What an AEO agency should deliver in the first 90 days
A realistic 90-day plan for Answer Engine Optimization: what should be done in weeks one to two, month one, month two and month three, and what you should see.
SEO
Rank on Google
Blue links, snippets and maps — and the base layer AI reads from.
AEO
Named by assistants
Cited in the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot give.
GEO
Synthesised by AI
The source Google AI Overviews and Gemini build their answer from.
One shared foundation: crawlable, structured, trustworthy content — run as a single program.
If you hire an AEO agency, the first three months set the pattern. By the end of them you should know your baseline, see your own site fixed, and see the off-site work under way. This is the plan we work to, and a fair standard to hold any agency to.
Weeks one and two: the baseline
- Agree 20 to 50 buyer questions, across how-to, comparison, cost and "who should I hire" questions.
- Run each one on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google, and record who is named and which sources are cited.
- Check crawler access, robots.txt, CDN bot settings and whether key text is in the HTML.
- List every public profile of your company and note mismatches.
You should receive the raw results, not only a summary.
Month one: fix your own site
- Open any blocked AI crawlers.
- Rewrite the pages that should win your top questions so the answer comes first.
- Add or correct structured data: Organization, FAQ, Service or Product, Breadcrumb.
- Bring company descriptions on the main profiles into line with each other.
- Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and switch on IndexNow.
Month two: start the off-site work
- Set up a simple, ongoing process to collect genuine reviews on the platforms the assistants cite.
- Complete or create directory profiles that appeared in the source list.
- Pitch inclusion to the authors of comparison and "best" articles that assistants quote.
- Publish comparison and alternatives pages where buyers ask "X vs Y".
Month three: measure and adjust
- Re-run the full question set and compare to the baseline.
- Look at which changes moved which answers, and shift effort accordingly.
- Report enquiries and AI-referred visits, not only mentions.
What you should see by day 90
| Usually visible | Often still in progress |
|---|---|
| Assistants describe you accurately | Appearing in broad "best agency" or "best tool" answers |
| Citations for specific, long-tail questions | Training-data knowledge in new model versions |
| AI referral traffic in analytics | A large number of reviews |
| Your pages appearing in cited sources | Inclusion in every major comparison article |
What you should do in those 90 days
An agency can't do it alone. Plan for a few hours a month from your side: approving page rewrites, introducing the agency to happy customers for reviews, and answering questions about your services so the copy is accurate. Programs where the client is slow to approve changes take noticeably longer.
Our AEO agency page sets out how we run this, and the AI visibility audit is the first two weeks on its own.
Frequently asked questions
- What should an AEO agency do in the first month?
- Establish a baseline of your buyer questions, fix crawler access, rewrite key pages to answer first, correct structured data and align your company facts.
- When should AEO results appear?
- Accuracy and long-tail citations often improve within the first two to three months. Broad recommendation answers usually take longer.
- What should the 90-day report include?
- The same questions re-run against the baseline, the raw answers, the sources cited, the work done on and off your site, and AI-referred visits and enquiries.
- How much of my time does AEO take?
- Usually a few hours a month: approving changes, connecting the agency with customers for reviews, and checking facts.
AI VisibilityAEOGEO
M
Magathi
AI Visibility specialist at Edthi · SEO, AEO & GEO
Leads AI Visibility programs at Edthi, helping companies get found and recommended across Google and the AI engines. Writes about how AI search actually decides who to cite.
Ready when you are.
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