AI search
Best AI SEO agency UK? How to actually choose one
There is no established best AI SEO agency in the UK, because the category was named in 2024 and no British firm has a track record in it yet. Anyone claiming a decade of generative engine optimisation experience is describing something that did not exist. Search the term and the agency results resolve mostly to Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Singapore, Perth and a set of software vendors. That leaves four real options for a UK business: an offshore agency, a monitoring tool you run yourself from around $29 a month, a traditional SEO agency adding the service, or a small UK specialist. For most small businesses the free work matters more than the choice of provider. Submit your site to Bing, which is where ChatGPT and Copilot retrieve from. Check your robots.txt is not blocking the answer crawlers. Get the business listed somewhere other than its own website. Those three take an afternoon and need no agency.
I run one of the businesses this article is about, so read it with that in mind. I have tried to write the piece I wanted when I started looking into this, which is a comparison that admits when the answer is to hire nobody.
Why is nobody the established best?
Generative engine optimisation was named in a research paper published at KDD in 2024. Before that the practice had no agreed name and no measured evidence behind it. Any UK firm claiming long expertise is either stretching the definition or describing ordinary SEO.
None of that is a criticism of the people doing the work. It does mean the usual signals for choosing an agency, years in business, case studies, awards, are not available yet. You are choosing on method rather than on track record, so the questions below are about method.
What are the four options?
| Option | Typical cost | Suits | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offshore AI SEO agency | Varies widely, often the cheapest quote | Businesses with in-house marketing who can brief and check the work | Timezone, and copy written for a UK audience is a genuine skill. Citing UK regulators matters in regulated sectors and is easy to get wrong from outside. |
| A monitoring tool, run yourself | From around $29 a month at the entry tier | Anyone who wants to see the problem before paying someone to fix it | A tool tells you that you are not being cited. It does not write the pages or earn the mentions. Buying one and changing nothing changes nothing. |
| Your existing SEO agency | Usually an add-on to the retainer | Businesses already on a retainer that is working | Ask what they are actually doing differently. If the answer is "we added an llms.txt", you are paying twice for the technical SEO you already had. |
| A small UK specialist | Folded into search pricing, or £495 upwards for an audit | Small businesses who want one accountable person | Capacity. A solo practice cannot run six workstreams, and none of us have the track record yet. |
Which AI visibility tools are worth looking at?
Naming these costs me work and it is still the right answer, because for a lot of businesses a tool plus an afternoon is the correct purchase. All of these track whether you are being mentioned in AI answers:
- Profound, aimed at enterprise, priced accordingly.
- Peec AI, self-serve analytics and reporting.
- Otterly, the cheapest entry point of the three and the most agency-shaped.
On what actually moves the needle, the researchers who named the field put it plainly:
“Our results show that techniques effective in search engines may not translate to this paradigm, and that content-level changes can substantially improve visibility in generative engine responses.”
Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024.
You will find comparison articles quoting precise market-share percentages for the tools above. Treat those numbers carefully: they circulate on vendor and affiliate blogs rather than in primary research, and I have not been able to trace them to a source worth citing.
The free version of the same job is a spreadsheet. Write down ten questions a customer would really ask, put them to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity once a month, and record who gets named. That is a small sample and it is honest about being one, which is more than most dashboards manage.
What should I ask a provider before hiring?
Six questions. The answers separate people who understand the mechanics from people who have rebranded an SEO package.
- Is my site in Bing, and did you check? ChatGPT and Copilot retrieve from Bing. A provider who has not looked at Bing Webmaster Tools before quoting has skipped the cheapest thing on the list.
- Which crawlers will you allow, and which will you block? The right answer distinguishes answer crawlers from training crawlers. Blocking GPTBot costs you nothing in visibility. Blocking OAI-SearchBot makes you invisible. Both are documented by OpenAI.
- What will you do off my website? If a search for my exact business name returns only my own domain, no engine will confidently recommend me. That is usually the biggest gap and it is not fixed by editing pages.
- What are you basing the content advice on? There is a measured answer available. The 2024 study found citing sources, adding statistics and adding quotations each worth up to 40% more visibility, and found authoritative tone and keyword stuffing worth nothing at all.
- How will you measure it, and what will you not claim? There is no Search Console for AI answers. Anyone showing you a precise AI ranking report is showing you a sample dressed up as a metric.
- What does this cost on top of SEO? Most of the technical work is the same work. Being charged twice for one crawl audit under two names is the most common way this gets mis-sold.
What should I do before hiring anyone?
Three things, all free, all commonly skipped, and doing them first means you are paying for the hard part rather than the obvious part.
- Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. Ten minutes. Two of the five major engines depend on it.
- Read your robots.txt. One stale
Disallow: /left over from a staging site blocks everything. It happens more than you would think. - Search your exact business name. If nothing comes back except your own website, your first job is a Google Business Profile and two or three real directory listings, not a retainer.
If all three are already done and you are still invisible, that is the point at which paying someone becomes sensible.
When is Werehouse Media the wrong choice?
Worth being direct, since I am one of the four options above.
- You need a team with cover. One person means one holiday and a limited number of projects at once. If you need a guaranteed response time, buy an agency.
- You want a monthly AI ranking report. I will give you a hand-checked list of ten questions and who got named. If your board needs a chart with a trend line, I cannot honestly produce one.
- You are pre-revenue and testing an idea. Buy a tool for a month and read the output. You will learn the same thing for a fraction of the money.
- You want someone to guarantee you appear in ChatGPT. Nobody can. There is no ranking to buy and no submission form, and the same assistant asked twice can name different businesses.
So what does good look like?
Good looks like this. A provider starts with the free work. They can tell you which engine reads which index. They distinguish answer crawlers from training crawlers without being prompted. They base content advice on the measured levers rather than on tone, stay specific about what cannot be measured, and do not charge you twice for the technical half of SEO.
Method is something you can check in one conversation, which is fortunate, because in a category this young it is the only thing there is to check.
If you want a second opinion on a quote you have had, send it over. Ask me, and I will tell you whether it is fair, including when the answer is that you should take it. There is more detail on how the work runs on the AI search optimisation page, and a practical walkthrough in getting recommended by ChatGPT and AI search.