How to choose an AEO agency and compare proposals

Choose an AEO agency by the work it can explain and verify. A useful proposal names the buyer questions, the pages to improve, the evidence needed and the measures that will tell you whether the work helped.

Start by asking for one example finding. It should identify a real URL, describe the issue, show supporting evidence and explain the proposed fix. That small sample often tells you more than a large presentation about the future of search.

This checklist is for comparing suppliers, including Blue Canvas. It is not a league table or a claim that one agency is best for every business.

Give every supplier the same brief

Describe your main service, the customer you want, the area you actually serve and a typical buying decision. Include the pages customers already use, common sales questions and any website constraints. State who can approve content and publish changes.

Then ask each supplier to propose the first useful piece of work within the same budget range. If one quotes for an audit and another for a full rebuild, separate those scopes before comparing prices. Our AEO, SEO and GEO comparison helps translate the labels into deliverables.

Use this practical scorecard

Copy the table into your comparison document. Mark each row clear, needs an answer or unacceptable, with a link to the relevant proposal section. This is a buying worksheet, not a validated quality score. A serious access or ownership concern should not disappear inside a high numerical total.

Ask them to explain one result properly

If an agency shows a citation chart, ask which questions and platforms it covers, how often checks ran, and whether the sample changed. Ask whether the chart represents linked sources, brand mentions or an internal score. Those measures are not interchangeable.

For a case study, ask what changed, when it changed and what was measured. A website build is evidence of a build. A saved AI response can evidence a mention at that moment. A paid invoice can evidence business won. Connecting those into a causal claim needs more than putting them on adjacent slides.

Good suppliers should be comfortable showing an unsuccessful observation or an unavailable metric. The visibility tracking template gives you a practical reference for what a repeatable record looks like.

Check who does the work after the audit

Ask who writes, reviews, builds and publishes. If your existing developer must make every change, find out what specifications they will receive and allow for that cost. If the supplier publishes directly, agree which pages it may change and how you will review factual claims.

You should know how the original content is preserved, how changes are checked on mobile, and who fixes a broken link or form. Ask whether changes are verified on the public website rather than only inside the editor. A saved draft and a working published page are different delivery states.

Retain control of your domain, website and analytics accounts. Use named access where possible and agree how access ends. An exportable report is more useful than a dashboard that becomes unreadable when you stop paying.

Recognise claims that need challenging

Question any guaranteed recommendation or promise to force an AI service to choose you. Also challenge a package whose main deliverable is large volumes of near-identical articles, synthetic reviews or unexplained “authority” links.

Google's spam policies cover manipulative links, doorway pages and scaled content abuse. Its structured data rules require accurate, relevant markup and do not guarantee a search appearance. Ask a supplier to show the current platform guidance behind a technical claim, especially when selling a supposed shortcut.

Useful FAQs, factual descriptions and original examples can help customers. They should be produced because they answer something worthwhile, not because a supplier claims every answer must have a magic length.

Make the first engagement reviewable

A sensible first scope should end with something you can inspect: an audit and prioritised plan, a defined set of improved pages, or a documented measurement baseline. Agree what counts as completion and how you decide whether to continue.

Check the AEO cost worksheet for questions about fees and exclusions. At Blue Canvas, our AEO service begins with a bounded visibility audit or a separately scoped implementation. You can compare that scope using the same scorecard above. We explain what we will deliver and report what we observe; the search and AI providers decide what they show.