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AI search optimization is real work, but whether it justifies retaining a separate agency is a different question.
If your business has a website, odds are an AI SEO agency has pitched you in the past year. These agencies claim search is being replaced by AI answers, your competitors are already turning up in ChatGPT and keeping pace now requires a separate discipline than traditional SEO. They’re selling “answer engine optimization”, or AEO, and some businesses are charging up to thousands per month for it.
The trends they’re describing are real, but whether it justifies the price tag and a separate agency is a different question. In May 2026, Google published its own guidance on optimizing for AI search, and its position is unusually blunt for a company that rarely commits to specifics. We read that documentation alongside the available research on what AI search is actually doing to website traffic, and the picture is clearer than the marketing suggests.
AEO is sometimes called by other names, including generative engine optimization (GEO), large language model optimization (LLMO) and “AI SEO”. These terms are used more or less interchangeably, and no standard definition separates them.
The services that AI SEO agencies offer generally include:
Some vendors bundle traditional technical audits in as well. Most of this list will look familiar to anyone who has run a small business SEO strategy, which also means your current SEO efforts may already be doing the bulk of what is needed without requiring additional spend.
Google Search Central now publishes a dedicated guide to optimizing for generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Its central claim is that these features are rooted in Google’s existing Search ranking and quality systems, which means standard SEO best practices still apply. On AEO and GEO specifically, Google states that optimizing for generative AI search is “still SEO”, and it points anyone weighing third-party AEO or GEO services toward its separate guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice.
The guide also includes a mythbusting section listing tactics site owners can disregard for Google Search:
Google is also direct about measurement claims, cautioning site owners to be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim access to internal Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to Google’s ranking or AI systems, and none can guarantee performance.
However, Google only speaks for Google. AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini’s grounded answers run on Google’s index, so the “still SEO” claim is well supported there. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, for example, do not use Google’s index, and none have published equivalent optimization guidance. The fundamentals that make a page retrievable appear to carry over, but anyone telling you they have decoded how a specific model picks its sources is overstating what is publicly known.
Foundational SEO principles remain important to AI search, and the rest is speculative. Consider the following to ensure a positive user experience that also positions you well when it comes to SEO and AEO, regardless of what the hype suggests:
The through line is that content built to be genuinely useful and easy to skim tends to be content that machines parse well too. Avoid chopping a page into terse fragments or padding it with markup in the hope of pleasing a model at the cost of the person actually reading it. Google’s advice on creating helpful, people-first content has not changed. Short, direct answers are good when they serve the reader.
None of this is a departure from the longstanding principles of a sound digital marketing strategy. Stick to these best practices and you’re likely to see results in a positive direction.
While there is considerable overlap, there is a difference between conventional SEO and AI search visibility. Here are a few new things to keep in mind as the search landscape evolves.
The major AI companies run several crawlers with separate purposes and separate robots.txt controls. OpenAI documents GPTBot for model training, OAI-SearchBot for surfacing sites in ChatGPT’s search features and ChatGPT-User for pages fetched when someone asks a question.
You can control these crawlers independently. For example, you could disallow GPTBot to keep your content out of training while still allowing OAI-SearchBot so you remain eligible to appear in answers. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and recommends allowing it. Anthropic documents a parallel three-bot structure for Claude and warns that disabling its search crawler may reduce a site’s visibility. Perplexity operates a two-crawler version.
This matters because a great many site owners added blanket AI crawler blocks to opt out of model training. Unfortunately, in doing so, these sites also blocked the search crawlers that determine whether they can be cited at all. If that describes your site, you are unlikely to be cited in AI answers. Fixing it requires a robots.txt edit, not an AI SEO agency retainer.
ChatGPT’s search layer has drawn on Bing’s index, which makes Bing Webmaster Tools a free and relevant check that Google Search Console will not give you. Treat the specifics as directional rather than settled. OpenAI has been building out its own retrieval infrastructure, and reporting suggests ChatGPT now stitches together its own crawler alongside multiple outside providers. Getting indexed in multiple places, not just Google, increases your odds of being picked up in AI citations.
Google Search Console reports on Google’s AI surfaces only, so seeing whether ChatGPT or Perplexity names your business requires third-party tooling. That category has matured quickly, and entry-level plans generally run from roughly $30 to a few hundred dollars a month. We compare the options in our roundup of the best AI visibility platforms.
If traffic is your goal, it’s unclear whether AI search will actually help you meet it. The research is limited, but seems to suggest that AI search significantly reduces the number of users who click through to a website at all.
A field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon University used a custom Chrome extension to randomly assign 1,065 U.S. participants to standard Google Search or a version with AI Overviews removed. When an AI Overview appeared, the researchers found outbound organic clicks fell by 39.8 percent and zero-click searches rose by 34.5 percent, with no effect on sponsored clicks or overall search frequency.
Observational research points the same direction. Pew Research Center analyzed 68,879 Google searches from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found users clicked a traditional result in 8 percent of searches that produced an AI summary, against 15 percent of those that did not. Clicks on links inside the summaries were rarer still, at 1 percent of visits.
Published estimates of how much traffic AI assistants actually send span roughly twentyfold. Cloudflare network data put every AI chatbot combined at a fraction of a percent of search referrals in May 2026. Marketing platform benchmarks have put AI referrals at around 1 percent of total website traffic. At least one agency panel reports north of 6 percent of sessions. Those figures measure different populations with different methods, and most of them are published by companies that sell AI search services or software.
The case against a dedicated AI SEO retainer is strong for most small businesses, but it is not universal. Google itself now lists optimizing for generative AI among the services SEO professionals legitimately provide. Our position is not that the work is fake, but that a competent provider should already be absorbing it.
A few circumstances may justify hiring an AI SEO specialist, though. Consider doing so when:
If your current agency cannot answer basic questions about AI search and shows no interest in learning, replace your agency rather than adding a second one. Questions about whether your current agency is earning its fee are worth raising directly. Our overview of what a digital marketing expert should deliver can help you determine if they’re up to standards.
Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO predates the AI search boom but transfers almost intact. Treat the following as reasons to slow down.
Google’s guidance also supplies the questions worth asking any SEO:
For AI search specifically, Google suggests asking whether the provider’s advice aligns with its official generative AI guidance and whether they cite that documentation as support. Check references with past clients, too.
You can establish your own baseline at no cost, which is worth doing before a vendor establishes one for you.
Do that work first and a proposal becomes much easier to read. You will know whether you have a visibility problem, a crawler problem or a content problem, and you will be able to tell whether what you are being sold addresses any of them. If it turns out you need help, that same baseline belongs in your small business marketing plan so the spending has something to be measured against.
For Google’s AI surfaces, Google has told us the work is ordinary SEO, and we have no reason to doubt it. For the other assistants, the fundamentals appear to transfer and nobody can credibly claim more than that yet. We recommend doing the basics well and keeping your commitments small and reversible—avoid committing a large budget to an AI SEO agency that hasn’t had time to prove their worth yet.
