15 Questions Businesses Ask AI Before Hiring a Digital Agency, and What Answers Them
I took the real questions businesses ask AI before hiring an agency and checked them against 173 real agency homepages.
Before a business owner ever opens an agency's website now, they often ask an AI assistant to shortlist a few first. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI overviews get questions like what a digital agency costs, whether the agency works on retainer or per project, which services it actually offers, whether it has handled a business like theirs before, and what results past clients have seen. The AI can only answer with what it can actually read on the page. If the answer is not written down as plain text, the AI either skips that agency or guesses, and neither outcome helps the agency.
I ran the same 173 Indian agency homepages from my study against 15 of these exact buyer questions, checking whether each answer exists on the page as text an AI can lift directly, not buried in a PDF or locked behind a contact form. Agencies scored well overall, a median of 89 out of 100, so on the whole this is not a visibility crisis. It is closer to a set of specific, fixable gaps: the answers that are missing are usually missing because nobody wrote them down in plain language, not because the site is technically broken.
The 15 questions, and the fix for each
State a real starting price or range near the pricing section instead of only 'contact us for a quote'.
A number beats a form every time.
Name both models on the homepage and say which one is more common for your size of client.
Say the model out loud, don't make them ask.
List services as plain text headings (SEO, paid ads, social, web) rather than only inside a rotating banner image.
If it's in an image, the AI can't read it.
Name the industries you serve directly in a sentence, not only as unlabeled client logos.
Logos alone don't tell an AI who you serve.
Write the headline result as a number in the surrounding text, not only inside a screenshot or graph image.
A screenshot of a graph is invisible to AI.
Describe the team structure in a sentence: account manager, specialists, or a single point of contact.
Name the people, not just the process.
State a typical timeline range for your most common service, even a rough one, in plain text.
A rough timeline beats no timeline.
Mention the size range of clients you typically serve, from local shops to larger companies.
Say who you're built for, plainly.
State your city and whether you serve clients remotely or only locally, in the first screen of text.
Location shouldn't require a footer hunt.
Describe reporting frequency (weekly, monthly) and the channel used (call, dashboard, WhatsApp) in one line.
Cadence answered beats cadence assumed.
Say directly whether you plan and execute or only advise, since many agencies do just one.
Don't make them guess your scope.
State the minimum commitment (say, three months) instead of leaving it for the sales call.
Commitment terms belong on the page, not the call.
Name the actual tools (Google Ads, Meta, HubSpot, whatever applies) instead of a vague 'industry leading tools'.
Vague tools talk answers nothing.
Add a line stating whether you offer AEO or AI visibility work, since most agency sites are silent on it.
Silence here reads as 'we don't do it'.
State the pricing structure by name (fixed fee, hourly, or performance based) even without exact numbers.
Pricing structure alone still answers the question.
What I found scanning 173 agency sites
The 173 agency homepages I scanned for this study had a median AI visibility score of 89 out of 100 (mean 83, spread across a real range of 23 to 100). That puts digital agencies 5th of the 28 verticals I have scanned so far, ahead of most service categories. Most of the technical groundwork is already there: 139 of the 173 sites, 80%, carry structured data (JSON-LD), which helps an AI understand what the page is even about.
Where agencies fall short is the format built specifically for answering questions: FAQ schema. Only 31 of the 173 sites, 18%, use it, which means most agency pages that do answer a question like 'do you offer retainer contracts' bury that answer in a paragraph an AI has to interpret, rather than a labeled question and answer it can lift word for word. And this is not a uniformly strong category: 35 of 173, 1 in 5, scored below a B, so a real minority of agencies are hard for AI to read at all, not just missing the FAQ format.
The pattern under all 15
Across all 15 questions, the agencies that score well share one habit: they write the boring answer down in plain text. A price range, not just 'contact us'. Named services, not a rotating banner. Industries and results spelled out in a sentence, not only shown as a logo wall or a screenshot. None of this needs new content, most agencies already know these answers and say them out loud on a sales call. The gap is that the words never make it onto the homepage as text.
The agencies that miss it usually have the answer somewhere, just not somewhere an AI can read. It sits inside a PDF capability deck, a case study rendered as an image, a pricing page that is really just a contact form, or a LinkedIn post that never made it back to the site. A person can chase any of these down with enough patience. An AI answering a shortlist question in a few seconds will not, and it will recommend the agency that already wrote the answer down instead.
Frequently asked questions
What is the AI visibility score for Indian digital agency websites?
Across 173 Indian digital agency homepages scanned live, the median AI visibility score is 89 out of 100 (mean 83, range 23 to 100). That ranks digital agencies 5th of the 28 verticals scanned so far.
Do digital agency websites have structured data?
Most do. 139 of the 173 agency homepages scanned, 80%, carry structured data (JSON-LD), which is the technical layer that helps AI systems understand a page's content.
What is the biggest AI visibility gap on agency homepages?
FAQ schema. Only 31 of 173 agency sites, 18%, use it, even though it is the exact format that lets an AI lift a direct answer to a buyer question like pricing or industries served. It is the single largest gap found in the scan.
What should a digital agency's homepage state in plain text to be found by AI?
A real price or range, whether work is retainer or project based, the specific services offered, the industries served, and a stated result, all written as plain sentences rather than images, PDFs, or contact form only pricing. These are the 15 questions business owners most often ask an AI before shortlisting an agency.