AI SEO agency or AI SEO software?
If you searched for an AI SEO agency, what you want is an answer engine that names your brand. That can come from a retainer, from software your own team runs, or from both. Here is how to tell which you need and how to judge either.
Sonarvue sells software, not retainer services, so we are not a neutral party on this question. We have written the agency section as the questions we would ask before signing one, because we would rather you buy the right thing than the wrong one from anyone.
What an AI SEO agency is selling
An AI SEO or GEO agency sells judgement plus labour: it decides which buyer prompts matter, finds the sources that decide each answer, then ships page changes and third-party mentions and reports what moved. The output should be pages that get cited and mentions on sites an engine already trusts, with the prompt evidence attached.
The failure mode is a dashboard retainer: monthly screenshots of visibility, no changes to the pages, and no record of which prompt was re-tested after which fix.
When to hire one
- You have no one who can write technically credible pages and do outreach.
- You need the work done in the next quarter and you can pay a retainer.
- Your category has an entrenched competitor that owns the citations, and unseating it needs relationships you do not have yet.
When software is the better first buy
- You already have an SEO or content team; they need the diagnosis and the verification, not another pair of hands.
- You cannot yet say which prompts you lose or who wins them. Buy the measurement before the remedy.
- You want the cost to scale with prompts and brands, not with hours.
Most teams that stay end up hybrid: software for the loop of measure, fix and verify, and a specialist or an agency for one specific blocker.
Five questions to ask an AI SEO agency before signing
- Show me a before-and-after on a real prompt, with the verbatim answer, not a dashboard.
- Which source did the engine cite in the answer we were losing, and which of our pages now answers that better?
- How many prompts will you track, in which countries, and will the set stay fixed between reports?
- What exactly do we own at the end: the page changes, the briefs, the outreach list?
- What is the definition of a win at 90 days, as a number on a prompt we both agreed to?
Frequently asked questions
Should I hire an AI SEO agency?
If you have no one to do the work and the budget for a retainer, yes. What you are buying is judgement, not tooling. Ask for the prompt set they will use, the sources they will earn, and how they will prove movement.
What does an AI SEO agency actually do?
Four things: define the buyer prompts that matter, find which sources decide each answer, improve the pages and third-party mentions that feed those answers, and re-run the prompts to show what changed.
How much does an AI SEO agency cost?
Retainers commonly run from roughly $1,500 to $10,000 a month depending on scope, with project work below that. Judge the price against a defined prompt set and a promised number of fixes per month, not against hours.
Can software replace an agency?
Software replaces the measurement, the diagnosis and increasingly the shipping. It does not replace the editorial judgement about what your buyers actually ask, or the relationships behind a third-party mention. Most teams end up with both, in some proportion.
What should I check before signing?
Ask to see a before-and-after on a real prompt, not a screenshot of a dashboard. Ask which competitor won the prompt they improved and which source the engine cited. If they cannot show the evidence chain, the retainer is a guess.