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Introduction
To prepare for AEO or SEO optimization, provide five things: context (who you are and who you sell to), ground-truth customer data, access to your site and analytics, brand assets, and one internal owner. Everything else the agency can gather. These five it cannot.
Hiring an agency is the easy part. Making the engagement work is decided in the week before it starts, by what you hand over.
The numbers say why this guide exists: 48% of marketing leaders already work with agencies on AEO, and 49% plan to increase agency involvement in the next 12 months, yet only one in five practitioners say agency support has been very effective.
New to the discipline? Start with our AEO vs SEO explainer, then come back here for the SEO client onboarding checklist.
The gap is not a talent problem. It is a preparation problem. As Vivian Hoang, SEO and AEO Lead at Webflow, puts the client-side requirement in one sentence:
"As an in-house operator that means just being a good partner and collaborator, giving your agency and partner enough context, data and access to actually do good work."
Context, data, access. This guide turns those three words, plus the two things most engagements skip, into a checklist you can finish in an afternoon.
Why preparation decides whether the engagement works
From Webflow's Building for AEO: Ownership, agencies, and execution webinar, the line that reframes every agency relationship:
"Agencies aren't a shortcut. They're an accelerant. They work best when someone internally owns the vision, the narrative, and the cross-functional alignment."
An accelerant multiplies what already exists. If the agency receives no context, no data, and no access, it starts from zero and burns the first month gathering what you could have handed over in a day.
If it receives all three, it starts fast and compounds.
The failure mode is well documented. Vivian Hoang names it directly:
"The biggest mistake that brands can make is bringing on that agency partner but not having real alignment or trust... projects or ideas get stuck in recommendations or proposals and nothing actually launches or ships, and then you go through agency after agency until you find someone who just tells you what you want to hear."
Preparation is what prevents that loop. Here is the checklist, in the order it matters.
1. The context packet: who you are and who you sell to
Agencies cannot guess your ICP, and should never have to.
Before any AEO action, Michael Huard, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Webflow, says the first requirement is understanding "who it is that you're trying to reach." That starts with you, because nobody knows your customers better.
Put together, in one document:
- Your ICP and audience segments. Who buys, who influences the buyer, what each segment asks before they convert.
- Your business story. How you got here, what you sell, what makes you different. In your words, not marketing-speak.
- The questions customers actually ask you. Sales, support, and onboarding all hear them daily. That list is the seed of your AEO content map.
- What "winning" looks like. The company goal this engagement serves: pipeline, bookings, retained customers, or something else. If the agency does not know, it optimizes for traffic instead of revenue.
Context compounds. Webflow's partnership with the agency Graphite has run 3.5 years for one reason: "Graphite knows our brand, our target audiences, our internal operating system."
That accumulated context is the moat that lets an agency move fast. You start building it on day zero, with this packet.
2. The ground-truth data dump: your customers' actual words
Your customers already wrote the brief. Give the agency their words.
The highest-signal asset in any AEO engagement is not a keyword list. It is the recorded voice of your customer. Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, gives the most direct advice on this:
"Run an LLM over your Gong or sales call recordings. Run them over your sales and CSE emails. That is literally ground truth. That is the questions your prospects are asking."
Those questions are worth more than any third-party keyword tool, because AI search queries have changed shape. Yalif's stat: when we searched on Google, the average query was 4 words. With LLMs, it is 23 words and growing.
Your prospects are asking AI the same long, specific questions they ask your sales team, and the sales calls are the only place those questions exist verbatim.
Hand over:
- Sales call recordings and transcripts (Gong, Chorus, or raw recordings).
- Sales and customer-success emails, exported and searchable.
- Support tickets and chat logs.
- Self-reported attribution. Ask buyers how they heard about you. As Kevin Indig points out, click attribution is broken for AI search. The only reliable signal is what buyers say.
- Heat and click maps. Once SEO and AEO start sending traffic, heat and click maps show how visitors actually behave: what they click, how far they scroll, where they hesitate or rage. Microsoft Clarity is free, needs no developer, and installs on Webflow in minutes via a site-wide snippet, so it belongs in the setup checklist alongside GA4.
3. Access checklist: the keys the agency needs on day one
An agency without access produces proposals instead of work.
The Reddit practitioner checklist ("complete AEO checklist, what am I missing?") keeps coming back to the same blocker: engagements stall because the agency never received the keys. Have these ready before kickoff:
- Google Search Console: the primary AEO measurement surface.
- GA4: read access for traffic and referred-session analysis.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing feeds several AI surfaces and is free.
- CMS access: Webflow designer or editor roles, so recommendations can actually ship.
- DNS and hosting access: if schema, redirects, or an llms.txt file need publishing.
- Existing SEO tools: Ahrefs or Semrush seats you already pay for.
- Past audits: every SEO or AEO audit ever run, so the agency does not re-buy knowledge you already own.
The test: if the agency cannot log in, run a crawl, and publish a change within week one, the engagement started late.
Grant access before the kickoff call, not after.
4. Brand assets: so the work sounds like you
AI stitches your brand together from everywhere. Give it one consistent record.
Answer engines decide what to say about you by combining what they find across the web, and they get it wrong.
The Webflow AEO Maturity Index found AI described companies accurately only 63 out of 100 times and pulled through the intended message just 24 out of 100. Consistency is the fix, and it starts with the assets you hand the agency:
- Style guide and messaging guidelines. Profound's promise to clients is the industry standard here: "create content that is on brand according to your own style guide, messaging guidelines." If you have them, share them. If you don't, ask the agency to build them first.
- A consistent entity record. Business name, logo, NAP details, social profiles, and company descriptions, identical everywhere. This is the entity consistency AI uses to decide what to say about you.
- Social and PR presence. Where you post, where you have been featured, who quotes you. Authority and PR inputs matter: 73% of companies are mentioned in fewer than 25% of the sources LLMs cite. The agency needs to know which sources already mention you.
5. The one internal hire you cannot skip: an owner
Ownership is the part of AEO you cannot delegate.
Josh Jacobs, Staff Brand Designer at Jasper, states the requirement: "You need a clear owner and a defined gap before you touch a single page." The owner does not do the AEO work. The agency does. The owner makes sure the work keeps moving.
That is more than a title. Guy Yalif frames good AEO as a team sport, with AI answers "shaped by inputs from across the company: SEO/AEO, engineering, content, brand, comms, data teams, and more."
The owner's job is assembling those inputs: pulling the sales recordings from revenue, the product answers from engineering, the messaging from brand, and clearing the path for the agency to ship.
Pick one person. Give them time. Put them in every status call. If the agency has to chase five people to get one answer, the engagement is already drifting.
Questions to ask before you sign
Alignment is the non-negotiable that prevents the agency-churn loop.
From Ally at Flexi, on the one thing that must happen before work starts:
"There needs to be full alignment on what the priorities are in terms of what's a non-negotiable for both sides before getting started."
Get written answers to these before day one:
- What are the priorities, ranked, and what is deliberately not being done?
- What is non-negotiable for each side? (Budgets, brand rules, speed, reporting depth.)
- What does the agency own, and what stays in-house?
- What is the reporting cadence, and which metrics define success?
- What happens when something ships? Who publishes, who reviews, how fast?
Conclusion
Preparation is the difference between an agency that ships and an agency that sends proposals.
Coherent is a Webflow and AEO agency that starts every engagement by handing you a day-one kickoff list (the exact checklist above, pre-built) and then audits your AI visibility, closes the gaps, and monitors your citations monthly.
Sources: Webflow's Building for AEO: Ownership, agencies, and execution webinar, The Answer Engine (ep. 2), and the Webflow AEO Maturity Index. Expert quotes linked to their original videos and articles.
