Hiring an AI SEO agency: what buyers report, and a one-person alternative

The reasons owners start looking for an AI SEO agency are usually the same: ChatGPT recommends a competitor, a board member asks what the company is doing about AI search, or a prospect arrives quoting a wrong price an AI tool gave them. The market has responded with a wave of agencies selling AI SEO, GEO, AEO and LLM SEO. This page sets out what buyers who hired them report, what good work looks like, and how M/AFZAL approaches it differently.

What do people who hired an AI SEO agency say?

Reddit's SEO, marketing and small business forums are full of first-hand accounts, and they are more candid than any case study. The ones that recur:

• A premium for the same work. One business asked whether $8,000 a month was fair when about $3,000 of it was an "AI SEO" add-on reported mostly through screenshots, and nobody could show a single citation that had moved. The replies were close to unanimous that it was not.
• Promises that did not land. A local business owner hired an answer engine optimization agency that promised voice search, featured snippets and Alexa rankings within 90 days. Six months on there was no measurable lift, featured snippets had fallen, and the agency blamed algorithm changes.
• Nothing behind the label. A consultant audited a client who had been billed for SEO, Google Maps and AI SEO for three years and found no new links, no posts and no site work: only an automated monthly report.
• No way to tell agencies apart. A marketer at an enterprise software company interviewed five GEO agencies, from a large consultancy to small firms. All promised reporting, strategy, content and case studies, and the team could not tell them apart.
• Tactics that backfire. A founder paid $2,800 to an "AI SEO expert" promising Reddit visibility and, three months later, appeared nowhere. Threads about hiring Reddit agencies for AI visibility warn that most of them post disguised promotion, which gets accounts banned.

The good accounts exist too. Buyers valued agencies that ran an audit first and were upfront about what was realistic in 60 to 90 days, and practitioners who tracked results carefully reported gains where the client already had a sound search foundation.

The difference between the good and bad accounts is almost always measurement: whether anyone could show the real answers before and after.

What does good AI SEO work look like?

A practitioner asked to start this work for an engineering manufacturer was given a 90-day plan in r/SEO that sums up the honest version well:

1. Collect around 30 real questions from the sales team, in the words buyers use.
2. Put them to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode, and log who is named and which pages are cited.
3. Rewrite specification sheets and comparison pages so they answer first, with numbers.
4. Get onto the directories and distributor pages the answers draw on.

Experienced practitioners in the same discussions said most of this, often put at around 80%, is the same work as good SEO. The LLM SEO guide explains why, and which tactics people found made no difference.

Which red flags should you watch for?

• Screenshots as reporting. One agency owner called screenshot-only reporting outright faking it. A screenshot shows one answer on one day.
• Branded questions only. Ask ChatGPT about your business by name and it will nearly always mention you. Only questions about your category, without your name, show whether you are winning new buyers.
• Guarantees and short deadlines. "Results in 30 days" and "guaranteed recommendations" appear in nearly every failure story. Nobody controls what an AI tool says.
• A score you cannot check. Proprietary visibility scores, sometimes explained only under a non-disclosure agreement, cannot tell you what to fix.
• Volume content. Dozens of AI-written articles a month risk breaching Google's spam policies on scaled content.
• Glowing comments that read alike. Several Reddit threads about choosing an agency contain near-identical praise for the same firm from different accounts. Treat anonymous testimonials with care.

The guide to what AI search optimization services should include turns these into questions to ask before you sign.

What do AI SEO agencies charge?

Pricing is all over the place, and the forums show why. Some established agencies fold AI visibility into their SEO retainer at no extra cost and tell clients it is the same work. Others sell it as a separate line, from a few hundred to several thousand a month, and a few agency owners admit openly that featuring GEO in pitches makes higher retainers easier to sell. Separate GEO consultants have been reported at around $2,400 a month, and full programmes at $10,000 a month or more.

M/AFZAL's prices are published:

• The AI visibility audit, $700 fixed. The baseline, the sources, your Google rankings and a ranked fix list, in 7 working days with a 45-minute walkthrough.
• Growth Partner, $2,500 a month. Two new pages a month written to be quoted, a monthly AI visibility check against the same questions, website care, and ads on up to two platforms. Three-month minimum, then month to month.

There is no separate "AI" surcharge, because the work does not split cleanly from SEO.

Why one specialist rather than an agency?

Buyers in the threads repeatedly gave the same advice: start with a project rather than a long contract, and consider smaller providers whose proposals are as good as the big firms'. AI SEO work is a series of small, specific changes across your site, your listings and the outside sources that mention you. It suffers when it is split between an account manager, a strategist, a writer and a developer.

Here one person does all of it. Muhammad Afzal worked for five years as a frontend engineer, including at Nextbridge, where his work made application loads 40% faster. The crawler, indexing and structured data fixes are made by the same person who writes the pages and reads the AI answers. The trade-off is capacity: this suits a business that needs the right work done well, not dozens of articles a month. The freelancer vs agency comparison sets out that trade-off honestly.

How is progress reported?

Practitioners who report honestly converge on the same evidence, and that is what you get:

• The same fixed list of unbranded buyer questions every month, so results are comparable.
• Results for each AI tool separately, because a gain in one says nothing about another.
• The pages each answer cited, so you can see which sources matter.
• A log of what changed that month, so movement can be linked to work.
• Enquiries alongside visibility. Much AI-referred traffic appears in analytics as "direct", so adding a free-text "how did you hear about us?" question to your enquiry form is recommended from the start.

How does it start?

1. Send a short brief using the form below: what you sell, who buys it, and which competitors AI tools name instead of you.
2. Agree the questions. Muhammad replies to confirm the buyer questions and two competitors.
3. Get the audit within 7 working days, with the answers, the sources and the ranked fixes.
4. Decide. Act on the list yourself, continue with Growth Partner, or stop. The AI SEO services page covers what the ongoing work includes.