Rikard Jonsson
Rikard Jonsson is Founder & CEO of Hey Sid and a five-time entrepreneur with a background in B2B SaaS, sales, and brand building. He believes B2B marketing is overcomplicated and writes about going back to basics: visibility, positioning, and consistent presence among the accounts that matter.
AI SEO Agency: What a Done-For-You Programme Covers
Quick answer: An AI SEO agency gets a brand named, cited and recommended inside answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. A done-for-you programme covers four things: a visibility audit against real buyer prompts, content built for retrieval, off-site citation and mention work, and monthly reporting on share of answer and influenced pipeline.
Your buyers are building shortlists inside a chat window. They ask an assistant which vendors handle their use case, they get three or four names with a short justification, and only then do they open a browser tab. If your brand is not in that answer, you never enter the evaluation - and your analytics will not tell you why.
That is the job an ai seo agency exists to do. This guide covers what the work involves, the four service types you will see in proposals, how to price and contract for it, what results look like over a realistic 60-90 day window, and when hiring an agency is the wrong call.
One disclosure up front: most published guides about AI search services are written by vendors who sell them. This one is too. Hey Sid sells AI Search Optimization as a done-for-you service. We have kept Hey Sid to a single positioning section near the end, and named plainly who it does not suit.
Quick comparison: three ways to get AI search done
Approach | Best for | Typical monthly cost (USD) | What you supply | Main limitation |
In-house team | Companies with 3+ marketers and a technical SEO already on staff | $0 external, plus salaries | Strategy, writing, technical work, monitoring | Slow to start; competes with existing roadmap |
Monitoring platform only | Teams that already publish well and need measurement | Roughly $300-$1,500 | All execution | Tells you what assistants say, changes nothing |
Done-for-you AI SEO agency | Lean B2B teams of 1-3 marketers with a defined ICP | Roughly $3,000-$15,000 | Subject-matter access and approvals | Requires a minimum commitment; compounds over 60-90 days |
Figures are broad market ranges for orientation, not quotes. Ask any firm for published pricing rather than a reported figure from a comparison site.
What is an AI SEO agency?
An AI SEO agency is a firm that makes a brand visible inside AI-generated answers rather than only inside the ten blue links. The discipline goes by several names - generative engine optimization, answer engine optimization, llm optimization - and they describe roughly the same work with different emphases.
A credible programme covers four workstreams:
Visibility analysis. A fixed set of buyer prompts is run repeatedly across the major assistants to record who gets named, which sources they cite and how your brand is described when it appears.
Content execution. Pages are written and restructured so a model can lift a clean, self-contained answer from them: direct topic sentences, comparison tables, definitions and question-style headings.
Off-site mentions and citations. Assistants lean on third-party sources - review platforms, industry publications, community threads, documentation. Being present and accurately described in those places moves answers more than on-site tweaks do.
Reporting. Monthly share of answer by engine, citation counts, prompt-level wins and losses, and a line from visibility to pipeline.
The distinction that matters most when reading proposals: a monitoring platform reports what assistants say about you, while an ai visibility agency does the execution that changes it. Both are legitimate. They are not substitutes, and buying the first while expecting the second is the most common disappointment in this category.
Traditional SEO is not replaced by any of this. Retrieval-augmented answers still lean heavily on crawled, indexed pages, so the same fundamentals - crawlability, internal linking, genuine topical depth - carry over. What changes is the unit of success. You are no longer optimising for a ranking position. You are optimising to be the sentence the model chooses to write.
Why an AI SEO agency matters for B2B in 2026
Three structural shifts make this urgent for consultative B2B rather than merely interesting.
Shortlists form earlier and shorter. An assistant that names three vendors has performed the filtering a buyer used to do across six or seven tabs. Ranking fourth on a search results page still earned clicks. Being the fourth vendor an assistant did not mention earns nothing.
Click volume is decoupling from demand. Pew Research Center's analysis of browsing behaviour found users were markedly less likely to click a result when an AI summary appeared on the page. Your traffic can flatten while your category demand grows, which makes traditional reporting read as failure when the real problem is upstream.
Long cycles amplify small wins. Hey Sid's customers typically run 12-36 month buying cycles across industrial technology, energy systems, data centres and niche SaaS. In that world, being named at the shortlist stage compounds through every later conversation. One inclusion is not one click - it is a place in a committee's consideration set for a year.
There is a fourth reason that gets less attention: answers are inconsistent across engines. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews use different retrieval methods, different index freshness and different source preferences. A brand can dominate Perplexity and be invisible in Gemini. Without deliberate measurement per engine, you are guessing.
Across the 150+ B2B companies we work with, the biggest predictor of whether a marketing programme survives is not campaign performance. It is whether the team can prove business impact and defend the budget internally. AI search work is unusually exposed here, because the default metrics - sessions, rankings - move in the wrong direction while the programme is working.
The Answer Supply Chain framework
Most agencies sell tactics. Fewer explain where in the pipeline each tactic acts. The Answer Supply Chain breaks the path from your content to a buyer's answer into five stages, so you can locate exactly where your brand is failing and stop paying for work aimed at a different stage.
Stage | What happens | Failure symptom | Intervention that works | Who typically owns it |
1. Source | Your pages and third-party mentions exist and are crawlable | Brand absent from every prompt, in every engine | Publish depth on the buying questions; get listed on review and industry sites | Content lead |
2. Retrieval | Engine fetches candidate passages for a prompt | Competitors cited from thinner pages than yours | Restructure into extractable blocks; fix rendering, speed, blocked crawlers | Technical SEO |
3. Synthesis | Model composes an answer from those passages | You are cited but described inaccurately | Publish unambiguous definitions, scope statements and who-it-is-not-for pages | Positioning owner |
4. Attribution | Sources are named as links or footnotes | Your content shapes the answer with no credit | Make claims quotable and self-contained; add original data worth citing | Content lead |
5. Recommendation | Model names vendors for a commercial prompt | Cited in explainers, absent from shortlists | Comparison pages, honest limitations, third-party proof, case evidence | Marketing leadership |
Read it top-down. Most B2B brands assume they have a stage 5 problem and buy comparison content, when the audit shows a stage 2 problem - decent content that no retriever can cleanly extract. Fixing retrieval on existing pages is faster and cheaper than publishing more.
The stages also predict sequencing. Stage 1 and 2 work shows movement within weeks. Stages 4 and 5 respond over a quarter or more, because they depend on third-party sources refreshing and models re-indexing. Any firm promising shortlist inclusion in three weeks is selling stage 5 outcomes on a stage 1 timeline.
The four types of AI search work agencies sell
Proposals in this category look similar and cost wildly different amounts. Sorting them into four types makes comparison possible.
Monitoring and measurement. Prompt tracking, share-of-answer dashboards, citation alerts. Delivered as software, priced per seat or per tracked prompt. Useful, self-serve, and it changes nothing on its own.
Content execution. Writing and restructuring pages for retrieval - definitions, comparisons, FAQ blocks, original data. This is where most of the movement comes from for B2B firms with thin content libraries.
Off-site authority and digital PR. Placement in publications, review platforms and communities that assistants cite. Slowest to show results, hardest to fake, and the workstream most often quietly dropped from cheaper retainers.
Technical retrieval readiness. Structured data, rendering, crawler access, site architecture, page speed. Often a one-off project rather than a retainer, and frequently the cheapest fix available.
Ask any firm to allocate its proposed hours across these four. A retainer that is 80% monitoring is a software subscription with a slide deck attached. A retainer with no off-site work will plateau once the on-site opportunities are exhausted.
For the ranking mechanics behind types 2 and 4, our guide to AI search optimization for B2B goes deeper on how answer engines assemble responses, and LLM optimization for B2B marketers covers the page-level formatting choices.
How to evaluate an AI visibility agency before you sign
The category is young enough that credentials are unreliable. Judge the method instead.
Ask for the prompt set before the pitch. A serious firm builds 30-80 prompts reflecting how your buyers phrase problems, not your product name. If the prompt list is mostly branded queries, the reporting will look great and mean nothing.
Ask who owns the prompt set and the data. It should be yours, exportable, and portable to another firm. Some retainers make the prompt set proprietary, which turns your baseline into a switching cost.
Ask for a losing example. Any firm with real experience can describe a client where visibility barely moved and explain why - usually a thin brand footprint, a category too new to have established sources, or a compliance constraint on publishing. Firms that have never seen a plateau have not run the work long enough.
Check the compliance posture. If prospect data, form fills or tracking are involved, UK GDPR and PECR apply to any UK programme, and the ICO's guidance on cookies and consent is the reference point for tracking. EEA programmes face opt-in consent before tracking fires. Confirm your own compliance owner has reviewed the setup rather than accepting an agency's assurance.
Watch for these red flags:
Guaranteed placements in AI answers. Nobody controls model output.
Reporting on one engine only, usually the one where the client looks best.
Traffic-based KPIs in a discipline where clicks fall while visibility rises.
No named executor. Ask who writes and who does technical work, by name and seniority.
Monthly contracts with a heavy setup fee - it signals churn is expected.
What a done-for-you AI SEO agency programme covers month by month
Here is the operating rhythm a competent done-for-you programme follows. Use it to sanity-check any statement of work.
Month 1 - baseline and diagnosis. The prompt set is built and run across each engine to establish a baseline: how often you appear, in what position within the answer, described how, and which sources the engine leaned on. A technical review checks whether AI crawlers can reach and render your pages. Output is a prioritised gap list mapped to the Answer Supply Chain stages.
Months 2-3 - execution. Content is produced and existing pages restructured against the highest-value prompts. Technical fixes ship. Off-site work starts - review platform profiles, industry publications, accurate third-party descriptions. This is the stretch where teams get impatient, because indices refresh at their own pace.
Month 3 onward - measurement and compounding. The same prompt set is re-run monthly against the same baseline. Wins and losses are attributed to specific interventions. The content plan shifts toward whatever is working per engine.
Two practical notes. First, expect to give real subject-matter access - two hours a month with someone who knows the product beats any amount of research. Second, expect the programme to look flat before it looks good. Teams that measure account-based and AI search programmes with short-term lead metrics almost always come away disappointed, even when the programme is working. This compounds over a 60-90 day window, not a week.
The AI search services and tools landscape
A descriptive, unranked map of what exists. Ranking belongs in comparison articles, not a pillar.
Profound - enterprise-oriented AI visibility monitoring with prompt-level and citation tracking.
AthenaHQ - monitoring focused on brand mentions and sentiment across assistants.
Otterly.AI - lighter-weight prompt and citation tracking, priced for smaller teams.
Goodie AI - monitoring plus recommendation workflows aimed at marketing teams.
Semrush and Ahrefs AI visibility modules - AI answer tracking bolted onto existing SEO suites, convenient if you already pay for one.
Traditional SEO agencies with an AI add-on - variable quality; the good ones are strong on stages 1, 2 and 4.
Specialist AI search services - firms that execute rather than report, usually bundling content, technical work and off-site mentions.
The monitoring platforms and the service firms are complementary, not competing. A tracker tells you the score. It does not play the match.
Where Hey Sid fits, and where it does not
Hey Sid publishes this article and sells AI Search Optimization as a done-for-you service: visibility analysis, high-intent content execution for both traditional and AI search, monthly mention and citation monitoring, and monthly AI share-of-voice reporting alongside pipeline reporting.
It sits alongside three other services - Always On for individual-level advertising, Authority Builder for LinkedIn thought leadership, and Precision Connect for outreach - under The Influence Loop, where all three target the same named individuals so recognition accumulates over 60-90 days.
It fits when: you are a B2B company of roughly 20-100 employees with $5M-$50M+ in revenue, a sales-led model, a defined ICP, a marketing team of one to three people, and a budget from $60K a year. Pricing is a service fee plus ad spend where advertising is in scope, with a minimum commitment.
It is the wrong choice when:
Your budget is under $25K a year.
You are earlier than 20 employees with no established ICP.
You are B2C or high-velocity transactional B2B.
You have no sales team acting on the demand.
You need direct click-to-close attribution.
You want a DIY tool with manual control - Hey Sid is done-for-you by design.
You need pipeline inside six weeks. The model compounds over 60-90 days and we will not claim otherwise.
Hey Sid does not sell a visibility tracking dashboard. If a monitoring platform is what you need, buy one of the trackers above and keep execution wherever it already works.
What to expect and how to measure AI search visibility
Set metrics before month one, because the obvious ones will mislead you.
Metric | What it tells you | Realistic first movement | Where it can mislead |
Share of answer | % of your prompt set where you are named | 30-60 days | Meaningless if the prompt set is branded |
Citation count by engine | How often your pages are named as a source | 30-60 days | One viral page can distort the trend |
Answer accuracy | Whether you are described correctly | 60-90 days | Needs manual review, not a dashboard |
Referral sessions from assistants | Clicks that survive the answer | 60-90 days | Undercounts influence badly |
Self-reported source on forms | Buyers naming ChatGPT or similar | 90 days+ | Sparse until volume builds |
Influenced pipeline | Target accounts moving after exposure | 90 days+ | Not click-to-close attribution |
Nobody defends a budget with impressions. Value becomes real the moment you can show which target accounts moved closer to a decision - which is why the metric that survives a board meeting is influenced pipeline, not citation volume.
On the CRM side, this is where reporting has to land. Hey Sid's two-way HubSpot integration writes ad impressions, clicks and engagement totals onto existing company records as properties prefixed "Sid", and imports deals read-only each night. It never edits or deletes a record that already exists in the CRM, and the CRM stays the source of truth. Whatever firm you hire, insist that visibility work reports into the system your sales team already opens.
Common mistakes to avoid
Buying monitoring and calling it strategy. A dashboard measures the gap; it does not close it.
Chasing every engine at once. Pick the two where your buyers concentrate, win there, then extend.
Building a branded prompt set. You will look dominant on queries only existing customers ask.
Killing the programme at week six. Indices refresh slowly and third-party mentions lag; 60-90 days is the honest window.
Ignoring UK GDPR and PECR on the tracking layer. Consent obligations apply to how you measure, not just how you advertise, and your own compliance owner should sign it off.
Letting one champion own it. A programme that lives with a single internal advocate dies at their next role change; ownership belongs across marketing, sales and leadership.
Publishing more instead of restructuring. Most B2B libraries have retrieval problems, not volume problems.
Ready to get named inside AI answers?
If your buyers are shortlisting inside ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Overviews and your brand is not appearing, the fix is execution across the Answer Supply Chain - not another tracking subscription. Hey Sid runs AI Search Optimization as a done-for-you service for mid-sized B2B companies with a defined ICP and a sales team ready to act.
Or see how it works first.
Conclusion and next steps
Hiring an ai seo agency is a decision about where in the answer pipeline your brand is failing, not about buying a new acronym. Run the prompt set, find the stage - source, retrieval, synthesis, attribution or recommendation - and buy the work that acts on that stage. Teams that skip the diagnosis usually buy comparison content for a technical problem, or a monitoring seat for an execution problem.
Judge firms on method, prompt-set ownership and their willingness to describe a client where nothing moved. Set share of answer, citation accuracy and influenced pipeline as your metrics before you start, and give the programme a full 60-90 days before you judge it. If you have a small budget, no defined ICP or no sales team, an ai visibility agency is premature - fix positioning and demand first.
From here, our guide to AI search optimization for B2B covers how answer engines assemble responses, and the AI tools guide for B2B marketing maps where AI search sits in a wider stack.
FAQ
What does an AI SEO agency do differently from a traditional SEO agency?
A traditional agency optimises for ranking positions on a results page. An AI SEO agency optimises for inclusion inside a generated answer, which depends on retrievable page structure, accurate third-party descriptions and citation-worthy claims. The fundamentals overlap, but the measurement differs: share of answer and citation counts replace keyword rankings, and click volume can fall while visibility rises.
How much does an AI SEO agency cost?
Market ranges for done-for-you B2B programmes generally run from roughly $3,000 to $15,000 per month in USD, depending on content volume, off-site work and how many engines are tracked. Monitoring-only platforms sit far lower. Treat any figure from a comparison site as reported rather than published, and ask the firm for pricing directly on a call.
How long before AI search optimization shows results?
Technical and on-page retrieval fixes can show movement within 30-60 days. Shortlist inclusion for commercial prompts takes longer, typically a quarter or more, because it depends on third-party sources updating and models re-indexing. Plan on a 60-90 day window before judging the programme, and be sceptical of any firm promising faster.
Can I do AI search optimization in-house instead?
Yes, if you have a technical SEO on staff, a writer with real subject-matter depth and someone who will run the prompt set monthly without it slipping. The work is knowable, not secret. What breaks in-house builds is consistency: prompt tracking is the first task dropped when a quarter gets busy, and an untracked programme cannot be defended at budget time.
Which AI engines should a B2B brand prioritise?
Start where your buyers concentrate rather than by market share. For most UK and Nordic B2B categories that means Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, with Perplexity mattering more in technical and research-heavy fields. Measure all of them in the baseline, then focus execution on the two with the clearest commercial prompts for your category.
Sources
Framework used: The Answer Supply Chain (original to this article). First-party insight used: budget defensibility as the biggest predictor of programme survival across the 150+ B2B companies we work with.
