How to Recognize a Credible AEO or GEO Agency.
The AI Countercheck and Seven Questions to Ask Before You Hire.

Many agencies are currently selling AI visibility with yesterday's methods: keywords, rankings and content volume in new vocabulary. Whether a provider truly understands how AI systems select their sources is something you can verify before you hire. This page gives you a self-test and seven questions that separate substance from packaging. richresults.ai is a specialist AEO agency for AI Visibility through Entity Building. With AEO, GEO and LLMO we make organizations, brands and experts understandable, citable and recommendable by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Search.

01 The AI Countercheck

The test you can run right now.

The AI Countercheck is a self-test for evaluating AI visibility providers: it measures whether a provider that sells AI visibility is itself correctly described by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

You can recognize a correct description by three characteristics: the systems describe the provider consistently, they do not confuse it with anyone else and they rely on independent sources rather than phrases like "according to the company." How repeated, consistent signals become accepted facts in AI systems is described in the Graph Loop.

02 Seven Questions to Ask Before You Hire

1. AEO, GEO, LLMO: What is the difference and should a provider be able to explain it?

You will see terms such as AEO agency, GEO agency and LLMO specialist used across the market. The label matters less than whether the provider can explain the difference. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) optimizes for answer engines, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) for generative systems and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) for language models. The three terms describe different aspects of the same task, but they are not interchangeable. Anyone using them as synonyms is using vocabulary instead of method. You do not need to master these distinctions yourself, but your provider must be able to make them clear to you in two minutes. More on the terms: What is AEO.

2. Does the provider talk about rankings or about citability?

AI answers do not have stable ranking positions like classic search results; they give answers and cite sources. A provider promising you position one is applying SEO thinking to a system that does not work that way. The goal that matters is citability: AI systems understanding you, describing you correctly and drawing on you as a source. Listen to the vocabulary in the conversation. Anyone treating rankings, positions and traffic as the whole model is still thinking in the old logic. Anyone talking about entities, citability and corroboration is working on the right problem. The structural difference is documented in Machine First: Why AEO Is Not SEO 2.0.

3. Does the provider have structured data on its own website?

Structured data (JSON-LD) is the layer through which a website tells machines explicitly who it is and what it stands for. Google itself describes structured data as explicit clues about the meaning of a page. Google can also understand websites without it, and for generative AI search Google says structured data is not a requirement.

That distinction matters. Google can read a page without schema. Good schema reduces interpretation by making entities, roles and relationships explicit and machine-readable. Google also explains that it uses structured data to understand page content and gather information about people, books and companies. For generative AI search, Google says it is not a requirement, for precise Entity Building, it is still a core part of the machine-readable identity layer. A provider that sells AI visibility but lacks this layer on its own website is selling a craft it does not practice. You can check this in thirty seconds: open the source code of the provider's homepage and search for "application/ld+json". If you find nothing, it is a reason to ask the provider how its entity data is implemented. Why this layer matters is also documented in the AI Visibility Evidence Model.

4. Can the provider explain Entity Building in concrete terms?

Entity Building makes an organization, a brand or a person recognizable as a distinct, machine-readable entity: with a fixed home on the web, consistent descriptions across all platforms and independent sources confirming those descriptions. A credible provider can name these building blocks specifically. Anyone who only says "optimize content" or "increase visibility" is describing an outcome while concealing the method. A simple test in the conversation: have the provider explain what is built individually for you and what comes from a ready-made tool, because a tool without understanding produces the same signals for every client, and identical signals make no one distinguishable. Then ask: what exactly gets built, where and how will I recognize it afterwards? The method is documented in How AEO works.

5. How does the provider measure success?

Credible measurement starts with a clean baseline: anonymous queries to AI systems without history and without context, repeated across a fixed prompt set and paraphrased variants, documented before and after the work. Individual screenshots of successful answers are not measurement, they are anecdotes. Ask the provider how they measure, when they measure and whether you can follow the method yourself. Anyone without an answer, or pointing to gut feeling, will also be unable to prove success to you in the end. The evidence standards are documented in the AI Visibility Evidence Model.

6. Does the provider promise guaranteed placements?

Nobody controls what ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini answer. A provider can increase the probability of being cited by addressing the documented selection factors. The outcome itself cannot be guaranteed. A guaranteed placement in AI answers is therefore not a mark of quality, it is a disqualifier. Anyone promising it either does not understand the system or is counting on you not understanding it.

7. Does the provider offer verifiable evidence?

Verifiable means: documented cases with starting point, intervention and result, a named methodology and sources you can access yourself. Anonymous success figures ("over 200 satisfied clients") and nameless case studies are not evidence. A provider doing serious work shows you at least one case in enough detail that you can retrace it and honestly labels what is a single observation and what can be generalized. Our documented cases: Case Studies.

03 The Difference at a Glance

Old SEO logic or AEO substance.

The seven questions converge on one core: old SEO logic optimizes pages for ranking positions, AEO builds entities for citability. The table shows how to spot the difference in a conversation.

If you want to know how your own organization performs on these points, talk to us.