By Carson Cobb. Updated November 2026.
Every agency now sells “AI search.” Some of them are doing real work. Some renamed their SEO package. Here are the questions I’d ask if I were hiring someone for my own brand, and what a good answer sounds like.
1. Which AI tools do you track?
Good answer: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode at minimum. They agree less than you’d expect: only 23% of brands named came from all three.
Red flag: “We optimize for AI” with no specific tools named.
2. How do you measure whether it’s working?
Good answer: a fixed set of real buyer questions for your products, run on a schedule, tracking how often you’re named, where you rank in the answer, and who’s named instead.
Red flag: reporting only Google rankings or traffic, or one screenshot of a single question. One question tells you almost nothing, since rewording it changes the top pick more often than not.
3. Which questions will you test?
Good answer: questions written the way shoppers ask AI, short and long, at the product level. AI queries are much longer than Google searches, and the long ones often name a need (“fragrance free, for sensitive skin, under $40”).
Red flag: a list of keywords.
4. Do you work in our theme code or install an app?
Good answer: either can be fine, but they should be able to explain exactly what changes on your product pages and why, and leave you with something you own.
Red flag: an app that injects product data with JavaScript. AI crawlers often don’t run scripts, and a second product data block from an app is a common cause of wrong ratings in AI answers.
5. What do you do about outside sources?
Good answer: they find which review sites, articles, Reddit threads and videos the AI cites for your questions, and have a plan to get your brand into them. ChatGPT showed a source in 45 of 48 product answers I tested.
Red flag: on site fixes only, with no view of what the AI is reading elsewhere.
6. What’s your take on llms.txt?
Good answer: it’s harmless and not a priority. Shopify already gives 95% of stores a default one, and no major AI search product says it reads the file.
Red flag: llms.txt sold as the main deliverable.
7. Will you also fix conversion?
AI referred shoppers arrive with a specific promise in mind, and they convert well when the page backs it up. Someone who only works on visibility will send those shoppers to a page that wasn’t built for them.
Good answer: they look at the product page the AI sends people to and make sure it confirms what the AI said.
8. Who actually does the work?
Good answer: a named senior person you can talk to.
Red flag: a sales lead you never hear from again after kickoff.
Agency or specialist?
For most Shopify brands doing under a few hundred thousand dollars a month, a senior specialist who does the work directly is the better fit. You get the person who knows your account, without paying for layers. A larger agency makes sense when you need a big content and PR operation running alongside.
I’m a specialist in AI search and conversion for Shopify brands, with 50+ AI search audits and 30+ stores optimized, from startups to billion dollar brands. Here’s how I work and what it costs, or start with the AI Visibility Check.
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- Why doesn't ChatGPT recommend my Shopify store?
- Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me?
- How to get your Shopify products into ChatGPT shopping
- How much does AI search optimization cost for a Shopify brand?