on all of them.

Our page on being an SEO company for small business explains why we built it as one engine from the start: one report, both kinds of results. The moment AI SEO becomes a second contract, ask what the second contract publishes.

Before you sign anything

Run the free audit first. It takes about a minute, it scores AI search readiness alongside technical health, on page SEO, mobile speed and security, and it emails you the report. If your site is blocking the AI crawlers or has no structured data, you will know before anyone sells you a fix for it, and you will have a baseline to hold whoever you hire against.

Check your AI readiness free, then read the proposal in front of you one more time. Count the nouns. Ask for the question list and the tool names. Ask what month two looks like. The companies doing the work answer all of that without a pause, and the ones that renamed their deck do not.