Choosing an AEO agency

An answer engine optimisation agency should be able to tell you what the engines said about you before it started, and re-run the same questions to show what changed. Most cannot, and that is the only qualifying question that matters.

This page is a buyer's guide rather than a pitch, because the category is new enough that the main risk is not choosing the wrong agency — it is buying a service with no way to tell whether it worked. Kunzum is one option and is named as such at the bottom.

Five questions worth asking

Kunzum would answer all five the way the middle column does, but the column is not written to favour Kunzum — it is written from what is publicly documented about how these systems work.

Why the schema question is the sharpest one

As of September 2026, Google’s Search Central documentation on AI features states: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.” Eligibility requires only that a page is indexed and can be shown with a snippet.

A proposal built on structured data, an llms.txt file or an AI-specific technical audit is therefore selling a mechanism the largest engine has publicly denied. This site publishes an llms.txt and uses schema — as parsing aids, not as the reason engines cite it, and not as a billable mechanism.

What has been tested is content substance. Aggarwal and colleagues’ 2023 GEO paper measured which content changes move a generative engine’s output, and Kumar and Palkhouski’s 2025 analysis looked at citation behaviour at wider scale. An agency that can cite these specifically is reading the field; one that cannot is repeating blog posts.

What Kunzum can show you

For completeness, here is what Kunzum would put in front of you if you asked it the five questions above.

1,500 AI responses, published raw. 480 in the Crypto AI Visibility Index and 1,020 in the Crypto Card Report, across four engines and nine markets, with every scoring script included. Under CC BY 4.0, no email gate, no login.

12,518 citations logged across 1,396 domains. Including which engine cited what, so claims about where these systems read are checkable rather than asserted.

Published failures. Edition one registered six hypotheses before any call was made and two failed outright, including the one the study was built around. Both are printed at full size.

A finding against commercial interest. The same corpus found AI warnings about crypto are more accurate than warnings about traditional finance — not the result a crypto marketing studio would have chosen.

All of it is here, and the datasets are downloadable.

What no agency can promise

In Kunzum's own index, ChatGPT ran a web search on 54% of its answers and Claude on 65%. The remainder came from training data, which nothing published afterwards can reach. Any guarantee of placement in AI answers is a guarantee over something the seller does not control.

Engines also vary between runs on the same day, which is why Kunzum's research runs every prompt three times and why no claim here rests on a single reply. And Liu, Zhang and Liang’s work on verifiability found engines frequently state things their own citations do not support, so being cited is not the same as being described accurately.

Kunzum is a narrow fit

Kunzum only works in crypto, takes three clients at a time, and does not run paid, KOL, community or press. For most buyers of AEO that is the wrong shape, and the services page says so before the enquiry form does.

If you are in crypto, the crypto-specific page is the relevant one, and five firms are compared here. If AEO itself is still the open question, start with what it actually is or how it differs from SEO.

Two neighbouring labels cover much the same ground and are worth disentangling before you compare quotes: GEO agencies, where the literature gives you concrete questions, and AI SEO, which covers three different services at three different prices.