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How do you choose an AEO agency for a charter or aviation business?

Sightline Aviation, October 29, 2026

What are you actually hiring an AEO agency to do?

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) mean helping your business be found and described correctly in AI answers. Decide what you need first: readable pages, direct answers, consistent facts and measurement.

Google's own guidance frames optimizing for generative AI search as "still SEO", and says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files, special markup or Markdown to appear in its AI features (Google's generative AI optimization guide; Google's AI features documentation). Google also tells site owners that if an SEO offers advice on AI experiences, sometimes called AEO or GEO services, they should check it against that guidance (Google's guide to hiring an SEO). That is a useful test for any proposal you receive. For what the work usually includes, see our AEO and GEO page for aviation.

Which questions should you ask before you sign?

Google's guide to hiring an SEO lists questions worth asking, and they carry over to AEO work (Google's guide to hiring an SEO):

1. Can you show examples of previous work? Ask what was changed and what was observed, and ask for references from past clients. Be wary of results that arrive without any explanation of what was done.
2. Do you follow Google's Search Essentials? The answer should be a plain yes, with detail on how.
3. What results do you expect, and over what timeframe? An honest answer talks about what the work can influence, not what it can promise.
4. Will you tell me about every change you make to my site? You should be able to see and understand each change.
5. Do you have experience in my industry? Aviation has its own vocabulary and facts, such as certificates, base airports and fleet details, and a provider who gets them wrong can publish errors under your name.

Add three questions specific to AI visibility:

• Which crawlers do you check, and what does each do? A competent provider can explain that, for example, OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot as a separate training crawler, with independent robots.txt settings (OpenAI's crawler documentation), and that Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as the crawler that surfaces sites in its search (Perplexity's crawler documentation).
• Which customer questions will you track, and how? You want a fixed, written question set, not a vague "AI score."
• What will you need access to? Google advises granting only read access to Search Console at first, and asking an SEO to explain any change if they have file-transfer access (Google's guide to hiring an SEO).

Which promises are red flags?

Google's hiring guide names warning signs, and several apply directly to AEO pitches (Google's guide to hiring an SEO):

• A promised number-one ranking. Google says no one can guarantee one. The same logic applies to promised ChatGPT or Perplexity mentions. Google also says indexing and serving aren't guaranteed (Google's AI features documentation). Sightline does not guarantee rankings or AI mentions either.
• A "special relationship" with a search engine, or a "priority submit" service.
• Secrecy about what they will do to your site.
• Link schemes or mass submission to search engines. Google's spam policies treat link spam, scaled content abuse, cloaking and hidden text as spam when used to manipulate rankings (Google's spam policies).
• A required "magic" file or markup. Google says Search ignores llms.txt and that no special schema is needed for its AI features (Google's generative AI optimization guide). A file may be fine to publish for other reasons, but it shouldn't be sold as the thing that unlocks Google's AI answers.
• Hundreds of near-identical pages aimed at AI answers. Google warns that large volumes of pages built to manipulate AI responses may violate its scaled content abuse policy (Google's generative AI optimization guide).
• Markup for content that isn't on the page. Google requires structured data to describe content visible to readers, and doesn't guarantee that it will show in results (Google's structured data guidelines).

Remember that the responsibility stays with you: Google's guide says you are responsible for the actions of any company you hire (Google's guide to hiring an SEO).

How can you check an agency's claims yourself?

You don't need to be technical to test a proposal. You can run these checks yourself:

1. Open your own yourdomain.com/robots.txt and ask the agency to explain each rule. Anthropic documents that ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot have different purposes and that it honors robots.txt (Anthropic's crawler guidance). An agency that can't tell the bots apart is a warning sign.
2. Ask which pages they would change first and what each page would answer. Vague answers such as "improve content" are a warning.
3. Ask for the measurement plan in writing: the questions, the tools, how often, and how results will be recorded.
4. Check that anything they claim about how Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude works links to that company's own documentation. If it only cites other marketing blogs, ask for the source.

Does industry knowledge matter?

For charter operators, aircraft managers and other aviation businesses, yes, because the facts that AI answers repeat are specific: who operates the aircraft, which certificate applies, where the base is and what the fleet is. Sightline is based in Camarillo, California, and works on websites plus SEO, AEO and GEO for private jet charter operators, aircraft management companies and aviation businesses. Our Diamond Aviation work is unpublished concept work, and we don't claim measured results from it. Judge any agency, including us, on method and evidence you can inspect.

How should the work be reported?

Reports should be in plain English and show what changed, which questions were checked, and what was observed, with the date and tool noted. AI answers vary by wording, location and time, so a single score or a "rank" can't capture them. Changes after the work are observations, not proof that the work caused them. Sightline reports monthly in plain English.

A one-page scorecard to take into calls

Score each agency yes or no on these lines:

1. Explains its method without secrecy
2. Makes no guarantee of rankings or mentions
3. Lists every change it will make to your site
4. Names the crawlers and what each does, with documentation links
5. Uses a written question set for measurement
6. Reports in plain English on a set schedule
7. Shows relevant aviation knowledge

If you'd like to see what a first check looks like, our free AI visibility check covers about ten customer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI answers and Claude, with a short written report. See also what an AI visibility audit should check, or book a 20-minute call.

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