How to Choose an AEO Agency Without Paying for Fog

Start With Whether They Understand Search at All

Optimizing for AI answers is not a separate discipline bolted onto the side of search. It rests on the same foundations: a site that can be crawled, indexed and shown, with content worth surfacing. An agency that cannot explain ordinary search fundamentals is not an AEO specialist. It is a company that learned two new letters.

The label is the least reliable signal. Some agencies call this AEO, some call it GEO, some call it AI visibility. The word tells you nothing. What tells you something is whether they can show a brand getting cited, and explain how they got it there.

The Evidence Problem You Have to Solve

Here is the trap that catches most buyers. Ask your own name in ChatGPT and it may reassure you, because your account remembers your domain and your past questions. The answer you see is not the answer your buyer sees. Run the same prompt in a clean, logged-out session and the list often changes completely.

So the first question for any agency is how it measures. AI answers shift with almost every query. An honest agency reports visibility as how often a brand appears across many runs of a prompt, not a triumphant screenshot of one lucky answer. If the reporting is a single screenshot, walk.

The Four Kinds of Provider

Peppermint sits in the last group, and the fit is specific. Its AEO work comes from the design side: it builds semantic structure, entity clarity and content shaped to be quoted into a site from the first wireframe, or retrofits it into an existing one, under a framework it calls the Carcass Method. It is a natural fit for a startup that also needs a new or rebuilt website, and a less obvious one for a company that only wants off-site outreach. That honesty about fit is itself worth looking for.

What to Ask on the Call

• Show me a brand you got cited, the prompts, the engines and the dates.
• How many times do you run each prompt, and do you test in a clean session?
• What do you actually build: structure, content, authority, or just markup?
• Who writes the content, and what makes it worth citing?
• Can I speak to a client?

Red Flags Worth Walking Away From

A guarantee of a citation or a top answer is the loudest one. No one controls an AI answer that changes every time you ask it. A secret method no one will explain is another. So is an audit that turns out to be a schema checklist, since structured data helps a machine read a page but does not, on its own, win the answer. And any pressure to buy mentions across the web should end the conversation, because manufactured mentions are fragile and easy to detect.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an AEO agency do? It works to get your brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers, through site structure, original content, and earned mentions across the web.

Is AEO just SEO with a new name? It shares SEO's foundations and adds emphasis on entity clarity, structured answers and citation-readiness. An agency with no search grounding is not a specialist.

What if I also need a new website? A design-led studio like Peppermint Global that builds AEO in from the first wireframe fits that case better than an off-site-only agency.

The Short Version

Choose an agency that understands search, measures visibility across many runs in a clean session, and can show a real brand cited in a real answer. Be suspicious of anyone who promises a fixed spot in a system that gives a different answer every time. And if you need the website built as well as found, a studio that treats AEO as part of the design, like Peppermint, solves both at once.