AI SEO Agency: What It Actually Does And How To Choose One

An AI SEO agency is a business that uses AI tools inside a normal SEO service. Usually for keyword research, drafting content and checking a website for technical problems.

There is no separate discipline called AI SEO with its own rules. There is SEO, done well or badly, with or without help from AI.

I should say where we sit before going any further. SEO is not our main service. Altrincham AI is an AI consultancy and automation business, and most of our work is training teams and building workflows. But we do offer SEO, and we run it the way this post describes. We built the system for our own websites first.

What an AI SEO agency actually does

Strip away the branding and the work sits in three places.

Keyword research, with AI sorting and scoring a list a person would otherwise go through by hand. Content, where AI writes a first draft and a person edits it, or does not. Technical checks, where software scans the site every day and flags pages Google has not indexed.

None of that is new. What AI changes is mainly the speed of the first pass. The judgement still has to come from somewhere.

So the question worth asking any agency is not whether they use AI. It is which bit, and what happens to the output after.

There is a second meaning creeping in too. Some agencies now use AI SEO to mean getting your business mentioned in the answers ChatGPT and similar tools give. That is a related job, not the same one. Ask which they mean, because being good at one does not make them good at the other.

How we run it on our own sites

I'll give you an example, because it is the easiest way to show what good looks like.

Every morning at five past six, a workflow checks our website through Google Search Console. If a page has dropped out of the index, or something is broken, that gets dealt with before anything else. No new content until the site is healthy.

Then it picks a keyword from a list, and Claude writes a first draft. Two other AI models, Gemini and GPT, read it separately and mark it out of ten. If they disagree, Claude reviews it as well.

Any point that two or more reviewers raise has to be fixed. A point only one of them raises is noted for me to look at. After editing, the draft is checked again. If it still scores under seven, it is marked as held and I am told not to publish it.

The bit that stays with me is the reading. Nothing goes live until I have read it, fixed what needs fixing and decided it is worth publishing.

I'll be honest with you. The reviewers are harsher than I expected. One of them gave the first draft of this very post three out of ten and said do not publish. It was right. The draft had us sounding like something we are not.

It is also early. We have been running this for a few weeks, and I cannot tell you yet whether it ranks better than a person writing on their own. I'd rather say that than show you a graph from week three.

The honest problem with "AI first"

The Office for National Statistics found that businesses using AI average 1.6 AI technologies each, and only one in ten describe their use as extensive. That is about UK businesses generally, not SEO agencies. But it is a fair reason to be sceptical of a badge.

An agency calling itself AI first has told you it bought a tool. It has not told you whether anyone there knows how to use it past the first layer.

Questions worth asking before you sign anything

Ask what the AI is actually doing, task by task. "We use AI throughout" is not an answer.

Ask who checks the output before it goes live. Google's own guidance on helpful, reliable content is about whether a page was made to help the reader or to game the rankings. It does not say AI written pages are penalised. It does mean a thin page will be judged thin, whoever or whatever wrote it.

Ask for a page they built that is still ranking a year later. Ask what you get each month, who owns the content and the data if you leave, and how they report back.

A quick look on Companies House will tell you when a company was incorporated. It will not tell you when they started doing SEO, and it does not cover sole traders at all. Treat it as one check, not proof.

When an AI SEO agency is the wrong hire

If you need content produced in large volumes, a technical migration on a complicated site, or digital PR and link building, you want a specialist built for that. That is not us, and I'd rather tell you now.

Where we fit is a smaller business that wants a steady, checked process. Regular posts, a site that is kept healthy, and a plain automated report each week showing whether any of it is working. The same systems thinking we use for automation and reporting work, applied to a website.

If you are weighing up agencies more generally, we have written about how to buy from an AI automation agency without wasting your money. Most of the same questions apply.

The honest limit

AI does not fix a website with a weak offer, thin service pages or no reviews. It speeds up the mechanics around a business that already has something worth finding.

If the underlying site and service are not there yet, no amount of AI changes that. Any agency telling you otherwise is selling the tool, not the outcome.

If you are around Altrincham, Hale or further into Manchester and want to talk it through, get in touch. I'll tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.