Essay · 07

Who can I hire to get my company cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity?

13 July 2026 · 6 min read

To get your company into ChatGPT and Perplexity answers you have three options: do it yourself, hire a freelance specialist who focuses on AI search visibility (the work is sometimes called AEO or GEO), or hire a content or PR agency that has added it as a service. There is no certification, no official directory, and nobody you can pay to be "listed" inside an AI engine, so you are vetting on evidence, not credentials. What you are really buying is time and judgement: most of the work can be done in-house if you have the hours, so hire when you would rather someone who has done it before run it for you.

Here's the deal: the hard part isn't the hiring, it's telling the real ones from the rest in a field that's two years old and full of people who learned the buzzwords last month. Below is how I'd vet anyone for this, and how to decide whether to hire at all.

What do I even search for? The job has several names

The first problem is knowing what to search for, because the job doesn't have an agreed name yet. You'll see "answer engine optimization" (AEO), "generative engine optimization" (GEO), "AI search visibility," and plain "getting cited by AI." They all describe the same work: getting your business named and linked when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation. The missing label tells you something useful on its own. This field is barely two years old, which means the people working in it are self-taught operators, not graduates of a programme. Judge them on what they can show you, not on a title.

Your three options: do it yourself, a specialist, or an agency

There are three realistic ways to get this done, and none of them is the right answer for everyone.

Do it yourself. Almost everything that earns an AI citation is public knowledge, and most of it isn't technical. If you have the time and someone in-house who can write clearly and follow a checklist, you can move the needle without paying anyone. You're trading hours for money.

Hire a freelance specialist. One person who does only this. Best when you want it owned end to end by someone who has done it before and you'd rather not manage an agency. This is the async, productised end of the market.

Hire a content or PR agency. Best when you already buy content or PR and want AI search bundled into work you're commissioning anyway. The risk is that it becomes a line item nobody actually specialises in, so ask who specifically will do the work and what they've gotten cited. If you have time, DIY genuinely works. If you don't, that's exactly what you're paying to solve.

What a good AI-search specialist actually does

Whoever you hire, the real work is the same four things, so you should hear all four described before you pay anyone.

First, they measure. They run the real questions your buyers ask across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI answers, on a schedule, and record whether you're mentioned, whether you're linked, and who shows up instead. Without measurement, nobody can tell you whether the work is working. (Here's how to measure it yourself, if you want to check their number against your own.)

Second, they write content shaped to be quoted. AI engines lift self-contained paragraphs, not whole pages, so the work is answer-first writing that stands on its own.

Third, and this is the big one, they earn presence on the third-party surfaces engines actually cite. When an AI engine recommends a company, it usually links a Reddit thread, a review site, or an industry article rather than the company's own site. Muck Rack's Generative Pulse study puts earned media at around 84% of AI citations (Muck Rack Generative Pulse, May 2026). A specialist who only talks about editing your own pages is missing most of the job.

Fourth, they get the machine-readable basics right so the crawlers can read you at all: an open robots.txt and clean structured data. You can check your own robots.txt in thirty seconds with my AI Visibility Check. If someone describes all four of these, they understand the work. If they only talk about your website, keep looking.

How to vet someone before you pay them

Here's the checklist I'd use to vet anyone for this work, me included:

• Do they measure citation rate, or only talk about "improving" it? Measurement is the tell. Anyone serious tracks a number and can show it moving.
• Can they show you their own results? A dogfood on their own site, a before-and-after, real citations they've earned. If they can't get themselves cited, be careful about paying them to cite you.
• Do they talk about earned, third-party coverage, or only on-page tweaks? Off-site is roughly 84% of the game, so an on-page-only answer is a half-answer.
• Are they honest about timelines? The right answer is weeks, not days. Crawlability fixes register in a crawl cycle, but earned citations compound over four to eight weeks or more.
• Will they show you their method? If it's a black box you can't inspect, you can't tell competence from confidence.

Red flags: who to walk away from

Walk away from any of these, no matter how good the pitch sounds:

• A guarantee of the top spot or overnight results. There's no ranking to guarantee and no overnight in this work.
• "Pay to be listed in ChatGPT" or "we'll submit you to the AI engines." There is no submission and no paid placement for organic citations. It doesn't exist, and anyone selling it is either confused or lying.
• Pure schema-stuffing, or on-page "AI optimisation" with no mention of off-site coverage. That's half the job dressed up as the whole job.
• Anyone who won't show their own citations or explain their method. If they can't demonstrate it on themselves, you're the experiment.

What should this cost?

I won't quote you a market rate, because the field is too new and too varied for an honest one. But you can think about cost by the shape of the engagement rather than a number. A one-off audit is the cheapest way to find out where you actually stand: what you're cited for now, who beats you, and which gaps to close. It's the right first purchase because it tells you whether you even need ongoing help. Project work fixes a defined set of gaps the audit found, then stops. A retainer is for ongoing earning of citations, which is genuinely ongoing work because engines re-crawl on their own schedule and competitors keep moving.

There's one more cost that never shows on an invoice: how much of your time the engagement eats. Async, productised work costs you almost none. Calls-heavy retainers cost you hours every week. For most founders the async version is the point, not a compromise.

Where I fit

Since you're reading this on my site, the honest disclosure: this is the work I do. I ghostwrite the content, and build the citation surfaces and schema, that gets companies cited by AI search. Case Study Zero runs on this site itself, in public. It started at cited in zero of seven buyer queries, which is the most useful baseline I own, and you can watch what moves it.

The boundary, because it matters more than the pitch: if the real problem is your product or your reviews, AI visibility won't paper over it, and I'll tell you that before you pay me. Getting cited makes a good business easier to find. It doesn't make a bad experience look good.

If you'd rather understand the method than hand it over, everything above is the method, and there's a longer version in how to get cited by AI search engines. If you'd rather have it run for you, the contact form is the channel.

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