Get your brand recommended inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and AI Overviews. Answer engine and generative engine optimisation.
The phrase AI search agency describes two businesses that have almost nothing in common, and buyers routinely brief the wrong one. The first builds search: retrieval systems, vector indexes, ranking models, and the infrastructure that lets a user ask a question in their own words and get an answer from your own content. That is engineering, it is priced like engineering, and the deliverable is a system that runs inside your product.
The second works on how your company appears inside somebody else AI system. When a person asks an assistant for a recommendation and a name comes back, something decided which name. Influencing that decision is a marketing discipline closer to public relations and technical SEO than to search engineering, and it is bought on a reporting cadence rather than a delivery date. Both businesses legitimately use the same three words to describe themselves.
The second one is also where the industry has the least settled practice and the most confident claims. Nobody can guarantee placement inside a model answer, the mechanisms change without notice when providers update their systems, and the measurement is genuinely difficult because there is no equivalent of a rank tracker that sees every conversation. A firm that promises a specific position in an assistant answer is selling something it cannot deliver. A firm that promises a measurement baseline, a content and structured-data programme against it, and honest reporting on movement is selling the real version of the work.
This is the newest category in the directory and the smallest, which means the listings here are worth reading individually rather than filtered. Each names the services the firm works on and the city it works from. Decide which of the two businesses you need before you write the brief, and say it in the first paragraph, because a firm that does the other one will still take the meeting.
What buyers ask most before hiring an AI Search partner, answered in plain terms.
An AI search agency works to get a brand named inside the answers AI assistants give. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews to recommend a provider, the assistant names a handful of companies; the agency’s job is to make sure yours is one of them. The discipline is usually called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or generative engine optimisation (GEO).
SEO competes for a position in a list of links a person then chooses from. AI search competes to be the answer itself, where there is no list and usually no click. The levers differ too: assistants lean on third-party write-ups, comparisons, directories and structured data far more than on a brand’s own marketing pages, so much of the work happens off your site.
Advisory-only engagements — audit, prompt benchmark and a roadmap you execute — typically run in the low thousands per month. Full-service work that includes producing citable assets and earning placements runs higher, often into low five figures. Project-based audits are common as a first step and a sensible way to test whether the channel matters in your category.
By prompt testing rather than rank tracking. A credible agency defines a set of buyer prompts, runs them across several assistants on a schedule, and records whether you were named, in what position, how you were described, and which sources were cited. The citation column is the useful one, because it tells you exactly which pages to go and influence.
Expect a first meaningful read in one to two quarters. Sources have to be published, indexed and retrieved before an assistant’s answer changes, and that chain is slower than a ranking change. Be sceptical of anyone promising a guaranteed placement inside a specific model’s output — that is not how these systems work.