AI SEO service providers, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to evaluate an AI SEO provider

1. Ask what a human does before anything publishes. Get the editorial chain in writing: who reviews a draft, who checks the facts and the sources, and who signs off. Google's spam policies describe scaled content abuse, where pages are produced in bulk primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help people, and the practical defence is a named human accountable for every page that goes live.
2. Ask for output you can read, not a dashboard. Request three live pages the provider published for a client in the last quarter and read them as a buyer would. If the pages restate the query in five different ways, cite nothing, and could have been written about any company in the sector, you are looking at the volume product regardless of what the proposal calls it.
3. Separate the tooling from the strategy. Find out which parts of the retainer are software and which are judgement. Keyword clustering, internal link suggestions and schema generation are largely automatable and cheap. Deciding which pages deserve to exist, what a page must prove to a buyer, and what to do when rankings fall is not, and that is what you are really paying a retainer for.
4. Check how AI answer surfaces are being handled. Ask what the provider does about visibility in AI generated answers as distinct from blue links: whether they track it, how, and what changes on the page as a result. Answers that lean on citing sources, quoting and including real figures are the ones that get picked up, and a provider with no view on this at all is behind.

The line between AI assisted and AI generated

Google's own position is that content is judged on quality and usefulness rather than on how it was produced, and that automation used primarily to manipulate rankings is a spam problem. That gives a workable test for a buyer. If the provider can explain what expertise entered a page that a language model could not supply on its own, meaning a customer interview, a price they verified, a photograph they took, a rule they read, the page has a reason to exist. If the answer is that the model produced it from the keyword, the page is competing against every other page produced the same way, and the cost of producing those is falling toward zero.

There is also a straightforward business risk in volume publishing. A site that accumulates thousands of near identical pages becomes expensive to unwind, and the cleanup is usually billed by the agency that produced the mess. Ask any provider proposing high page counts what their remediation plan is if traffic falls, and whether removing pages is included in the retainer.

What moves the price

The volume product is cheap by design and priced per page or per bundle, often at a fraction of what a written page costs. The assisted product is priced like normal SEO work: a retainer covering strategy, technical work, a stated number of pages and reporting, with the tooling improving the margin rather than the price. Comparing the two on monthly cost is meaningless, so ask both for a per page cost and for the number of pages, then read one page from each.

Beyond that, the usual drivers apply. Site size and technical debt raise the first quarter's cost, competitive markets need more evidence per page and therefore more research time, and multi location or multi language work multiplies everything. A provider whose price does not move at all when you describe your site is quoting a product, not a project, which is fine as long as you know that is what you are buying.

Questions people actually ask

Will Google penalise AI written content?

Not for being AI written as such. Google's guidance focuses on whether content is helpful, reliable and people first, and its spam policies target scaled content abuse where pages are mass produced mainly to game rankings. The production method is not the issue, the intent and the quality are.

Can an AI SEO service replace a writer?

It can replace the drafting, not the sourcing or the judgement. Someone still has to know what a buyer in your market needs to see, verify the figures, and take responsibility when something on the page is wrong. Providers who have removed that person entirely are cheaper for a reason.

How many pages a month is reasonable?

Fewer than most volume proposals suggest. The useful question is not how many pages but how many distinct queries you have with real demand that no existing page of yours answers. Once that list is exhausted, additional pages compete with your own.

How do I check a provider's own site?

Read it. Providers who publish their own thin generated pages are demonstrating the product, and it is the cheapest due diligence available. Check too whether they publish pricing or minimums, because that willingness tends to correlate with how straightforward the engagement will be.

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