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AEO Agency: How to Choose One (And Why And Zeros)

Search is splitting in two. Some of your traffic still comes from ten blue links. A growing share comes from an AI model reading the web, synthesizing an answer, and citing three or four sources by name, or none at all. If your brand isn't one of the sources, you don't just rank lower. You disappear from the answer entirely.

An AEO agency (Answer Engine Optimization agency) exists to fix that. Not by chasing rankings, but by engineering how your brand gets found, understood, and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the other answer engines buyers now use to make decisions before they ever land on your site.

This page covers what an AEO agency actually does, how to evaluate one, who needs this now versus later, and why And Zeros runs this practice differently: starting with the fact that we get ourselves cited in the same answer engines we optimize for our clients.

What an AEO agency actually does

Most agencies that say "AEO" are really doing traditional SEO with new vocabulary. A real AEO agency operates differently across four areas:

Answer-structure content engineering

01
AI answer engines pull from content that is structured to be extractable (clear claims, defined terms, direct answers to specific questions, scannable structure). An AEO agency rebuilds or writes content so it's easy for a model to lift and cite, not just easy for a human to skim.

Entity and authority signals

02
Answer engines decide who to cite based on how consistently and credibly a brand shows up across the web: structured data, third-party mentions, review sites, Wikipedia and Wikidata presence, author bios, and consistent naming. This is closer to digital PR and technical markup than it is to keyword targeting.

Technical accessibility for crawlers and retrieval systems

03
Schema markup (Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article), clean crawlability, llms.txt where relevant, and page architecture that retrieval systems can parse without ambiguity.

Citation tracking and iteration

04
You can't manage what you don't measure. An AEO agency monitors actual prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews to see whether your brand is being cited, how it's being described, and where competitors are winning the citation instead, then adjusts the content and technical work based on that evidence, not guesswork.

The output isn't a ranking report. It's your brand name, your product, or your founder showing up inside an AI-generated answer, with a link or citation back to you.

How to choose an AEO agency

AEO is new enough that positioning outpaces substance. Use this checklist when evaluating agencies.

Do they show their own citations?

01
If an agency can't show you where their own brand (or a client's brand) gets cited in AI answers today, be skeptical of their ability to do it for you.

Do they separate AEO from SEO in their process, not just their pitch deck?

02
Ask what specifically changes in the content brief, the schema, and the QA process for an AEO-focused page versus a standard SEO page. Vague answers mean it's rebranded SEO.

Can they explain how citation tracking works across engines?

03
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews surface sources differently. An agency should be able to describe how they monitor prompts and citations across each, not just claim they do it.

Do they understand your entity footprint, not just your website?

04
AEO depends heavily on signals outside your own site: mentions, structured data, third-party validation. An agency that only touches your CMS is doing half the job.

What's the reporting cadence and what does a report actually contain?

05
You want citation share and answer visibility over time, not just impressions and clicks.

Do they write for humans first?

06
Content engineered purely for extraction reads like a spec sheet. The best AEO content is genuinely useful to a person and structured well enough that a model can lift it cleanly, in that order.

Is pricing tied to deliverables you can verify?

07
Retainers should map to specific content, technical, and measurement work, not a vague "AI visibility" line item.

If an agency can't answer most of this concretely in a first call, that's your answer.

Who this is for

AEO work makes the most sense for B2B service businesses, SaaS companies, and considered-purchase brands where buyers research before they talk to sales, the exact behavior that's shifting fastest to AI answer engines. It matters most if your category is one where people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "who's the best agency/tool/provider for X" before they open a search engine at all.

It matters less, at least right now, for businesses that live on local intent, transactional e-commerce, or paid acquisition, those buyer journeys haven't moved to answer engines the same way. If your growth depends on being the trusted answer to a research question, AEO is no longer optional. If it depends on being the cheapest option in a map pack, start with local SEO instead.

Why And Zeros

And Zeros is based in Santa Fe, NM, founded by Doug Saltzman, and built specifically around AEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), not SEO with an AI label stapled on. A few things separate how we work:

We get cited, not just our clients

01
Ask an answer engine about AEO agencies and And Zeros shows up in that conversation. We don't ask clients to trust a methodology we haven't proven on ourselves.

We treat citation tracking as the core deliverable

02
Every engagement is measured against actual appearances in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overview answers for the prompts that matter to your business, not proxy metrics.

We build the entity foundation, not just the content

03
Schema, structured data, and off-site authority signals are part of the engagement from day one, because content alone rarely earns citations without them.

Small, senior team

04
No account layers between you and the people doing the work. Doug and the And Zeros team run strategy and execution together.
Book an AEO teardown
See how And Zeros gets cited

Frequently Asked Questions

01What does an AEO agency actually deliver?

Content structured for extraction and citation, technical and schema work that makes your entity legible to answer engines, and ongoing tracking of whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers for target prompts, with iteration based on what the data shows.

02Is AEO different from SEO?

Yes, though they overlap. SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links a person clicks through. AEO optimizes for being cited or summarized directly inside an AI-generated answer, which depends more on entity authority, structured data, and content clarity than on keyword ranking alone.

03How is AEO success measured?

Primarily through citation tracking. We run representative prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to see whether and how your brand is mentioned, then track that share of citation over time against competitors and use the findings to guide ongoing content and technical work.

04How long does AEO take to show results?

It varies by category and by how much entity authority a brand already has. Foundational technical and schema work can go live quickly; earning consistent citations typically takes sustained content and authority work over months, similar to how organic SEO compounds over time.

05Do I need both an SEO agency and an AEO agency?

Not necessarily two separate vendors, but you do need both disciplines covered. Many brands consolidate this with one agency that runs SEO and AEO together, since technical foundations and content overlap; others add AEO as a parallel workstream to an existing SEO program.

06What's the difference between an AEO agency and a GEO agency?

The terms are largely used interchangeably in the market, both describe optimizing for visibility inside AI-generated answers. Some practitioners use GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) as the broader umbrella term and AEO for the answer-specific tactics within it, but there's no fixed industry standard yet.