If you want those enquiries without learning SEO yourself, Heddle's AI agents find what your buyers ask, publish pages that answer them and draft a reply to every enquiry, and a free search audit shows where you're missing today. We build Heddle, so the section on who should buy something else is meant to cost us sales.
What AI SEO means, and what Google says works
The tool vendors define the term broadly. Nightwatch's guide calls it applying machine learning, language processing and large language models to search visibility, then adds a second meaning: optimizing your site so it shows up in AI-generated answers. Salesforce's guide sticks mostly to the first meaning, covering AI for keyword research, content creation, on-page work and link building. SEO.com treats AI SEO, AEO and GEO as the same goal under different names.
Google's view is blunter. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features says AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in the core ranking and quality systems, and that optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." It tells anyone weighing third-party AEO or GEO services to read its guidance on evaluating SEO advice first.
The same guide is specific about what helps. Content that's unique and non-commodity matters more than anything else it lists. Pages should be crawlable and indexable, duplicate content should be reduced, and Business Profile and Merchant Center details should be current. It also warns against making a separate page for every variation of a query. Doing that mainly to manipulate rankings or AI responses breaks Google's scaled content abuse policy.
Google's page on AI features and your website adds that there are no extra technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special schema to add. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. Traffic from these features shows up in Search Console's Performance report, under the Web search type, so you can measure it without a new tool.
One piece of popular advice conflicts with Google directly. SEO.com suggests experimenting with llms.txt. Google said on 15 May 2026 that Google Search ignores llms.txt and Markdown files. Heddle writes llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every page from the built HTML anyway, because other systems may read them. Don't expect either to move your Google results.
Our position is that most of what's sold as AI SEO is SEO with a new label. ChatGPT and Perplexity aren't covered by Google's guidance, and getting named there is the one part that is new.
Even there, the advice from SEO.com comes back to being worth citing: answer first, show evidence, keep your reputation clean. SEO.com also reports that AI searches average about 23 words against three or four for traditional search. That's a reason to write for the intent behind a question rather than a keyword.
Your three options: tools, an agency, or a team of agents
Do it yourself with tools. You pick the tools and someone on your team runs them. Nightwatch, for example, sells rank tracking that also monitors where your brand appears in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Its guide suggests ChatGPT for rewriting sections and Perplexity for gathering referenced facts before you write. This is the cheapest option in money and the most expensive in hours. The tools report problems, and a person still has to fix them.
Hire an agency. SEO.com is run by WebFX, which sells AI SEO and AI Overview optimization services alongside its guide. An agency brings people who've done the work before. Expect a retainer and a monthly report, and ask how much of the work you'll see before it's done.
Use software agents that do the work. SEO.ai calls itself an AI SEO agent that writes and publishes content, builds backlinks through a link exchange network, and can run in auto mode or with approvals. It offers a seven-day trial. Heddle is also a team of agents, with a different stance on what gets published unchecked, covered below.
None of the market sources here publish an agency or tool price, so we won't guess one. Get every quote in writing and compare what each quote actually covers.
What to ask before you pay anyone
These questions separate careful work from volume, whichever option you choose.
- Does anything go live without a person reading it, and can you turn that off?
- How do you stop near-duplicate pages across cities, services or comparisons? Google's scaled content abuse policy is the risk here.
- Where do the links come from? If the answer is a link exchange network, decide whether you'd be comfortable explaining it to Google.
- What's the baseline, what will you measure against it, and when? Google says even a page that meets every requirement may never be crawled, indexed or served, so a promised ranking should worry you.
- Who owns the pages, the data and the accounts if the engagement ends?
Where Heddle fits
Heddle is a team of AI marketing agents that gets a business found in Google and AI answers and makes sure every lead gets a fast reply. The agents page lists fourteen of them, from research and content to links and follow-up, plus a watchdog and a canary that keep watch over the rest.
Each agent runs at one of four levels (off, report, propose, merge), each with a kill switch, a budget floor and signed approval links. Pitches and replies to buyers are always drafted for a person on your team to send.
The method is written down. Every engagement runs the same eight stages, each with a written definition of done, laid out on how it works. Heddle ships 14 page families, each listing the material every page must carry, its doorway risk and how its pages link. It runs 27 checks on built pages, including uniqueness against siblings, claims with evidence, a buyer test and agent readiness.
Those checks come from mistakes on our own sites, where an SEO agent and a content agent run on a schedule. Two city pages once shared 67% of their sentences, so Heddle now measures uniqueness on built HTML against an 80% ceiling.
Thirteen of twenty-five pages in one family were never fetched because every page linked the same nine siblings, and Heddle now rotates sibling links. A page reported at #48 was #3 when read from the city it targets, which is why rankings are read from where the buyer is.
Heddle has no traffic or ranking result to show you yet. The homepage says each story on our own sites gets its numbers once they're in. Heddle is set up in your own repository and accounts, so you keep everything if you stop.
There's no published price: plans are quoted after a free search audit, as the pricing page explains. First pages usually go live in three to five weeks, and the first decision on what to expand or remove lands around two and a half months in.
Who should buy something else instead
If you want a price today and a trial you can start tonight, Heddle won't give you either. SEO.ai's trial is the faster way to see what an agent does on your site.
If you need proof of results before you spend anything, Heddle can't show it yet. An agency with measured case studies you can verify is the better buy for you.
If your site is small and someone on your team has a few hours a week, Google's guidance, a free Search Console account and a rank tracker like Nightwatch may be all you need. That's a fair choice and costs far less.
If you need enquiries this month, organic search won't deliver them on that timeline from anyone. Run paid search directly while the pages mature.
If you want outreach sent in your name automatically, Heddle is built to refuse it, and its agents only publish pages on their own once you allow it and every check passes. And if nobody searches for what you sell, no SEO option will help much. Spend the money on sales instead.