How to Choose an AI SEO or GEO Agency in the UK (2026)

The Short Answer

Choose an AI SEO or GEO agency by the work it will deliver and the evidence it will report. Ask for a baseline of your current search visibility, a prioritised plan for specific pages, a clear explanation of crawler access, and a way to connect improvements to enquiries. A promise that ChatGPT will recommend you or Google will rank every page is not a useful acceptance criterion. Neither the agency nor your developer controls those results.

For many UK businesses, the first job is still ordinary website improvement: publish the right service information, make pages accessible to crawlers, explain what you actually deliver, and give buyers a clear next step. Our AI SEO and GEO service covers that technical and content work. This guide helps you decide what to commission and how to review a proposal before signing.

What SEO, AI SEO and GEO Mean

SEO usually means improving visibility in search results. AI SEO and generative engine optimisation, or GEO, are commonly used for work intended to improve visibility in answers from search-enabled assistants. Agency definitions vary, so ask which products and outcomes the proposal actually covers. Google Search, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and other assistants are different surfaces; a report about one is not proof of performance across all of them.

Google Search Central says its generative search features rely on its core Search ranking and quality systems. Its official optimisation guide explains that established SEO practices remain relevant and that there is no special schema required for these features. That supports doing useful site work first. It does not establish that adding an FAQ, a new file or a certain keyword will earn a citation.

For the wider visibility workflow, read How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT: A 12-Step Plan for UK Businesses (2026). Use this agency checklist alongside that guide, with your own sector and buyer questions replacing generic examples.

Compare the Three Ways to Buy the Work

The label alone does not establish competence. A conventional agency may do careful assistant monitoring, and a specialist may offer little beyond a renamed content package. Review the actual deliverables. If you also need a new website or integration, establish whether that development is included; Bespoke Software Development in the UK: What Decides the Cost, When Off-the-Shelf Wins, and What to Put in the Contract explains the ownership and handover questions for custom work.

Nine Questions for an Agency Proposal

1. Which pages and buyer questions are in scope? A useful proposal names services, sectors and priorities rather than promising to optimise everything equally.
2. What is our baseline? Request current impressions, clicks, index status and enquiry measurement where available. Missing data should be named rather than filled with estimates.
3. Which assistants will you observe? Agree the products, prompts, location context and test dates. A single favourable answer is not a trend.
4. Which fixes will actually be implemented? Separate a recommendations document from publishing, development and deployment. Name the owner of each action.
5. What access do you need? Decide who grants website, Search Console and analytics access, at what permission level, and who removes it when work ends.
6. What evidence will you add? Real project examples and approved client material are different from generic service copy. Ask who verifies claims before publication.
7. How will you measure commercial value? Define an enquiry or booking and check that the relevant form or contact route works. Impressions alone do not demonstrate revenue.
8. What happens if results do not move? A useful review explains what was changed, what was observed and what should be investigated next without guaranteeing a date.
9. Who owns the outputs? Confirm access to content, source code, accounts, reports and handover information before work starts.

Check Crawler Claims Against the Product

An agency should be able to explain the purpose of a crawler before recommending that you allow or block it. OpenAI’s crawler documentation distinguishes OAI-SearchBot, used for ChatGPT search discovery, from GPTBot, used for content that may support model training. Their controls are independent. Allowing a search crawler does not guarantee a citation, and a training setting should not be presented as a paid visibility trick.

Ask the agency to check both the site’s robots instructions and whether its hosting or security layer actually permits the intended requests. A permissive robots file does not prove that a page is reachable, rendered correctly or indexed. The answer should identify the relevant platform documentation and a specific observation from your own site. Keep security decisions with the person who owns the hosting configuration rather than broadly disabling protection to satisfy an audit tool.

A Brief That Produces Reviewable Work

Give an agency a small, explicit brief. For example, a UK firm might prioritise one service, one industry page and the guide buyers read before contacting it. The brief can ask the team to check publication, titles, canonical URLs, internal links, page content and the enquiry route for those pages. Specify the action the buyer should take and the information they need before taking it.

That is especially useful in regulated sectors. A firm offering professional services needs approved boundaries and accurate descriptions; more elaborate promotional copy cannot substitute for them. Our AI for Law Firms page illustrates how intake, confidentiality and human review belong in the service explanation. For your own industry, name the person who approves the technical or regulatory claims and define what the website must not promise.

Attach a deliverable list to the brief: the pages to change, the issues to resolve, the evidence to include, the deployment responsibility and the acceptance checks. Ask for a written scope and a fixed quote after the work has been assessed. Do not assume that a report includes implementation, that an integration includes paid vendor access, or that a monitoring retainer includes new content every month.

What a Useful Report Looks Like

A good report separates work completed from outcomes observed. “Published a guide and added relevant links” is a completed action. “The guide appeared in an assistant answer during this test” is an observation. “The guide will now generate leads” is a prediction. Keeping those separate makes it possible to review progress without confusing activity with commercial success.

For conventional search, compare the same pages, date ranges and query groups. Record indexing status separately from rankings: a page can be accessible but not indexed, or indexed without earning useful impressions. For assistant checks, preserve the prompt, test date, product and cited pages. Answers can vary between runs, so avoid turning one screenshot into a percentage improvement without a defined method.

Enquiry reporting needs the same care. Check that the form delivers a message and that analytics counts success after delivery, rather than counting every button press. Track alternative contact routes separately when possible. A discovery-call click may be useful evidence of interest, but it is not automatically a completed meeting or a sale.

Claims, Guarantees and Real Proof

ASA and CAP guidance on misleading advertising says objective advertising claims require supporting evidence. When reviewing a proposal, ask what supports claimed results and whether those results are from comparable work with permission to be shown. Avoid publishing invented testimonials, client logos or statistics to make a new site appear established.

An agency can commit to defined work, such as checking pages, publishing approved changes and supplying a report. It cannot control every decision a search platform makes. Read the exact wording of a guarantee, including any conditions and what remedy it offers, rather than treating a confident sales statement as evidence that rankings or citations are assured.

If you have no publishable client examples yet, begin with accurate service explanations and useful original guidance. Prepare anonymised process examples only when they are clearly labelled and do not pretend to be client results. Seek approval for real project material before naming a client or disclosing what was built for them.

Make the Decision

Choose the team whose proposal makes the work and its limits understandable. Prioritise a clear brief, relevant implementation experience, honest reporting and control of your accounts. If the proposal is vague, ask for the page list, acceptance checks and reporting method before committing.

Book a free discovery call at our contact page to discuss your website, priority services and current enquiry route. Bring any existing Search Console reports and the pages you want to improve. We can agree the next scope from that discussion; audit work is scoped separately, and search outcomes remain subject to platform decisions.