Hire someone who understands brand positioning, not just technical SEO. AI search optimization is fundamentally a brand problem, and most people selling AI visibility services are solving the wrong one.
The market is flooded with agencies offering AI search optimization, AEO, and generative engine optimization packages. Most of them are repackaged SEO services with new labels. They will optimize your schema markup, clean your site structure, and submit your content to AI training pipelines. These are useful services. But they address roughly thirty percent of what determines whether AI recommends your brand.
The other seventy percent is brand work. Positioning clarity. Narrative consistency across platforms. Content structured for extraction, not just indexing. A story that holds up when the machine cross-references your website against your LinkedIn, your press coverage, and what people say about you on Reddit. No technical optimization can compensate for a brand the machine cannot confidently describe.
Look for someone who starts with your brand, not your sitemap. The right person will ask what your brand does, who it serves, and why it matters before they ever look at your analytics. They will audit your positioning across every platform AI trusts, not just your website. They will build the clarity first and the technical infrastructure second.
The combination that matters is classical brand strategy plus technical understanding of how AI systems evaluate and cite sources. Twenty-four years of building brands for human audiences, plus deep knowledge of how LLMs process, trust, and surface information. That intersection is rare. Most brand strategists do not understand AI systems. Most AI optimization specialists do not understand brand. You need both.