Best AI SEO agency UK? How to actually choose one

We run one of the businesses this article is about, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to write the piece we wanted when we started looking into this: a guide that names no agencies, including us, and admits when the answer is to hire nobody. If you came looking for the service itself rather than advice on choosing, our AI SEO services page sets out what we do and what it costs.

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?

Which AI visibility tools are worth looking at?

Naming these costs us 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 we 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.

How do I read a "best AI SEO agency" list?

Most of the lists you will find are written by agencies, and most of those agencies put themselves first. That does not make every list useless, but it changes how to read one. Five questions:

1. Who wrote it? Look for the publisher's name at the top and in the footer. An agency's own blog is marketing, however it is dressed.
2. Is the author's firm at number one? If it is, read the rest of the list as the author's view of their competitors.
3. Are the criteria and prices stated? A list that ranks firms without saying how, or without a single price, cannot be checked.
4. Is anyone independent? A trade publication, a directory with verified reviews, or a buyer writing about their own experience carries more weight than any agency.
5. When was it updated? This field changes monthly. A list from last year describes a different market.

The AI engines appear to read these lists the same way. Lily Ray tracked 100 "best" queries in Google's AI Overviews between April and June 2026 and found that when a brand's own self-promotional list was cited as a source, that brand was left out of the actual recommendation 69% of the time, 224 of 323 lists (Lily Ray, June 2026). Being cited is not the same as being recommended.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. What will you do off my website? If a search for our exact business name returns only our own domain, no engine will confidently recommend us. That is usually the biggest gap and it is not fixed by editing pages.
4. 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.
5. How will you measure it, and what will you not claim? Since June 2026, Google's Search Console reports impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode (Google Search Central), but only impressions: no queries, no clicks, and nothing about ChatGPT or Perplexity. Anyone showing you a precise AI ranking report for those engines is showing you a sample dressed up as a metric.
6. 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.

1. Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. Ten minutes. Two of the five major engines depend on it. While you are there, check Google Search Console's AI report to see whether you already appear in AI Overviews.
2. Read your robots.txt. One stale Disallow: / left over from a staging site blocks everything. It happens more than you would think.
3. 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.

What does the work involve each month?

Ask for this in writing, because it is where the difference between a real service and a relabelled SEO package shows. A sensible month has four parts, and only the first two happen on your website:

• Access. Is the site in Bing and Google, and can the answer crawlers read it? Once this is right it needs checking, not redoing.
• Pages an answer can quote. The question in the heading, a direct answer underneath, sources and real figures. One or two pages a month done properly beats twenty thin ones.
• Mentions elsewhere. Directories, trade bodies, local chambers and roundups that an engine can read. This is the slow part and usually the part that matters most.
• Measurement. The same list of buyer questions put to the same engines on a fixed schedule, with the answers logged. If a provider reports only a score from their own dashboard, ask to see the answers.

How much does AI SEO cost in the UK?

We have not found a reliable market figure, and we would treat any confident "average" with care. What we can give you is the range of ways to pay, using figures from this article and our own published prices:

Whoever you choose, be wary of a guarantee. Nobody controls what an AI answer says, and the same question can produce a different answer from one day to the next, which is why the measurement has to be repeated and not taken once.

When is Werehouse Media the wrong choice?

Worth being direct, since we are one of the four options above.

• You need a team with cover. A studio this size runs a limited number of projects at once. If you need a guaranteed response time, buy an agency.
• You want a monthly AI ranking report. We will give you a hand-checked list of ten questions and who got named. If your board needs a chart with a trend line, we 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.

Questions we get asked about this

Which AI SEO agency is the best?

Nobody can honestly claim that yet, because the practice is too new for anyone to have a long record in it. Judge providers on method instead: whether they check Bing, distinguish answer crawlers from training crawlers, work on your mentions away from your own site, base content advice on measured evidence, and say plainly what they cannot measure.

How much does AI SEO cost?

It varies by provider and is often folded into SEO pricing. Ours is included in every search engagement at no extra charge: an SEO and AI visibility audit normally £495 and free until 31 December 2026, local SEO from £695 a month, or a full search programme from £995 a month. A monitoring tool on its own starts from around $29 a month.

What are AI SEO services?

The work of getting a business named in answers written by ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot: Bing indexation, letting the answer crawlers in, consistent listings and mentions on other sites, and pages written so an engine can quote them. Our AI search agency page has the detail.

If you want a second opinion on a quote you have had, send it over. Ask us, and we 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, a practical walkthrough in getting recommended by ChatGPT and AI search, and a free SEO and AI visibility audit if you would rather we looked first.