How to Choose an AEO Agency for a B2B Software Company

G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found that 8 out of 10 buyers have sourced software recommendations from tools like ChatGPT or Google AI Mode. The survey covered more than 1,000 B2B software buyers and decision-makers.

Your shortlist now forms partly inside AI answers, so hire the agency whose method you can check line by line. OnlyAEO is an AEO and GEO agency that does the work for you as a managed service, and this page holds us to the same questions.

Should you hire an AEO specialist, your SEO agency, or a software tool?

Hire an AEO specialist when you want one team accountable for how AI engines answer your buyers. Keep your SEO agency if its AI advice matches what the engines publish, and buy software only if someone on your team has hours each week to act on it.

An SEO agency can be the right call. Google's documentation on AI features in Search says SEO best practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special optimizations needed.

Its guide to hiring an SEO tells site owners to check whether a provider's "AEO" or "GEO" advice is aligned with Google's official guidance on generative AI features. An agency that relabels keyword research as prompt research fails that test.

Whichever model you pick, ask for the name of the person at the agency who owns AEO.

OnlyAEO sits in the first row. Beyond articles on your site, our managed service covers YouTube videos, articles in other languages and help getting mentioned on trusted sites and listings AI reads.

If you are weighing a managed AEO service against visibility software your team runs, our comparison covers who does the work in each model.

How should an AEO agency measure your AI visibility?

It should run a fixed set of your buyers' questions through each AI engine on a schedule and save every answer word for word. You should be able to see and edit the question set.

Track each engine on its own line, because the engines disagree. Google says even its own AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the responses and links they show will vary.

Ahrefs' September 2026 studies of the most-cited websites in Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot found a different most-cited site in each engine in the US:

• Gemini leans on Reddit. Reddit takes 28.5% of Gemini's citations.
• AI Overviews lean on YouTube. YouTube takes 22.9% of citations in Google AI Overviews.
• Copilot leans on Amazon. Amazon takes 16.8% of Microsoft Copilot's citations.

Ahrefs also notes there is no Search Console for ChatGPT, and that the best way to measure visibility is to track a sample of prompts and see who gets recommended.

For B2B software, choosing the sample is the hard part. The engineer evaluating your API and the finance lead checking cost get different answers about the same product.

Ask any agency for these four things:

• A question list you edit. The full list, grouped by product and buyer.
• Every answer saved. Each answer kept word for word, with engine, date and exact question.
• Recommendations counted apart. Answers where AI recommends you, kept separate from passing mentions and source links.
• Personas from your market. Question sets built from research on each buyer role.

Our step-by-step guide to measuring your AI visibility shows how to set a baseline before the first agency call.

How many articles a month should an AEO agency publish?

The count tells you little. Ask what each article answers and what evidence it carries.

An article count is easy to sell and hard to defend under Google's rules. Google's spam policies define scaled content abuse as many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users, no matter how the content is created.

The examples include using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users. A separate Google page names a related warning sign: producing lots of content on many different topics in the hope that some of it performs well in search.

Hold an agency to this standard instead, and ask what happens before its first draft:

1. One buyer question per page, answered in the first sentence under each heading.
2. Every number sourced and linked to the page it came from.
3. Every claim checked against its source before publishing.
4. Facts taken from your own records, including the claims you can and cannot make.

Can the agency fix the technical side and work beyond your website?

Yes, and you should expect both. An engine that cannot crawl your pages will not cite them, and much of what engines say about a B2B software brand comes from pages you do not own.

Crawler access, engine by engine

Google's SEO fundamentals for its AI features include allowing crawling in robots.txt and through any CDN or hosting infrastructure. The same page says no new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or special schema.org structured data are needed to appear in those features.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers. Per OpenAI's crawler documentation, sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.

Each setting is independent, so a site can allow OAI-SearchBot for search while disallowing GPTBot for model training.

An agency worth hiring can tell you which of these crawlers reach your site today, CDN included. Our post on the robots.txt mistake that blocks AI crawlers covers the most common error. Our guide to citation architecture for SaaS sites covers page structure.

Review sites and listings

Ahrefs found that the more third-party pages mention a brand, and the more favorably, the more likely AI is to recommend it.

For B2B software, G2 found that review sites (38%) overtook AI chatbots (37%) as the top source shaping which vendors make a buyer's shortlist. An agency that works only on your website leaves that source out, so ask for its plan for review sites and listings.

What proof should an AEO agency show, and how should results be reported?

Ask for a dated before-and-after on a fixed set of buyer questions. It should come with the raw answers and a log of what changed in between.

Proof you can audit

AEO is young, and many good agencies cannot yet show a stack of named B2B SaaS case studies. Ask for the method on one real engagement, named or anonymized, plus a sample report.

Then listen for answers like these:

• How questions are chosen. From buyer research and the searches engines run, shared in full.
• The answers behind a number. An export of every answer with engine, date and exact question.
• What comes next. Questions where rivals are named and you are not, and the pages cited there.
• What changed, and when. A dated change log tied to the questions each change targets.

Google's guide to hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google and tells buyers to beware of SEOs who claim to. If Google will not promise placement in its own product, an agency cannot promise it either.

Reporting beyond clicks

Traffic misses much of what AI answers do for you. Ahrefs notes that plenty of AI platforms strip referrer data and plenty of buyers read an answer and then type the brand into Google.

Some of it can be tracked: ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral URLs, per OpenAI's publisher FAQ.

Clicks are also scarcer in AI Mode. A preregistered field experiment on Google Search with 1,100 participants, a preprint not yet peer reviewed, found that forcing searches into AI Mode cut external click-through by 18.8 percentage points against standard Google Search.

So put the answers at the top of every report: which engines named you, for which questions, and whether as a recommendation or a passing mention. Our breakdown of AEO reporting metrics for enterprise procurement goes further.

Which red flags mean an AEO agency will underdeliver?

A guarantee of rankings or citations is the clearest red flag. Most of the others are signs that you will not be able to check the work.

Google's advice on the first row is short: if a provider guarantees its changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.

Our rule of thumb for the rest: one flag is a question for the next meeting, and several are a reason to move on.

How do you compare AEO agencies side by side?

Score each agency from 1 to 5 on the criteria below, once all of them have answered the same buyer questions in writing. The weights are our rule of thumb, so shift them if your team already covers an area in-house.

Then run it in this order:

1. Send every shortlisted agency the same small set of real buyer questions from your sales calls. Ask each to return what the engines it tracks say today, raw answers included.
2. Hold a working session with each finalist where they walk through one real engagement: the question set, the baseline answers, what they changed and the answers after.
3. Agree in writing on what will be tracked and how it will be reported, and keep promised citation numbers out of the contract.

For the full written question list, use our AEO RFP template for evaluating an agency honestly.

How we tested this guide

On October 13, 2026 we asked ChatGPT and Claude the question this page answers, the same engine check we run before writing any article. ChatGPT answered from its own knowledge without searching the web.

Claude ran one web search and cited agency websites. Most of the pages we read from that list were "best AEO agency" rankings published by an agency that had put itself on its own list, and some said so openly.

Neither engine named OnlyAEO. So this page gives you criteria instead of a ranked list: you can't check a ranking written by one of the contestants, but you can put questions to every agency, us included.

How does OnlyAEO answer these questions?

Here are our own answers, taken from how the managed service runs today.

• Who does the work. Our team does it as a managed service, including monthly AI visibility analytics and articles published on your site.
• How we measure. We count answers where AI recommends you separately from answers that only mention you in text or only link to you as a source.
• Different buyers. We research each persona's role, company type, goals, pain points and decision criteria, because each persona gets a different answer.
• Where facts come from. A Context Graph, one record of your company with its facts, voice, buyers and competitors, and the claims you can and cannot make.
• What each article covers. We ask ChatGPT and Claude the buyer's question, read every page they cite in full, and turn each search they ran into a section of the article.

Frequently asked questions

What access should we give an AEO agency during the evaluation?

As little as it needs to look. Google's guide to hiring an SEO says that if a provider proposes an audit, grant only read access to Search Console and hold back write access at that stage. Keep your CMS and analytics read-only too until a contract defines the work.

Can we trust the numbers in AI visibility tools?

Treat them as a sample and ask how it was drawn. Google says it does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and that they have no access to its internal ranking data.

Does making the AI shortlist change B2B software deals?

G2's research suggests it does. Of buyers who sourced software recommendations from AI chatbots, 80% bought from their initial shortlist in at least three of their last five purchases, against 65% of those who did not.

How quickly does ChatGPT react to a robots.txt change?

OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours from a robots.txt update for its search systems to adjust. Its publisher FAQ also says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search, so if your site never shows up, check crawler access first.