How to find the best agency for AI search campaigns, step by step

Start with your own research, not a vendor list

Before searching for an agency, open ChatGPT and Perplexity and ask the exact questions your buyers ask: "best [category] for [use case]", "which [product type] is licensed in [region]". Write down whether you appear, where, and who does. This ten-minute exercise tells you more about your actual gap than any agency's sales deck, and it means you walk into every first call already knowing whether the problem is that you're absent, or that a competitor is winning the exact same prompt.

This step also protects you from overpaying for a problem you don't have — some brands discover they already show up reasonably well and only need a narrow paid push, not a full retainer.

Keep the list of prompts and screenshots you collect during this exercise. When you eventually talk to agencies, handing them this exact list rather than describing your situation from memory makes the first conversation dramatically more useful, since it lets a candidate agency react to real evidence instead of a vague description of "we feel like we're not visible enough."

Where to actually look

Search engines still work for finding candidates, but so does asking ChatGPT itself "who manages AI search campaigns" — if an agency doesn't show up in that answer, that's informative on its own. Industry Slack groups, marketing conference speaker lists, and referrals from other B2B founders in comparison-heavy categories tend to surface agencies that have actually done the work, versus SEO shops that added "GEO" to their service list without changing their process.

• Ask peers in your category who they use and what changed measurably
• Check whether the agency's own site shows up when you ask AI tools about their specialty
• Look for case-study language that names specific prompts, not vague "visibility improved" claims

It's also worth checking how long a candidate agency has actually been doing AI-specific work versus how long they've existed as a company. A ten-year-old SEO agency that pivoted its messaging eighteen months ago has less hands-on experience with this exact channel than the pivot date alone might suggest, and it's fair to ask directly when their first AI search engagement actually started.

The shortlist filter: free audit or walk away

The best agencies in this space lead with a free or low-cost diagnostic audit before quoting a retainer, because pricing an AI search engagement without first measuring your current citation rate is guesswork. If a vendor jumps straight to a $5,000/month quote without looking at your specific prompts, that's a agency optimizing for closing the deal, not for your actual gap.

A genuine audit should return a written report: which prompts you appear in, which competitors dominate, and a rough split of whether the fix is organic content, paid campaigns, or technical crawler access. Anything vaguer than that isn't really an audit.

How this applies if you're a forex broker

A forex broker searching for an AI search agency should specifically ask candidates to run a live prompt like "best regulated broker for CFD trading in the UAE" during the pitch call, not after signing. Suggesting.ai's client base already includes brands in this exact space — Economies.com, FxNewsToday.ae, BestTradingSignal.com among them — so the broker-specific compliance language, licensing terms, and comparison-page structure that AI models cite are already part of the standard audit checklist rather than something learned on your dime.

A broker's search should also specifically probe how a candidate would keep regulatory information current across markets, since a licensing detail that's accurate for one jurisdiction can be wrong for another, and an agency without finance-sector experience may not think to ask which regulator's language applies to which page.

Vetting and measuring after you've narrowed the list

Once you're down to two or three agencies, ask each the same three questions: how do you measure success in 90 days, what happens if a prompt doesn't improve, and can I see a redacted client report. Compare answers side by side rather than in isolation — the differences show up fastest that way.

Finally, confirm reporting cadence in writing before signing anything. A monthly report should tie citation changes and any paid spend back to actual traffic and, ideally, leads in your own analytics — not just an internal dashboard you can't independently verify.

Common mistakes when running the search yourself

The most common mistake is searching for "GEO agency" or "AI search agency" as generic category terms and picking whoever ranks highest, without checking whether that ranking reflects actual AI-search execution work or just traditional SEO applied to a new keyword. A second mistake is skipping the self-audit step entirely and asking every candidate to run it for you during the pitch — that hands the diagnosis to whoever is trying to sell you something, which biases the findings before you've even signed anything.

A third, subtler mistake is assuming the agency that talks fastest about ChatGPT Ads is automatically the strongest partner overall. Paid media expertise and organic citation expertise are genuinely different skill sets, and the search process should test for both rather than being swayed by whichever one comes up first in conversation.

What to do once you've made a decision

Even after choosing an agency, keep running your own spot-check prompts monthly rather than relying solely on their reporting. This isn't about distrust so much as keeping a second, independent data point — it's the fastest way to catch a reporting discrepancy early, before a full quarter has passed on an engagement that isn't actually moving the needle.