How to Pick the Right LLM SEO Agency

Start with proof, not promises

The fastest way to separate a real LLM SEO agency from an opportunist rebranding old SEO services is to ask for a live audit of your brand before you sign anything. A credible agency can run your brand name and category through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot in an afternoon and show you exactly what comes back. If an agency skips straight to a retainer proposal without showing you current state, that's the first red flag.

Ask specifically what prompts they tested — real buyer language, not generic brand-name searches — and whether they checked competitor citation rate alongside yours. A one-sided "your brand isn't showing up enough" pitch without competitor context is marketing, not analysis. If you have to push twice to get the raw prompt-and-response transcripts rather than a summarized slide, treat that as a signal about how transparent reporting will be later.

What to look for: the evaluation checklist

Beyond the initial audit, evaluate an agency the way you'd evaluate any specialist vendor: technical competence, reporting rigor, and honesty about what's controllable. GEO and paid ChatGPT ad management require different skills, so ask whether the same team runs both or whether it's outsourced. A single point of contact managing both organic and paid AI visibility tends to produce more coherent strategy than two disconnected vendors.

• Do they check and fix crawler access (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended)?
• Do they show a monthly citation-rate trend, not a one-time snapshot?
• Do they distinguish AI referral traffic from regular organic traffic in reporting?

Red flags that mean walk away

Any agency guaranteeing a specific AI answer, a #1 citation, or a fixed number of "AI mentions" per month is overselling. Models are non-deterministic and no vendor — including OpenAI, Google, Perplexity or Microsoft themselves — can guarantee output. What's controllable is the input: content quality, structure, crawler access, and distribution. An honest agency will tell you that plainly instead of promising outcomes it can't deliver.

Also be wary of pricing that seems disconnected from scope. Market GEO retainers run roughly $2,000/month for a single market up to $10,000+/month for enterprise engagements with digital PR included. A quote far outside that range without a clear reason deserves a second look.

A subtler red flag is an agency that talks only about content and never mentions technical crawler access at all. Content that a model is technically blocked from reading will never get cited no matter how well it's written, so an agency that skips this step is either inexperienced or hasn't actually audited your site.

The forex broker test case

If you're evaluating agencies as a regulated forex broker or trading platform, ask them to run a live test: "which brokers are licensed to operate in [your target market] with tight spreads on [your core instrument]". Watch whether your brand appears, whether the model gets your license status right, and whether it recommends a named competitor instead. This single test tells you more about an agency's understanding of your category than any pitch deck, because it forces them to explain, live, why the current result looks the way it does.

Push further and ask why the model chose the competitor it did. A capable agency will point to a specific page, a specific piece of structured data, or a specific third-party mention driving that citation — not a vague answer about "algorithm preferences". If they can't explain the mechanism, they probably can't fix it either.

Why Suggesting.ai structures it as a free audit first

Suggesting.ai runs the audit described above — free, delivered in 48 hours — precisely so a prospective client can evaluate the work before committing budget. The audit covers citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, crawler access status, and a named-competitor gap list. From there, engagements split into GEO content, managed ChatGPT ad campaigns, and standing AI presence audits, reported together monthly. The point of the exercise, plainly, is to make AI start suggesting your brand instead of the competitor it currently defaults to.

Questions to ask before signing

Bring a short list to the first call: What's our current citation rate and how did you measure it? Which crawlers are currently blocked on our site? What does reporting look like month to month, and does it separate paid from organic? What happens if a model's algorithm changes and citation rate drops — is that covered in ongoing work or a separate fee? An agency that answers all four without hedging is worth a serious conversation.

It's also fair to ask how they'd handle a market where ChatGPT Ads isn't yet available — availability is expanding country by country, and an agency that pretends every market has the same paid options isn't being straight with you. A good answer treats that as a scoping detail, not a reason to oversell what's currently possible.

Don't skip the reference check

Ask for a client in a comparable, comparison-driven category — not necessarily a direct competitor, but a business where buyers evaluate multiple providers before committing. Ask that reference specifically about reporting cadence and whether the agency flagged problems proactively or only reported wins. This single conversation usually reveals more than any pitch deck about how the agency actually behaves once a contract is signed. If an agency can't produce a single reference willing to talk, treat that as informative on its own.