8 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Agency for AI Visibility

Most agencies will tell you they understand AI visibility. Very few actually do. These eight questions separate the ones who have done the work from the ones who have read the headlines, and help you avoid hiring the wrong partner for a discipline that is still widely misunderstood.

AI visibility has become the thing every agency claims to offer. It’s on decks, in proposals, in new business pitches. The problem is that most of what’s being sold under that banner is recycled SEO thinking with a new label, and for luxury and premium brands, that’s not just unhelpful, it’s actively misleading.

If you’re evaluating a partner for AI visibility work, these eight questions will tell you quickly whether you’re talking to someone who understands the space, or someone who’s hoping you don’t ask too hard. For context on what good AI visibility strategy actually involves, our AI search optimisation checklist covers the seven core areas any serious agency should be working across.

1. Which publications actually get cited by AI for queries in our sector and which don’t?

This is the most important question on the list. AI systems don’t cite all publications equally. Some titles that carry enormous weight in traditional PR terms, such as legacy consumer magazines and certain broadsheet supplements, have minimal AI citation footprint. Others that might seem niche or secondary are cited repeatedly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.

An agency doing genuine AI visibility work will have tested this. They’ll be able to name specific publications that perform strongly for your category and explain why, in terms of crawlability, content structure, and domain authority signals. They’ll also be honest about which titles your brand is currently placed in that aren’t moving the needle with AI systems.

If the answer they give is vague, for example “we focus on high-authority titles” or “we look at domain authority”, then you’re talking to someone working from SEO instincts, not AI visibility data.

2. Can you show me what AI currently says about our brand and our competitors?

Any agency offering AI visibility strategy should be able to pull this up in the room. Not a report from three months ago. Live. Right now. Across at least two or three platforms.

What you’re looking for isn’t just whether your brand appears. It’s how it’s described, how confidently it’s recommended, what context it appears in, and what’s said about the brands that do appear when yours doesn’t. That last point matters as much as the first.

Agencies that are genuinely across this will have a methodology for running these queries, using consistent prompts, consistent platforms, and consistent persona testing. Agencies that aren’t will give you a screenshot of one ChatGPT response and call it an audit.

3. How does your approach differ between AI visibility and traditional SEO?

The honest answer to this question is: they’re related but meaningfully different. A good SEO foundation helps. But the signals that make you visible in AI responses, such as third-party citation profiles, content structure, entity clarity, and topical authority, are not the same as the signals that move Google rankings.

Backlink profiles matter differently. Keyword density is largely irrelevant. Paid search has no influence whatsoever on what AI systems recommend. And the publications that carry the most weight with AI are not always the ones with the highest domain authority scores.

If the agency’s answer to this question is essentially “it’s the same thing” or “AI visibility is part of our SEO offering”, stop right there. It isn’t the same thing. An agency that treats it as such will apply the wrong playbook and wonder why nothing moves.

4. What does success look like, and how will you measure it?

This is where a lot of AI visibility pitches fall apart. Because AI citation is harder to measure than search rankings, some agencies either avoid the question entirely or default to generic SEO metrics like traffic, backlinks, and domain authority. These don’t actually tell you whether you’re appearing in AI responses.

Genuine measurement in this space looks like: standardised queries run across multiple AI platforms on a regular cadence, tracking whether your brand is mentioned, how it’s described, in what context, and with what confidence. It also looks at competitor citation rates because your visibility doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Ask for a sample report. Ask how frequently they run the queries. Ask what prompts they use and why. If there’s no systematic methodology behind the answer, the measurement isn’t real.

5. Have you done this for a brand in our category?

Luxury and premium brands have specific dynamics that generic AI visibility approaches don’t account for. The publications that carry authority in AI responses for a boutique hotel in the Dolomites are different from those that matter for a fintech brand or a mass-market retailer. The prompts your target guests use are different. The competitive set is different.

An agency with genuine category experience will be able to talk about which publications they’ve seen cited consistently in your space, what kinds of prompts your target audience actually uses, and what the competitive AI visibility landscape looks like for brands like yours.

If they can’t speak specifically to your category, ask how they’ll develop that understanding and how quickly. Generic AI visibility strategy applied to a premium hospitality brand will produce generic results. In a market where differentiation is everything, that’s not good enough.

6. How do you handle AI visibility for a brand versus an individual property or product?

For hospitality and luxury brands especially, this distinction matters enormously. A hotel group and its individual properties each need their own AI visibility strategy. AI systems may recommend the brand confidently but fail to surface specific properties, or cite individual properties without connecting them to the wider brand story.

An agency working in this space should understand that brand-level and property-level visibility require different content structures, different citation targets, and different schema approaches. If they treat the brand and its properties as interchangeable, the strategy will have structural gaps from the start.

7. What’s your process when AI is saying something inaccurate about our brand?

This happens more than most brands realise. AI systems can describe a property incorrectly, cite outdated information, or conflate a brand with a competitor. The question is what the agency actually does about it, and this is where a lot of agencies have no real answer.

A credible agency will have a correction methodology: identifying the sources AI is drawing on, fixing inaccuracies at source where possible, building accurate alternative content that AI systems can cite instead, and monitoring whether the correction takes hold over time. “We’ll flag it” is not a methodology.

8. How do you stay current as AI platforms update their models?

AI platforms update their retrieval methods, citation behaviour, and underlying models regularly. What works today may perform differently in six months. An agency that ran a one-time audit and built a strategy around it without ongoing monitoring is not set up to manage this.

Ask how they track model updates across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Ask how their methodology evolves in response. Ask whether their reporting cadence is designed to catch changes in citation behaviour before they become a problem. Ongoing visibility requires ongoing methodology, not a set-and-forget approach.

One more thing worth saying

The right partner for AI visibility work isn’t necessarily the biggest agency in the room. This is a relatively new discipline, and size doesn’t correlate with capability here. What you’re looking for is rigour: someone with a systematic approach to testing, measuring, and improving AI citation, and genuine understanding of how the systems you care about actually work.

Ask the questions. Listen carefully to the answers. The ones who’ve done the work will be specific. The ones who haven’t will be confident in ways that don’t hold up under scrutiny. If you want to see what a baseline AI visibility assessment actually looks like before you commit to an agency, an AI Visibility Snapshot is a good starting point.

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