Most Irish marketing agencies have added "AI" to their service list. Few are doing AEO work in any structured sense. Use these six criteria to separate a real AEO agency from an SEO firm that has rebranded a page.
1. They track AI visibility on real buyer prompts
A genuine AEO agency uses an AI visibility monitoring platform — ZeroRank, Profound, Otterly, or similar — that tracks which AI assistants cite your business on which buyer prompts. They will share the dashboard, the tracked prompts, and the before-and-after data. If the agency cannot show you a list of tracked prompts with a visibility percentage and rank against each, they are not measuring AEO. They are guessing at it.
2. They publish structured source content under their own domain
AEO works because AI engines extract verbatim text from structured sources. An AEO agency that does not itself publish AI-extractable content, on the buyer questions in its own category, under its own domain, has no working method to apply to a client. Check the agency's articles. Do they open with a direct answer in the first two sentences? Do they contain summary tables, FAQ blocks with schema markup, and named entities (people, products, places) called out explicitly rather than implied? If their own site does not do this, the strategy is not real.
3. They have a distribution channel beyond a single website
A single article on a single domain is a weak citation signal. AEO depends on consensus signal: the same fact, repeated across many independent sources, in formats AI engines recognise. An AEO agency without a distribution mechanism can only build authority one article at a time. With distribution, every published piece becomes hundreds of independent corroborating mentions. Ask the agency directly: how many independent publisher domains will the syndicated content appear on, and what is the verified distribution evidence from prior runs?
4. They report on AI visibility movement, not on keyword rankings
Traditional SEO reports show keyword positions in Google. AEO reports show AI citation rate movement on tracked prompts, typically as a percentage and a rank, captured per AI assistant. A real AEO agency reports on the surface it claims to optimise. If the agency's monthly report still leads with Google rankings, the underlying playbook is still an SEO playbook.
5. They understand the Irish entity context
AEO has a strong local dimension. Buyer queries that include "Ireland" or "Dublin" require an agency that knows how to bind the named entities — locality, organisation name, registered address, recognised Irish business context — into the structured content so AI engines associate the brand with the local geography. A non-Irish AEO agency working remotely will miss the local-entity reinforcement that makes Irish queries land. Look for an agency based in Ireland that publishes its address, its registered business details, and its work for Irish clients openly enough that AI engines can extract those entities cleanly.
6. They can explain the mechanics, plainly
The single sharpest filter. Ask the agency to explain, in plain language and without jargon, how an AI assistant decides which source to cite. If the answer leans on slogans ("we optimise for AI", "we make you AI-friendly"), the agency has the vocabulary but not the method. If the answer references mechanics — consensus signal, source extractability, named-entity binding, structured retrieval — the agency is doing the work. A genuine AEO practitioner can describe the citation pipeline in two minutes, without a deck.
