What Should an AIO Agency Offer Your Business?

Introduction

As AI becomes a  dominant force shaping how people discover and engage with brands online, the rules of visibility are changing fast. 

Traditional SEO alone is no longer enough to ensure your brand appears in AI-driven answers (e.g. LLMs such as Chat GPT), summaries, citations or conversations. That’s where AI Optimisation(AIO) steps in.

An AIO agency helps businesses adapt and thrive in the AI-first landscape, making sure your brand is visible, accurately represented and competitive in AI-generated content across platforms like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other Large Language Models (LLMs).

In this blog, our Marketing Director Joseph, outlines what businesses should expect from an AIO agency, what services they can expect and how to choose the right AI partner. 

First, let’s start with the basics.

What Is AI Optimisation?

As explained on our AI Optimisation page, AI Optimisation can have  an impact throughout your buyer journey. From search and discovery to comparison and consideration and check out to post purchase, AI Optimisation focuses on creating the right structure and content to train AI tools to find, understand and represent your brand accurately, helping you to show up in the right places, for the right queries with the right information.

Instead of chasing keyword rankings, as one might with a traditional SEO strategy, AI search Optimisation is about feeding, shaping, and influencing the data AI driven Large Language Models consume, ensuring your brand surfaces favourably in prompt results, summaries, and AI chat responses compared to your competitors.
Then, when the traffic lands on your site, your products, images and customer support system is all geared towards a better experience and ultimately a higher conversion rate. 

Why Brands Need AI Optimisation

In a world where AI tools are becoming the first point of contact for product research, brand comparisons, and purchasing decisions, your brand must be part of the conversation, literally.

Without AI Optimisation, you risk being:

• Overlooked in AI-generated answers
• Misrepresented in AI summaries
• Outpaced by competitors already optimising for LLMs

AI is now the gatekeeper to visibility, trust, and conversions. AIO ensures you’re recognised, trusted, and preferred across the evolving digital landscape.

What’s the difference between AIO and SEO

We cover this in greater detail in another blog. But, in essence while SEO optimises for search engines like Google, AIO optimises for AI large language models that generate content dynamically.

If you are still struggling with how AIO differs from your current SEO work, read our blog on the key differences between the two strategies.

Why use an AI Optimisation Agency

It’s difficult to answer this question without first adding in some context. 

This year SOZO celebrates 25 years in business. To survive, and indeed thrive, we have spent that time adapting and evolving to keep up with new trends.

25 years ago it would have been commonplace for a client to ask for a new logo, a nice advert for a print publication and maybe a brochure to hand out to prospective customers. They may have had two or three marketing assets in total.

But now, the world has changed; consumers are on-line 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from home, from work, even from the bus. And in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, AI technologies are fundamentally changing how consumers search, engage, and make decisions online.

To remain visible, and engage their target audience, brands need to be present on so many channels all the time. 

This shift means businesses must rethink how their brand is positioned in AI-generated content. But keeping up with the pace of change, learning new tools, and aligning it with your existing web, content, and SEO strategies is a big ask for any in-house team.

That’s where an AI Optimisation agency comes in. 

Agencies working across multiple brands gain insights and learnings at speed. They are able to test, adapt, and refine strategies in real time. They also  bring a joined-up approach that complements any current digital ecosystem, from website optimisation to content strategy and AI automation.

Instead of trying to bolt AI knowledge onto an already-stretched marketing team, businesses can rely on an experienced partner to lead the charge; ensuring they stay visible, competitive, and in control of how their brand appears in AI-driven search web.

And, AI’s impact doesn’t stop at the search or discovery stage. As we highlighted in our recent webinar ‘How AI Optimisation Can Supercharge Your eCommerce Growth’ AI tools and techniques can improve results at every stage of the buyer journey. 

It’s a big opportunity but a lot of work.

How to use AI to grow your business 

Really the opportunities here are endless. With the right tools and the right partner, AI can be used to optimise all facets of your business operations. 

From initial discovery to post-purchase personalisation AI can drive scalable, sustainable growth for your business without consuming all of your ad spend.

Here are some of the things we are doing for clients right now:

• Using intent-driven marketing to target audiences based on what they are actually searching for, not just how old they are or where they live.
• Producing a cross-channel content strategy at scale to enhance keyword rankings and maintain a strong presence on Google as well as YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, while also improving research and responding to emerging trends faster than our clients’ competitors
• Maximising lifetime value (LTV), but retaining more customers with personalised experiences post purchase.  
• Using AI to help generate consistent brand content including graphics and videos to improve product listings and conversions

What should an AI optimisation agency offer your business?

Clearly there has been much change in just a short space of time and the full impact of AIO has yet to be tested. 

Therefore, AIO is a new, evolving service. We have just launched our own AI Search Optimisation service  for SMEs and it is clear deliverables may differ from agency to agency, but from our already extensive experience, we think that a forward-thinking AIO partner should offer the following:

1. Measurement and reporting of brand mentions across LLMs

AIO Agencies should track how your brand is represented in AI-generated responses across platforms to understand your visibility and reputation.

2. Analysis of brand citations in Google’s AI Overviews

Understand how Google’s AI Overviews reference your brand and pinpoint areas for optimisation and growth.

3. Improve your online presence and brand authority

Curate and distribute strategic content to shape the data LLMs consume to ensure your brand is trusted, relevant, and consistently highlight favourable comparisons to competitors so your products are mentioned for the right reasons.

4. Competitor monitoring in AI tools

Understand how your AI visibility stacks up and set clear performance goals, while also keeping tabs on how your competitors show up in AI Overviews and chat results to identify gaps and opportunities.

5. AI content strategy for website, social media and forums

Craft high-quality, AI-optimised copy and content tailored for LLM consumption across all your digital touchpoints, from blog posts to Reddit discussions.

Read our blog on how to How to Write AI-Friendly Content for Better Search Visibility

6. Build custom GPTs

Tailored to clients’ internal marketing workflows, we can create GBTs that can help improve efficiency, consistency and content output. We can also deliver AI adoption workshops to teach clients how to write effective prompts; the structure, clarity and context before refining outputs and adding governance to ensure anything posted or published is accurate. 

7. AI Automation Agents

Build automated systems that support marketing, lead generation, or customer support tasks, powered by AI.

8. Regular workshops for insights and strategy

Stay ahead with regular reviews of AI performance and new recommendations tailored to your business goals.

9. AI assistants to boost team productivity

Deploy internal AI tools or agents to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and enhance decision-making.

10. Build Product Description Assistants 

Custom-built AI tools that help clients write brand-aligned, SEO-friendly product copy that matches their tone of voice and speaks to their target audience.

11. Technical website optimisation for LLMs
Ensure your website architecture, schema, and data are structured in ways that LLMs can understand, trust and favour.

Conclusion

AI is changing how people find, learn about, and choose brands. Businesses that embrace AI Optimisation now will be the ones who show up in AI Overviews, dominate product comparisons, and gain a competitive edge in the new AI-driven digital age.

Partnering with an AIO agency like SOZO means your brand won’t just adapt, it will lead.

From visibility in Google’s AI Overviews and other AI driven search to smart content strategies and AI automation, AI is the future of digital marketing 

For more information on our AI Search Optimisation service get in touch today.