"AI agency" covers two distinct disciplines. Build agencies develop AI products for you: chatbots, automation, custom models. Visibility agencies make sure AI systems find, cite and recommend your brand when customers ask. CitationLab is the second kind. If you want a chatbot on your website, we are not your agency — and we will say so.
The two kinds of AI agency
They share a name and almost nothing else.
Build agencies
They develop AI for you: chatbots, workflow automation, custom models, RAG systems on your own data. You are buying engineering. Success is a working product.
Right for you if: you want to automate internal processes, add AI features to a product, or build a customer-facing assistant.
Visibility agencies
They work on how AI systems see you. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation in your category, visibility agencies decide whether your name comes up. You are buying demand, not software.
Right for you if: your customers have started asking AI before they ask Google, and you do not know what it says about you.
CitationLab is a visibility agency.
What a visibility agency actually does
Measures what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overview say about you today — the baseline most companies have never seen
Maps which questions in your category you appear in, and which competitors take your place
Fixes the sources those answers are built from: your own content, third-party mentions, structured data, entity consistency
Publishes answer-shaped content that models can actually retrieve and cite
Tracks citations, sentiment and share of voice over time, so the work is measurable rather than asserted
How to evaluate one
Four questions that separate a real specialist from a side service.
Can they show you your current baseline?
If they cannot tell you what AI says about you today, they cannot tell you whether anything improved.
Do they measure citations, or just mentions?
Being mentioned is not being cited as the source. Citations are what send traffic and confer authority.
Is AI visibility their main business or an add-on?
Most agencies added an AEO line to an existing SEO offer. Ask what share of their revenue it is.
Do they report on a schedule you can audit?
Model answers change weekly. Quarterly reporting cannot catch that.
Frequently asked questions
What companies ask before choosing an AI agency.
An agency that either builds AI solutions for you (chatbots, automation, custom models) or works on how AI systems find and recommend your brand. The two are separate disciplines with different skills — most agencies do one or the other, not both.
It depends entirely on which kind. Build projects are priced like software development. Visibility work is usually a monthly retainer covering measurement, content and technical optimization. Ask for pricing against a defined scope rather than an hourly rate.
Not necessarily — but ask your current agency what your brand's citation share is in ChatGPT and Perplexity. If they cannot answer, that part of your search visibility is currently unmanaged.
No. SEO optimizes for a ranked list of links. AI visibility optimizes for being the source a generated answer is built from. Ranking first in Google does not guarantee being cited by ChatGPT — we see the two diverge constantly.