Answers
Questions people ask before commissioning this work.
Written to be useful whether or not you end up hiring anyone here. Each one answers its own question in the first paragraph, then explains the reasoning underneath it.
Index
ANSWER 01
How do you tell whether an AEO agency has real SEO foundations?
Ask them to show you a rendered-DOM comparison and a server log sample from a past engagement. Anyone doing AEO properly has both, because the AI layer cannot be diagnosed without them. Vendors who on…
ANSWER 02
What should you ask before signing a year-long GEO or AEO retainer?
Ask what the baseline measurement is, what happens in month two if the baseline says the problem is not AEO, and what you own when the contract ends. A retainer that cannot answer the second question …
ANSWER 03
What drives the cost of an SEO and AEO audit?
Five things move the number: how many templates the site actually has rather than how many URLs, whether the site renders server-side or client-side, how many markets and languages are in scope, wheth…
ANSWER 04
Why does ChatGPT still describe my company using our old positioning?
Because the model is not reading your homepage. It is reconstructing your company from the corpus it was trained on plus whatever retrieval returns now, and the corpus still contains the old descripti…
ANSWER 05
How do you find out which parts of your site AI crawlers actually read?
Server logs, filtered by user agent and verified against published IP ranges. Analytics will not show you this because these agents do not execute JavaScript. The useful output is not a hit count, it …
ANSWER 06
How do you audit an ecommerce site with millions of product pages?
You do not crawl all of it. You identify every distinct template, sample statistically within each, and use server logs to find where crawl budget is actually being spent. A full crawl of five million…
ANSWER 07
Does llms.txt actually do anything, and where should it live?
It belongs at the root of your domain, at /llms.txt, alongside robots.txt. It is a curated statement of what your site is and which pages matter, written for machine readers. The common mistake is shi…
ANSWER 08
What is the actual difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO targets a deterministic surface: the same query returns broadly the same ranked list, and position is a stable measurement. AEO targets a probabilistic one: the same prompt returns different text …
Next step
Send the problem. Get a scoped proposal.
Within 24 hours you get a proposal with a fixed scope and a delivery window, or a note saying this is not the right practice for it. Quoted per engagement in euros. No subscription, no default retainer.