Visionary AI Partners publishes 12-question guide for hiring AEO and GEO agencies

Visionary AI Partners, a veteran-owned AI visibility agency in Milford, Connecticut, has released a free checklist to help founder-led service businesses compare providers that optimize for AI answers in tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity. The guide aims to bring some structure to a fast-growing category where buyers are being asked to evaluate results before standards are settled.

Why it matters: - Founder-led service businesses are now being evaluated by AI assistants as well as search engines, which can affect how easily customers find and choose them. - The AEO and GEO market is growing, but there is no standard way to measure results across providers. - Visionary AI Partners is positioning the checklist as a buyer’s guide for comparing agencies on substance instead of marketing claims.

What happened: - Visionary AI Partners published a free guide titled "How to Choose an AEO Agency: 12 Questions to Ask." - The Milford, Connecticut-based agency is U.S. Army veteran-owned. - The guide is aimed at founder-led service businesses evaluating AI visibility agencies. - The checklist is designed to help owners compare providers that say they can improve how a business appears in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Overviews.

The details: - The 12 questions are grouped into three categories: measurement, delivery and business terms. - The measurement section asks which AI engines and customer questions an agency will track, how often it checks, whether wording stays fixed over time, and how missing or failed data is reported. - The delivery section covers what the agency will provide in the first 90 days, how it checks crawler access, indexing and structured data, how it approaches content, and how it earns third-party mentions without buying reviews or links. - The business terms section looks at content, account and data ownership, pricing, contract length, exit terms, and whether the agency can share examples or references. - The guide flags guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or other AI answers as a red flag. - The guide also flags a single score with no explanation of how it is calculated, and missing data reported as zero. - The company said buyers need a practical way to compare agencies because firms often market AEO and GEO services under different labels. - Ed Moran, co-founder and managing partner, said business owners are being asked to buy AI visibility before the industry has agreed on how to measure it. - Moran said the guide is meant to help buyers compare agencies, including Visionary AI Partners, on what gets tracked, what gets delivered and what no one can promise.

Between the lines: - The guide reflects a broader shift in how customers search, with AI assistants increasingly replacing long search-result pages with short answers. - Visionary AI Partners is trying to define a more measurable version of AI visibility at a time when many providers are selling the concept without common benchmarks. - The emphasis on ownership, reporting and exit terms suggests the firm wants buyers to scrutinize agency contracts as closely as performance claims. - Dr. Beth Moran, co-founder and managing partner, said AI platforms are third-party systems and no one can guarantee a recommendation. - Dr. Beth Moran said the controllable part is whether AI can clearly understand who the business is, what it does and where it works.

What's next: - Businesses can use the free AI Visibility Score to assess their public website against published AI-readiness checks. - The assessment returns a score and three prioritized improvement opportunities. - Visionary AI Partners said the score is a website assessment, not a live test of ChatGPT recommendations. - Businesses that want more support can use the company’s paid AI visibility services, which start with a measured baseline across named AI engines and an agreed list of customer questions. - Those services also include reporting missing data separately, a written prioritized plan and ongoing optimization of content, structure and authority signals. - The company also offers AI-optimized websites, custom 24/7 AI voice agents, website chatbots, and CRM and workflow automation. - A companion guide, "What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)? How to Choose a GEO Agency," is also available. - The company’s AI voice agent, Maya, can be reached at (203) 427-0515.