Question 1

What does an AI SEO consultant do?

Accepted Answer

An AI SEO consultant works out whether AI engines name your brand, then changes the things that decide it. That means finding the prompts your buyers ask, measuring which brands ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews name in reply, fixing what stops their crawlers reading your pages, restructuring content into sections an engine can quote, and getting mentioned on the third-party sites those engines trust. The title varies, from AI SEO specialist to AEO consultant, and the job stays the same. What separates one consultant from another is how much of that list they do themselves.

Question 2

What do we get when we hire RankZero as our AI SEO consultant?

Accepted Answer

First, a measured baseline of the prompts your buyers ask, tracked daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and a 90-day roadmap before any work begins. Then the work itself: technical fixes first, then 10, 20, or 30 new content pieces a month depending on your tier, in-depth optimization of the pages you already have, and a map of the sources the engines read, with the posts and pitches for them drafted, never paid placements. Who sends them is agreed with you. Alongside it you get a standing strategy call, from monthly to weekly depending on tier, and a monthly performance report built from your own GA4 and Search Console.

Question 3

How is that different from hiring one independent AI SEO consultant?

Accepted Answer

Mostly in capacity and continuity. An independent AI SEO expert splits one month between strategy, audits, writing, technical tickets, and outreach, so how much ships is capped by one calendar, and the work pauses when that person is away. The skills are also separate trades: fixing rendering and schema, writing passages an engine will quote, and getting mentioned on sites you do not own. With RankZero those run in parallel inside one retainer. The tracking runs on an engine we built and use on our own brand, and the result is judged in your analytics, not ours.

Question 4

When is RankZero not the right fit?

Accepted Answer

In four cases, and it is better to say so before a call than after one. If you want a one-off audit and a document to hand your team, our work is a monthly retainer, so start with the free AI SEO audit or hire a consultant for a fixed project. If you already have developers, writers, and outreach capacity and only need direction, an advisory consultant suits you better, since you would be paying us for execution you do not need. If you want links bought or a specific placement promised, we do neither: we map and draft the off-site work, and no single mention is guaranteed. And if your buyers mostly search in a language other than English, German, or Dutch, those are the only three where a native speaker writes or reviews our work.

Question 5

What should we ask any AI SEO consultant before hiring one?

Accepted Answer

Four questions separate the work from the label. Where do your visibility numbers come from, and can we see the prompts behind them? Which AI engines do you track, and how often? Which fixes do you ship yourself, and which land in our backlog? And what outcome do you commit to, measured in whose analytics? Be wary of anyone who promises a spot in Google AI Overviews: nobody controls that placement, so a commitment worth having is one you can check in your own data. Ask us the same four on the call.

Question 6

Should we hire an in-house AI SEO specialist instead?

Accepted Answer

Possibly later, and for a large marketing team it can be the right long-term setup. The trade is timing. An in-house AI SEO specialist means staffing a discipline that has no settled playbook yet, before you know what the channel is worth to you, and one hire still depends on engineering and content time before anything ships. A sensible order is to run a managed program first, see what moves in your own analytics over the first 90 days, and then decide which parts of the work you want to own.

Question 7

Do you work with startups, or only larger SaaS companies?

Accepted Answer

Both. We work with SaaS and ecommerce brands from seed to scale-up, and what changes with stage is the order of the work. For an early-stage startup, the first job is making sure engines can describe you at all: plain category language, structured data, and a presence on the review and comparison sites they cite in your category. Later the emphasis moves to coverage, winning the long tail of prompts buyers ask when they compare you with named competitors.

Question 8

How will we know it is working?

Accepted Answer

You can check it yourself. Daily prompt runs across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews show whether each engine names you, which competitors it names instead, and which sources it cites, against the baseline we take before work starts. Traffic is the other half. We commit to a 25% rise in AI-referred sessions in your own GA4 within your first 90 days, measured against the 90 days before kickoff.

Question 9

How much does an AI SEO consultant cost?

Accepted Answer

Independent consultants price AI SEO consulting by the hour, the day, the project, or the month, so quotes are hard to compare line by line. RankZero is a monthly retainer in three tiers, scoped to your site and goals on a call instead of a published rate card. When you compare, set a consultant fee next to the internal time it takes to ship their plan, because our retainer covers the work as well as the advice.

Question 10

What happens when we book a call?

Accepted Answer

You get a free 15-minute working call. Before it, we run an audit on your domain, so the call opens on findings: where AI answers and Google show you today, which competitors get recommended in your place, and a roadmap for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini. Nobody technical needs to join. If we turn out not to be the right fit, you keep the audit and the roadmap either way.

Hiring an AI SEO consultant? Get the plan and the team that ships it.

A plan only changes AI answers once it ships

How a RankZero AI SEO consultant engagement runs

Brand and citation baseline

Source of truth audit

Implementation: schema, entities, answer-shaped content

Authority and citation building

Monthly AI visibility scorecard

Think of us as your fractional Head of AI Visibility

AI SEO consultant, explained without the buzzwords

AI SEO vs traditional SEO

AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini

Citations, not rankings

Entity authority and training data

llms.txt and schema are real work

What it costs, honestly

AI SEO consultant, compared honestly

Services we deliver in this pillar

Execution, not reporting

We run our own engine

Engine coverage

AI visibility work that moved real revenue

5× more buyers finding them in Google, in two months.

The #2 brand AI recommends, above 8 category leaders.

10% of monthly revenue from AI search, at margins closer to organic than paid social.

Every engine, tracked for you daily

25%+ AI traffic lift in 90 days

Get recommended by AI,
before your competitors are.

Questions, answered

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