Say you run a workshop in Melbourne, and your SEO provider emails to say the retainer now includes AI SEO. Or a new AI SEO agency sends a proposal of its own. Either way, you have been pitched AI SEO and cannot tell whether it is new work.
Much of the work sold as AI SEO is the same work good SEO already does, and Google says so in its own guidance. The new part is narrower and checkable. It names the AI assistants covered beyond Google and checks that AI search crawlers can read the site. It builds pages that can be quoted in pieces, and it reports on whether the business is named in AI answers. A proposal that cannot point to those things is probably the old retainer with a new name.
You will see this work called AI SEO, GEO, AEO, or the work of an AI search agency. They are names for one job: getting a business named in the answers AI assistants give. Plenty of Melbourne agencies now list it. The question is the one you started with: what am I paying for?
An AI SEO proposal should name the work that belongs to AI search rather than ordinary SEO. Look for four items in it.
What the work consists of, and what it should cost, is a separate question with its own article. Here the only test is whether you can find each item in the proposal.
A lot of AI SEO is the same as regular SEO, and that is fine. Google’s guide to its generative AI features says SEO best practices ‘continue to be relevant’. The reason it gives is that those features are ‘rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems’.
The same Google guide lists things you can ignore for Google Search. You do not need an llms.txt file, a text file some sites add to point AI tools at their content. You do not need special schema markup, the code that labels facts on a page for search engines. You do not need to break content into ‘chunks’ or rewrite it just for AI.
Google’s page on hiring an SEO goes further. It lists ‘Optimizing for generative AI’ among the useful services an SEO provides.
Google’s statements are about Google, though, and other assistants run on other systems. Microsoft says its Bing index now has to support AI answers, where what counts is ‘discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance’. So writing pages that can be quoted in pieces is worth doing, and an AI SEO proposal should name it. Good SEO in 2026 should be doing it anyway, so ask whether your current retainer already covers it.
An honest AI SEO offer tells you which parts are the SEO you already have and which parts are new. An offer that presents all of it as new is the repackaging. So is one that charges a second fee for work your first retainer covers. Selling AI SEO as a separate service is not a warning sign on its own. What matters is whether the proposal names what it adds.
That test applies to us too. CJ Digital sells AI SEO as a standalone service or as an add-on to an existing SEO engagement. Our AI SEO service page says ‘the foundations are the same’ and that most of the work ‘strengthens both layers at once’. So if you already pay for good SEO, expect our AI work to be a layer on top, not a second programme. Ask us the same first question you would ask anyone. We track visibility on Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity separately each month. Nobody can see inside an assistant’s choices, us included, so that tracking is a sample of answers. It shows direction, not a count.
Three claims in an AI SEO pitch should stop you, because none of them can be backed up.
Guaranteed placement in AI answers. This sounds like ‘we will get you named in ChatGPT’s answers’. Google’s hiring guide says ‘No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google’. Its AI guide adds that a page meeting every requirement is still not guaranteed to be shown. OpenAI says advertisers ‘have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses’. OpenAI is testing ads in ChatGPT, but they sit below the answer, labelled as sponsored. An ad is not a place in the answer.
A private score nobody else can inspect. This sounds like ‘our AI visibility index shows you well behind your competitors’. Google says third-party SEO tools ‘don’t have access to Google’s internal ranking data’, and warns against tools that claim Google’s approval. No AI assistant publishes how it chooses one business over another. A score from a tool only the agency can use cannot be checked.
Reporting you cannot reproduce. You should be able to open Google Search Console yourself. That is Google’s free tool showing how a site performs in its search results. You should also be able to ask an assistant the questions the agency tracks. Reporting that lives only in the agency’s own dashboard fails both tests.
AI SEO reporting should tell you which numbers are hard data, which show direction, and which are guesswork.
What can be tracked. Search Console has a Generative AI performance report showing how a site performs in Google’s AI features. Google also points to tools such as Google Analytics for what visitors do once they arrive. You can hold your own access to both.
What is directional. An agency can ask assistants a fixed set of questions each month and record who gets named. It is a sample of answers on the day, not a count. Ask for the list of questions so you can ask them too. To run those checks yourself, here is how to find out if your business is invisible to ChatGPT.
What is guesswork. A single AI visibility percentage or share-of-voice score, presented as a hard number, is guesswork. No assistant publishes the data such a number would need.
These questions are for an AI SEO agency in Melbourne, or the provider you already pay, about this offer. They are not questions to ask yourself about buying. Nor are they the monthly ones for checking the SEO you are paying for is being done.
Take the proposal you have and check it against those five questions. The first one usually settles it. An agency that cannot split its own proposal into old and new has already answered. If you have no proposal yet, start with whether a small Melbourne business should pay for AI SEO services yet.
Yes. GEO, AEO and AI SEO are labels for the same work, so judge the proposal rather than the name on it.
No, and a promise like that is a reason to walk away. OpenAI states that advertisers cannot shape ChatGPT’s responses, and Google says nobody can guarantee a top ranking.
Not for Google, which lists it among things its search does not need. Google’s guidance does not speak for other assistants.
Only for the part that is new. Ask your provider to show you, in writing, which work you are not already getting, and pay for that.
Not by default. If your current provider can separate new work from old and report it in ways you can check, adding it there is usually simpler.
