The short answer
An AI SEO agency gets your business named and cited inside AI answers rather than ranked in a list of links. Being based in London is close to irrelevant, because none of the work needs to happen in the room. The question that actually filters the market is simple: show me your own AI visibility, measured over time.
Why location matters less than it used to
Almost nobody needs an AI search specialist within travelling distance. There is no site to visit and no equipment to install. The work is configuration, writing, structured data and measurement, all of which happen wherever the person doing them happens to be.
What a London search still tells you is which agencies are competing for the market you are in, and that is genuinely useful. It just should not be the filter you buy on.
The one question that separates the real from the repackaged
Ask to see their own AI visibility, measured over time.
Not a case study written after the fact. A tracked question set, run on a schedule, showing which assistants name them, for which questions, and how that moved across weeks. An agency selling AI visibility that cannot show its own is asking you to take a theory on trust.
This is a harder question than it sounds, and very few can answer it. That is exactly why it works as a filter.
What good work actually looks like
They check access before they sell you content
The first thing a competent agency does is fetch your site as GPTBot and the other AI crawlers and show you the response. If they never do this, they are guessing.
They fix your entity, not just your pages
One consistent business identity with a stable identifier, matching every external profile. This is unglamorous and it is what makes a model confident enough to say your name.
They write answers, not brochures
Pages with the buyer's question as the heading and the answer in the first two lines. If the drafts read like your old landing pages, nothing has changed.
They measure and show you the log
A fixed question set, run on a schedule, recorded every time. You should be able to see the readings, including the bad ones.
Warning signs worth taking seriously
- Guaranteed placement in AI answers. Nobody can guarantee this, and the promise itself tells you they are not being straight with you.
- A proposal that never mentions crawler access. It is the first check and the most common single cause of invisibility.
- Volume as the whole plan. Fifty thin pages lose to five genuinely specific ones.
- No measurement method. If nobody can tell you how success will be observed, it will not be.
- Invented review counts or ratings in your markup. This damages the trust the whole exercise is trying to build, and it is easy to catch.
Where to start if you are not ready to hire anyone
Run the crawler check yourself. Fetch your homepage while identifying as GPTBot and look at the status code and the body. That single test tells you more than most audits.
Then ask ChatGPT the question your best customer would have asked before they found you, and read who it names. Those are your real competitors in this channel, and their pages will show you what a winning answer looks like in your category.
If both of those come back healthy, your problem is content shape rather than access, and that is a much better problem to have.