Hire An AEO SEO Consultant In 7 Steps (+ 10 Questions)

An AEO SEO consultant is an expert who helps your brand rank in Google and get chosen, cited and recommended when people ask AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode a question.

My first pick is me and my team at Goldie Agency, and I'm telling you up front that this is my own business, so weigh my bias.

The easiest way to see how we'd work on your brand is to book a free strategy session and get a custom visibility plan for Google and AI.

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation, which is the work of getting your content picked when an AI assistant answers a question.

SEO is the classic work of ranking in search results, and a good consultant now has to do both at once.

This page is the operator's hiring guide, so it covers what the job is, what you should get, seven steps to hire one and the questions that sort the real experts from the rebrands.

What Does An AEO SEO Consultant Do?

An AEO SEO consultant looks at the same website through two lenses.

The SEO lens asks whether Google can crawl, index and rank your pages for the searches your buyers make.

The AEO lens asks whether AI answer engines can read your pages, describe your business correctly and find trusted sources that back you up.

The consultant then gives you a plan that fixes both, in the order that matters most for your business.

Some consultants do the work themselves, and some set the strategy and hand the work to your team or an agency.

You'll also hear GEO, which is generative engine optimisation, and most people use it to describe the same goal of appearing in AI-generated answers.

AEO SEO Consultant vs Classic SEO Consultant

The difference shows up in what each one measures and what each one asks you to change.

Area	Classic SEO consultant	AEO SEO consultant
Main question	They ask whether you rank on page one of Google.	They ask whether you rank and whether AI answers name and cite you.
Crawl checks	They check Googlebot can reach your pages.	They also check OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot can reach them.
Content	They match pages to search intent and keywords.	They also make each page answer the question in its first sentence.
Authority	They focus on backlinks.	They also plan brand mentions on reviews, comparisons and expert articles.
Facts	They check your About and contact pages.	They make your facts match everywhere, so AI tools describe you correctly.
Reporting	They report rankings, clicks and traffic.	They also report dated AI answers for a fixed list of buyer prompts.

The classic work hasn't gone away, because Google's guide to AI features says a page only needs to be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Google also says there's no special schema and no new AI text file needed for those features, so a good AEO SEO consultant builds on normal SEO rather than replacing it.

The Deliverables An AEO SEO Consultant Should Give You

A real engagement leaves a trail of work you can check, even before results show up.

Deliverable	What good looks like
Prompt map	You agree a list of twenty to fifty buyer questions together at the start.
AI answer baseline	You get the dated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google before any work begins.
Crawl access review	You see whether Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot can reach your key pages.
Fact clean-up list	You get every place where your name, services or prices don't match.
Answer-first rewrites	Your money pages open with the direct answer and carry short FAQ sections.
Coverage plan	You get a list of the reviews, comparisons and publications to target first.
Re-check report	You see the same prompts asked again on a schedule, next to clicks and enquiries.

If a proposal has none of these, you're buying a label rather than a service.

🔥 Want to learn the AEO side yourself before you hire? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom, I share my AI SEO trainings and the installable Agent OS I use to track AI answers on my own sites. You'll learn alongside 3,400+ members, with four coaching calls a week. → Get access here

My First Pick: Julian Goldie And Goldie Agency

I'll be straight with you, because this is my own entry on my own site.

I started in SEO with a cryptocurrency website while travelling in Asia, and it got zero Google traffic for months.

That pushed me to learn link building, it worked on my own affiliate sites, and I realised I could sell it as a service.

That's how I started Goldie Agency on my own, and today it's an SEO and link building agency with 70+ people.

The agency site lists link building with manual outreach and no PBNs, a Complete Site Audit and an AI Automation service.

AI runs around 80% of our internal operations through the same Agent OS I teach.

I'm not a solo freelancer, so when you book the session you speak with an experienced strategist from my team.

The strategy session page describes a free AI brand visibility session that helps brands get found, cited and recommended by Google and AI.

It names Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini as the places it plans visibility for.

The page lists a custom visibility plan, a clear AI visibility roadmap, your questions answered by an experienced strategist, a strategy built around your brand, a competitor gap analysis and a plan for traffic, mentions and leads.

It also says the session is 100% free with no obligation.

Best for: Business owners who want the SEO and AEO plan from one call, and then a team that can deliver content, coverage and links.

Price: The strategy session is free, and paid work is scoped after you talk, so I won't quote a number.

→ Book a free strategy session

If you want to compare other individual experts, my best AEO consultant list from this same batch ranks people known for AI search work, and my best SEO consultant list covers respected classic SEO consultants.

How To Hire An AEO SEO Consultant In 7 Steps

This is the order I'd follow if I were hiring one for my own business.

Step 1: Record your own baseline first

Write twenty buyer questions and ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google.

Save every answer with the date, the brands named and the sources cited.

This gives you an independent record, so you never have to take a consultant's report on trust.

Step 2: Check your crawl access

Open your robots.txt and look for rules that block Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.

OpenAI's crawler page recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot to appear in ChatGPT search results, and it treats GPTBot, the training crawler, as a separate setting.

Perplexity's crawler page recommends allowing PerplexityBot to appear in its search results.

Knowing this before the first call lets you test whether the consultant spots it too.

Step 3: Decide what you want the consultant to own

Some businesses want a one-off audit and a plan, and some want a monthly partner.

Some want training for their own team, and some want the consultant to manage an agency on their behalf.

Write that down, because it changes who you should hire.

Step 4: Shortlist three consultants

Pick people who publish their own work on AI search, so you can judge how they think before you pay.

Check that each one talks about both Google and AI answers, rather than only one of them.

Step 5: Run every call with the same questions

Use the ten questions in the next section on every call, and score the answers side by side.

📞 Want to test a strategist against your own baseline? Book a free strategy session with Goldie Agency, bring the AI answers you recorded and see what our competitor gap analysis finds that you missed. You'll keep the visibility plan either way. → Claim your free session

Step 6: Ask for a sample report

Ask each consultant to show you a real or anonymised report with tracked prompts and dated answers.

A consultant who only shows traffic charts is leaving out the AEO half you're paying for.

Step 7: Agree a first phase and a re-check date

Start with a fixed first phase of around ninety days rather than an open-ended contract.

Put the re-check date in writing, and re-ask your baseline prompts on that day yourself.

🚀 Ready to put Hire An AEO SEO Consultant In 7 Steps to work in your business? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step video trainings, my installable Agent OS and four coaching calls a week with 3,400+ members building real automations. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom

10 Questions To Ask An AEO SEO Consultant

Which buyer prompts will you track, and can I choose them with you?
Which AI tools will you check, and how often will you re-ask the prompts?
Will I see the raw dated answers and the cited sources, or only a summary score?
How do you check that OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot can reach my pages?
Which third-party sources would you target first for my brand, and why?
How will you make sure the facts about my business match everywhere online?
How will you measure Google's AI features, given that Google counts them inside the "Web" search type in Search Console?
How do you use AI in your own work, and what does a person review before anything goes live?
What will you need from me each month, such as interviews, quotes or approvals?
Who owns the content, the accounts and the data if we stop working together?

Red Flags When Hiring An AEO SEO Consultant

A consultant who guarantees that ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI will recommend you is promising something nobody controls.
A consultant who sells an AI text file or special schema as the secret is ignoring Google's own guidance.
A consultant who skips the baseline has no honest way to prove the work changed anything.
A consultant who won't show you raw answers is hiding the part you can check.
A consultant who plans thousands of AI-written pages with no human review is putting your site at risk.
A consultant who talks only about AI and never about indexing or links has skipped the foundation.

Nobody Can Guarantee What A Model Says

I'll say this plainly, because it's where buyers get hurt.

Nobody can guarantee what a model says, and that includes me and Goldie Agency.

None of the companies behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude publishes a formula for which brands they recommend.

Google's own guide says meeting its requirements doesn't guarantee crawling, indexing or serving.

What a good AEO SEO consultant controls is the footprint those systems read and the honesty of the reporting.

That's why my own free strategy session gives you a plan and a roadmap rather than a promise.

How I'd Run The Work With AI Agents

I use AI agents for the repetitive parts of this work and keep the judgement for people.

My Agent OS is a dashboard that runs a crew of AI agents, such as Hermes and Claude, under one shared memory.

One agent re-asks the buyer prompts on a schedule and saves each answer, and another reads robots.txt and flags new blocks.

I still review every change, because an agent can be confidently wrong.

That split is worth asking about on every call, because it tells you how much of the fee pays for thinking and how much pays for repetition.

If you want to see the audit side of this job in detail, my AEO audit walkthrough from this batch shows the checks prompt by prompt, and my King of AEO breakdown covers the setup I run daily.

🔥 Would you rather run the AEO work yourself with AI agents? The AI Profit Boardroom has my AI SEO trainings, the Agent OS and the workflows I use every day. There are 3,400+ members inside and four coaching calls a week where you can ask about your own site. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom

If you'd rather learn SEO at a higher level with other experienced operators, my SEO Elite Circle is my SEO mastermind.

My Verdict On Hiring An AEO SEO Consultant

Hire someone who does both SEO and AEO, shows you raw dated answers and never sells you a guarantee.

Record your own baseline before the first call, ask the same ten questions every time and agree a re-check date in writing.

If you'd like my team to look at your brand first, book a free strategy session and leave with a plan for traffic, mentions and leads.

Also On Our Network

FAQ: AEO SEO Consultant

What is an AEO SEO consultant?

An AEO SEO consultant is an expert who helps your brand rank in Google and get chosen and cited in AI answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode.

They combine classic SEO with answer engine optimisation in one plan.

How is an AEO SEO consultant different from a normal SEO consultant?

A classic SEO consultant focuses on rankings, clicks and backlinks in Google.

An AEO SEO consultant also checks AI crawler access, answer-first content, brand facts, third-party mentions and dated AI answers for your buyer prompts.

Who would you hire as an AEO SEO consultant?

I'd start with my own team at Goldie Agency, and I disclose that bias.

The way in is a free strategy session that the page describes as a free AI brand visibility session with a custom visibility plan and a competitor gap analysis.

Can an AEO SEO consultant guarantee I'll appear in ChatGPT?

No, because nobody can guarantee what a model says.

A good consultant improves the footprint AI tools read and reports the answers honestly.

What should an AEO SEO consultant deliver in the first month?

You should get an agreed prompt map, a dated baseline of AI answers, a crawl access review and a list of facts that don't match across your online profiles.

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About Julian

I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.

I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.

I started Goldie Agency on my own, and it is now a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency with 70+ people.
I've grown my YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
I wrote "Link Building Mastery".
My Udemy courses have taught 29,000+ students.

→ Get my best AI training inside the AI Profit Boardroom

Record your baseline, ask the ten questions and insist on dated answers, and you'll hire the right AEO SEO consultant.