What an answer engine optimisation agency should actually deliver

A real answer engine optimisation engagement delivers four things you can check: a written list of the questions your buyers actually ask, pages rewritten so each of those questions has a complete answer under its own heading, one consistent account of your business everywhere it appears online, and a way of seeing whether any of it is being picked up. If a proposal cannot tell you which of those four you are paying for, it is not describing AEO. It is describing SEO with a new label on it.

That is the short answer. The rest of this note is about reading a proposal, because most of the pages that come up for "AEO services in India" are service listings from the agencies selling it, and none of them say what should arrive after you pay.

What does an AEO agency actually do?

The work is narrower than the acronym suggests, which is good news for the person paying. When somebody asks an assistant who to use, it names two or three businesses. To be one of them, a business has to be easy to quote and easy to agree about. Everything an agency does for you should serve one of those two things, and the answer engine optimisation page sets out why.

1. The question list

Before anything is rewritten, somebody should find out what your customers ask. The sources are ordinary: your phone calls, your WhatsApp enquiries, the questions on your Google Business Profile, the reviews your competitors get, and what search autocomplete offers when somebody types your trade and your city. The output is a list in your customers' words, not a keyword spreadsheet in the agency's.

If a proposal skips this and goes straight to "optimising content", ask what the content is being optimised towards.

2. Pages that answer one question each

This is the core of the work, and it is mostly writing. Each important question gets a heading that matches how people ask it, and directly under that heading a paragraph that answers it completely and still makes sense when quoted on its own. We have written about why that shape matters more than it used to.

You should be able to open the finished pages and point at the answers. If the deliverable was "on-page optimisation" and the pages read the same as before, nothing was delivered.

3. One account of the business

Your name, number, address, service area and a one-line description of what you do have to be identical on your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. In India that usually means some mix of JustDial, IndiaMART, Practo or Sulekha depending on the trade, plus whatever smaller listing sites have copied from them. The work is unglamorous: find every listing, fix every mismatch, and write down the correct version so it stays fixed.

This is the part most often left out, because it cannot be done from a dashboard. It is also one of the four usual reasons an assistant passes a business over.

4. A way to see whether it is working

There is no rank to report, because an assistant's answer is not a ranked list. What an honest agency can show you is whether your pages are indexed, how they perform in Google Search Console, and a repeatable check: the same set of real customer questions put to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode on a fixed schedule, with the answers saved so month three can be compared with month one. That last check is manual and noisy, and a good agency will tell you so rather than turning it into a score.

What should an AEO proposal never promise?

A guaranteed mention. Nobody controls what an assistant says. There is no position to buy and none to hold.

A percentage uplift. Figures of the "40% more AI visibility" kind trace back to studies that do not replicate, or to correlations with how old and established a site is. Ask where the number comes from and what it was measured against.

AI schema. Structured data is worth having because it states plainly what a page is about. But no markup type makes a page eligible to be cited by an assistant, and Google's own guidance on its AI features names none. A line item called "AI schema" or "LLM markup" is a file, not a service.

An llms.txt file as a deliverable. It is cheap to publish and harmless, and no major model provider has committed to reading it. It should not appear on an invoice.

How do you tell AEO from relabelled SEO?

Put three questions to any proposal.

1. Which questions will my pages answer, and can I see the list? A real engagement starts from what buyers ask. A relabelled one starts from keywords and backlinks.
2. What changes on my listings outside my own website? If the answer is nothing, a third of the job is missing.
3. What will you show me in month three? A good answer names indexed pages, answer paragraphs you can read, listings that now agree, and a saved record of what the assistants said. A bad answer is a score.

None of this makes SEO the wrong thing to buy. Good SEO is most of the foundation, and a site that search engines ignore will not be quoted by an assistant either. The point is only that you should know which of the two you are paying for.

What decides the cost?

Two things mostly: how many questions need a proper answer written, and how many listings need finding and fixing. Both are only known after the question list exists, which is why a fair quote comes after that step rather than before it. The same logic applies to what a website costs in India more generally.

Where this studio stands

This is the work we do, described the way we would want it described to us before paying for it. The answer engine optimisation page covers what we will and will not claim, including the numbers we refuse to quote.