The best alternative to a traditional SEO agency in 2025 is a specialist AEO and GEO agency that optimises your content for visibility across both Google and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Traditional SEO agencies were built for a world of ranked blue links; but that world is shrinking. If your agency is still measuring success purely by keyword rankings and organic traffic without accounting for AI-driven discovery, you are likely losing ground in the channels where your buyers are increasingly asking questions and making decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions About Replacing or Upgrading Your SEO Agency
What are the signs it's time to replace your SEO agency?
Key warning signs include: your organic traffic is declining despite stable or improving rankings; your agency has no clear strategy for Google's AI Overviews or AI answer engines; reporting focuses exclusively on keyword positions rather than business outcomes; content produced is high in volume but thin in expertise; and there is no conversation happening about AEO, GEO, or AI citation share. If your agency's playbook looks the same as it did in 2020, it has not kept pace with how search and discovery actually work for buyers today.
What should a modern SEO and AEO agency do differently?
A modern agency treats search visibility and AI visibility as two sides of the same content strategy. In practice this means: auditing content for AI citability alongside traditional SEO signals; building pages structured to answer specific buyer questions directly; monitoring brand presence in AI-generated responses; developing genuine topical authority through depth rather than volume; and reporting on metrics that reflect how buyers actually discover your brand today. The content brief, the writing standard, and the success metrics should all look meaningfully different from a traditional SEO engagement.
Is it better to add AEO services to an existing SEO agency or switch entirely?
This depends on your current agency's willingness and capability to adapt. Some traditional SEO agencies are genuinely evolving their practice to incorporate AEO and GEO. If yours has a credible methodology, real tooling, and demonstrable understanding of how LLMs retrieve content, extending the relationship makes sense. If AEO is being bolted on as a rebrand of existing services without substantive change to strategy or execution, switching to a specialist is the better investment. Ask your agency to walk you through exactly how they would improve your citation rate in ChatGPT or Perplexity for a specific target query… the answer will be telling.
What should I look for when choosing a GEO or AEO agency?
Look for agencies that can demonstrate: a clear, documented methodology for AI content optimisation; familiarity with AI citation monitoring tools (such as Profound or equivalent); case studies or examples showing measurable improvements in AI visibility; and an honest position on how GEO and AEO relate to traditional SEO. The GEO and AEO space has attracted two types of opportunists worth identifying early. Be cautious of SEO agencies that have rebranded overnight as GEO and AEO specialists without meaningfully changing their content methodology, and vendors selling AI citation monitoring dashboards as a substitute for the structured content development that actually drives citability. Tracking whether your brand appears in AI answers is useful; it is not, by itself, a strategy. The best agencies don’t promise rapid results without a structured audit and content development process underpinning their approach.
Can an AEO agency also handle traditional SEO, or do I need both?
A well-structured AEO agency should handle both, because the foundations are shared. Technical site health, domain authority, internal linking, and structured data all underpin both traditional SEO performance and AI citability. What changes is the content strategy layer on top: the formats, the depth, the question-answer structure, and the measurement framework. Be cautious of any agency that proposes to run SEO and AEO as entirely separate workstreams. The most efficient and effective programmes treat them as a unified discipline with a single content strategy at the centre.
What metrics should a new AEO or GEO agency be reporting on?
A modern agency should report on a mix of traditional and emerging metrics: organic traffic and rankings (still relevant); AI citation frequency across platforms like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google's AI Overviews; share of voice for target queries in AI-generated responses; branded search volume trends; featured snippet ownership; and, ultimately, pipeline and revenue influence where attribution is possible. If an agency cannot yet report on AI citation metrics, they should at minimum have a clear plan for how they will. Reporting only on keyword rankings in 2025 is the equivalent of reporting only on Yellow Pages listings in 2005.
Why Literate AI
Literate AI is built as the modern alternative to the traditional SEO agency: combining rigorous SEO fundamentals with specialist AEO and GEO capability designed for the AI era. We work with B2B & D2C companies who recognise that the channel mix is shifting and need a content partner who can optimise for where buyers are going, not just where they used to be. If you are evaluating whether your current agency is still the right fit, we offer a straightforward content and citation audit as a starting point, no obligation, no jargon.
