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An AEO agency is a team you hire to improve how often AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity name and cite your brand, and for a healthcare brand the right one also keeps patient details out of anything it sends to AI assistants and plans content around clinical review. Curve Compliance offers this work as a managed service, Curve AEO, built for healthcare brands. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service.
Shortlisting AEO partners for a practice, health system or healthcare brand? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.
The types of AEO providers
Lists of the "best AEO agencies" mix very different kinds of firms. Sort your shortlist by type first, because each brings different strengths:
| Provider type | What it usually brings | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| SEO agency that added AEO | Technical SEO, content and link experience | Whether it tracks AI answers directly, or reports search rankings and calls them AEO |
| AEO specialist firm | Focus on AI answers, prompts and citations | Healthcare experience, clinical review and how it handles patient data |
| Healthcare marketing agency | Specialty knowledge, ads and patient acquisition | Depth in AI search, and how it measures AI answers over time |
| Managed AEO service from a healthcare platform | Tracking software and a team in one, built for healthcare | What the team does each month and what you see in the dashboard |
| Software only | A dashboard your own team works from | Whether you have writers, clinician time and developer help to act on it |
Comparing a tool your own team runs with a team that does the work? See AEO tools vs a managed AEO service. For what the work itself covers, see AEO services for healthcare.
How to choose an AEO agency: eight questions to ask
Google's advice on hiring an SEO now names AEO directly, and most of it carries over. It suggests asking "Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?" and "What's your experience in my industry?" For AEO or GEO advice, it asks: "is their advice aligned with Google Search's official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features?" (Google Search Central). For a healthcare brand, ask these eight:
| Question | What a good answer sounds like | Why it matters | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Can you show past work and results? | Before and after AI answers for real questions, with dates | Google lists this first among questions to ask | |
| 2. How do you measure success? | Mentions, citations and share of voice over time, plus visits and bookings | 50% to 83% of AI citations were gone the next day in one study | Ahrefs |
| 3. Which AI assistants do you track? | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini | ChatGPT sends 83.8% of AI referral traffic in health care | Conductor |
| 4. What is your experience in my specialty? | Examples from your field and the questions your patients ask | AI Overview coverage ran 94% to 97% for some specialties and 63% to 74% for others | BrightEdge |
| 5. What will you change on our site? | A written list of every change, with the reason | Google advises asking a provider to share every change it makes | |
| 6. Who writes, and who approves? | Writers plus your clinicians, who sign off on anything medical | 50% to 90% of LLM medical answers were not fully supported by the sources they cited | Nature Communications |
| 7. What do you send to AI assistants? | Marketing questions only, never patient details | 77% of U.S. adults worry about the privacy of medical information given to AI tools | KFF |
| 8. Will you sign a BAA? | Yes, before any work that could touch patient data | HIPAA sets BAA requirements for vendors that create, receive, maintain or transmit PHI for you | HHS |
A few of these deserve more time in the meeting. On measurement, ask to see a sample report. Ahrefs, which tracked about 37,500 citations for 20 days, puts it plainly: "Don't judge AI visibility from one check" (Ahrefs). A report that shows a single run of answers is a snapshot, not a trend.
On assistants, coverage should match where your patients are. In West Health-Gallup's survey, the AI tools recent health users reported most were general chatbots such as ChatGPT or Copilot (61%) and AI built into web searches, such as Google AI summaries (55%) (Gallup). A provider that only watches one of them misses part of the picture.
On specialty, AI answers vary a lot by field. BrightEdge found 94% to 97% AI Overview coverage for clinical specialties such as cardiology, gastroenterology and orthopedics, but 63% to 74% for mental health and primary care, and it reports that self-harm, crisis and addiction queries stayed excluded from AI Overviews (BrightEdge). Local answers are selective too: across multi-location brands in all industries (more than 350,000 locations), SOCi found ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of brand locations, against a 35.9% appearance rate in Google's local 3-Pack (SOCi). A partner who knows your field knows which answers are worth chasing.
Red flags when hiring an AEO agency
- A promised top spot. Google's hiring advice says no one can promise a number one ranking on Google, and to beware of anyone who claims a "special relationship" with Google (Google). The same goes for promises of a place in AI answers.
- Claims of inside access or Google approval. Google says "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems" (Google), and that "Google doesn't evaluate third-party services, so be wary of such claims and those making them" (Google).
- Bulk mentions. Google warns that "seeking inauthentic "mentions" across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem" (Google).
- Secrecy. Google's advice: "Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do" (Google).
- Reports built on one check. Single screenshots of AI answers change from day to day, so ask for trends.
- Requests for patient data. Checking what AI assistants say about you takes marketing questions, never patient records.
- No clinical sign-off. Anything medical should go to your clinicians before it goes live.
Set realistic expectations
AI search is growing fast from a small base. In Semrush's U.S. clickstream data, outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 206% in 2025, comparing January 2025 with January 2026 (Semrush). Yet in Conductor's health care benchmarks, AI referrals were 0.64% of all website traffic (Conductor).
Much of the value sits inside the answer. In Pew Research Center's browsing data across all topics, a link inside Google's AI summary was clicked on just 1% of visits to pages that showed one (Pew Research Center), while Seer found that being cited in an AI Overview brings 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited, though Seer notes it cannot claim causation, since higher-authority brands are also more likely to be cited (Seer Interactive). And patients act on what they read: 36% of patients who searched for a new doctor said AI tools influenced their decision, and 66% of AI users said they had seen incorrect provider information from an AI tool (rater8). A good partner reports mentions and citations, accuracy, and the visits and bookings AI answers bring, not clicks alone.
Expect SEO and AEO to overlap without being the same. In Ahrefs' study of 15,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average; Perplexity was highest at 28.6%, and the others hovered around 8% (Ahrefs). See AEO vs SEO for healthcare and why AI recommends your competitor.
Agency, in-house team or managed service?
An agency suits a brand that wants outside hands on strategy and content. An in-house team suits a brand with writers, clinician time and developer help already in place, plus software to track the answers. A managed service suits a brand that wants the tracking and the team together, with one view of progress.
Agencies are also buyers here. The managed service is available to practices and clinics, health systems and multi-location groups, and agencies. Agencies can use AI Visibility for their clients, or have Curve's team run it for them. See AI visibility for healthcare marketing agencies and Curve Compliance for marketing agencies.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In one AI Visibility program we've run, for a HIPAA-focused healthcare software brand, Curve's team tracked the questions buyers ask AI assistants, found where competitors were named and the brand wasn't, and published pages to close those gaps. About five weeks in:
- AI assistants named or cited the brand in 53% of their answers to its 40 core buyer questions (104 of 196), across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude.
- Across 184 real buyer questions and 912 AI answers, its site was cited in 236 answers, more than any competitor's and more than 2.5 times as many as the nearest one (89).
- 47 of the new pages were already cited by AI assistants within six days of going live.
- One new page brought in more than half of the brand's unpaid ChatGPT visits in its first week.
How Curve Compliance helps
AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. In Curve, the feature is called AI Visibility (AEO), and the managed service is Curve AEO. Introducing Curve AEO: a service that helps you understand how your brand appears in AI search, with a team that handles the strategy and execution for you.
What You Get with Curve AEO:
- AI Visibility Tracking. See how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- Optimize Your Site for AI. We make technical improvements that help AI assistants find, read, and understand your content.
- Competitive Insights. Understand who's getting recommended instead of you.
- Content Roadmap. Identify gaps and prioritize opportunities to improve performance.
Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress. With the managed service, Curve's team sets up your questions, competitors and topics, writes the pages on your roadmap, and makes the technical fixes that help AI assistants read your site. Your clinicians review and approve anything medical before it goes live.
If your developer manages your site, Curve's team hands them the exact fixes. Each month, Curve's team walks you through your results on a call and sends a one-page report. Every week you also get a plain-language summary of what changed.
AI Visibility is built for healthcare: only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan. It ties AI answers to the visits and bookings they bring you. See HIPAA-compliant AI visibility tracking.
Built for healthcare marketers, Curve connects the entire patient funnel in one platform: paid ads, web analytics, and now AI search. Curve AEO is rolling out to select customers, and spots are limited.
Sources (checked November 6, 2026): Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?; Google Search Central, Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice; Google Search Central, Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search; Ahrefs, How Stable Are AI Citations? (October 29, 2026); Conductor, Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks; Gallup, Americans Turning to AI to Supplement Healthcare Visits (April 14, 2026); BrightEdge, Healthcare and AI Overviews: How Google Sharpened Its Approach Over Three Years (December 24, 2025); SOCi, 2026 Local Visibility Index (January 28, 2026); Wu et al., An automated framework for assessing how well LLMs cite relevant medical references, Nature Communications (April 16, 2025); KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Use of AI For Health Information and Advice (March 25, 2026); Semrush, ChatGPT traffic analysis: Insights from 17 months of clickstream data (April 7, 2026); Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (July 22, 2025); Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update (April 24, 2026); rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report (June 3, 2026); Ahrefs, Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 for the Original Prompt (August 11, 2025); HHS, Business Associates Frequently Asked Questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AEO agency?
An AEO agency is a team you hire to improve how often AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews name and cite your brand. It tracks AI answers, fixes what keeps AI systems from reading your site, and creates the content those answers draw on.
How do I choose an AEO agency?
Ask for past results, how they measure success over time, which AI assistants they track, their experience in your specialty, what they will change on your site, who approves medical content, what they send to AI assistants and whether they sign a BAA.
What is the difference between an AEO agency and an SEO agency?
An SEO agency works to rank your pages in search results; an AEO agency works on whether AI answers name and cite you. The two overlap, but many pages AI assistants cite sit outside Google's top 10 (Ahrefs).
Can an AEO agency promise that ChatGPT will recommend us?
No one controls what AI assistants say, and Google says third-party tools "don't have access to our internal ranking data" (Google). Treat any promised placement in AI answers as a red flag.
Does a healthcare AEO agency need a BAA?
It needs one if its work will create, receive, maintain or transmit PHI for you, because HIPAA sets BAA requirements for those vendors (HHS). Ask what it sends to AI assistants before work starts. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan.
Can marketing agencies use Curve for their clients?
Yes. Agencies can use AI Visibility for their clients, or have Curve's team run it for them.
Is Curve AEO an agency?
Curve AEO is a managed service. Curve's team handles your AEO strategy, content creation and optimization, with a dashboard that shows how your brand appears in AI answers and tracks progress over time.
Talk to Curve Compliance
Want to see how a managed AEO service would work for your brand? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.