What is a GEO agency?
Every page ranking for 'GEO agency' is owned by an agency. This one isn't. Here's what a Generative Engine Optimization agency actually does, when you should hire one, and the five situations where you shouldn't.
A GEO agency (Generative Engine Optimization agency) is a marketing services firm that helps brands get cited inside the answers generative AI search systems produce — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot — by making their content easier for those systems to retrieve, trust, and reproduce.
I do not run a GEO agency, an SEO agency, or any kind of marketing services firm. I built TurboAudit, a tool that measures AI search visibility. I have no agency to sell you. What follows is what I've learned watching this category form over the past eighteen months — from the academic side (the Princeton paper that coined GEO at KDD 2024), the venture side (the a16z thesis in May 2025 that took it mainstream), and the vendor side (running the audit tool itself).
What a GEO agency actually does
Strip the marketing language and a real GEO agency delivers six workstreams. If a prospective agency doesn't discuss at least four of them in their first discovery call, you are looking at a traditional SEO agency with an AI marketing page — not a GEO agency.
- 01
AI search audit
The starting baseline. Without it, nothing else is measurable.
Checks robots.txt for crawler rules covering GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, and Google-Extended. Inventories existing schema markup, content extractability, AI citation baseline across the major engines, and where the brand currently appears or doesn't. A real audit produces a per-page report. A marketing version produces a colour-coded score.
- 02
Entity engineering
Making the brand a clean, disambiguated entity AI systems can identify.
Consistent brand naming across properties, knowledge graph coverage, Wikipedia or Wikidata presence where editorially defensible, schema markup for the brand entity (Organization, Person, Product), and consistent attribution across third-party mentions. Generative engines must disambiguate the entity before answering questions about it; the agency's job is to make that easy.
- 03
Content restructuring for retrievability
Rewriting pages so AI systems can lift answers from them cleanly.
Answer capsules in the first 30 percent of a page (Indig's research shows 44.2% of ChatGPT citations come from that window), question-format H2s, FAQ blocks with FAQPage schema, definitional pages for category-defining terms, evidence density (statistics, quotations, citations — the three highest-effect modifications in the Princeton GEO paper).
- 04
Citation engineering and digital PR
Earning third-party mentions on the sources AI systems actually cite.
Chen et al. (2025) documented a systematic preference in generative engines for earned third-party sources over brand-owned content. A real GEO agency targets the sources LLMs already cite — Wikipedia, Reddit threads, G2 / Capterra style review sites, vertical research publications, Forbes-tier media. They do not run generic link-building. The deliverable is a measurable lift in third-party citation density on prompts that matter.
- 05
Cross-engine monitoring
Measuring what AI engines say, not what Google ranks.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot return different answers to the same prompt. Profound's 250M-response analysis found roughly 39% overlap between ChatGPT's chosen sources and Google's top results — meaning more than 60% of generative-engine citations are not explained by traditional ranking. Monitoring has to be cross-engine and statistically sampled. Single-run dashboards are noise.
- 06
Reporting against citation share, not rank
The metric that proves the work happened.
A real GEO agency reports on mention share, citation share, and source-link share across the engines they monitor — not on keyword rank in Google. They explain how they handle LLM non-determinism. They show trend lines over weeks, not snapshots. If the report is a Google rank tracker with 'AI Overview triggered: Y/N' added as a column, the work being measured isn't GEO.
GEO agency vs AI SEO vs AEO vs LLMO — the taxonomy
The vocabulary in this category is a mess. Buyers are quoted by GEO agencies, AI SEO agencies, Answer Engine Optimization agencies, LLMO agencies, and AI search agencies — sometimes by the same firm under different headlines on different pages. Some distinctions are real. Most are marketing.
Here is the honest map. The five rows describe how the labels are typically used in practice as of mid-2026; they are not formal definitions because no formal definitions exist.
When you should not hire a GEO agency
This section is the one every agency-owned page on the SERP cannot write. It is also the most useful, because the agency-buyer's most common mistake is buying a service they don't need yet.
- 01
Your annual customer LTV is under $5,000
Most GEO agency retainers land between $3,000 and $8,000 per month. At that price, the agency needs to drive somewhere between 4 and 12 additional customers per month to be ROI-positive on a $5k LTV. For an SMB selling a $200/month SaaS, the math rarely works in the first twelve months. Hire a freelancer plus a $200/month monitoring tool until your customer economics support a retainer.
- 02
You haven't shipped basic GEO foundations yet
If your robots.txt blocks GPTBot, you don't have FAQPage schema on any article, you have no llms.txt, and your About page is two paragraphs — an agency cannot meaningfully accelerate you. They will spend the first two months doing foundation work you could have done in two weeks. Do the foundations yourself or with a freelancer, then bring an agency in for ongoing engineering and PR.
- 03
Your existing SEO agency hasn't even noticed the AI search transition
If you are paying a traditional SEO agency monthly and they have not raised GPTBot, llms.txt, AEO content, or citation monitoring with you, the cheaper move is to push them to expand or replace them — not to layer a second agency on top. Two agencies on one site duplicate audit work and confuse the brief.
- 04
You would be better served by a tool plus a consultant
For most SMBs, a $50–$500/month monitoring tool (Otterly, Peec, TurboAudit, Trackerly) paired with a $1.5–$3k/month part-time consultant produces 70% of agency value for 30% of agency cost. The agency premium pays for execution capacity — if you don't need that capacity, you don't need an agency.
- 05
You're optimizing for the wrong outcome
Citation share is a vanity metric without an underlying brand someone would search for. If you don't have a brand, build it first. Press, product launches, named expertise, conference talks, podcasts — the brand is the input. GEO accelerates a brand that exists; it does not create one from scratch.
How to evaluate a GEO agency — 8 screening questions
Discriminator questions: ones a real GEO agency answers cleanly and a bluffer cannot. Use them on the first discovery call. The agency's answers will tell you more than any sales deck.
- 01
Pull up Perplexity right now and search one of your clients' brand names. What appears?
If the agency can't or won't, that's the answer. If they do and the results are weak, ask how long they've been the agency of record. Real GEO work shows up in months, not years.
- 02
What's in your own robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot? Why those rules?
Eats own dog food test. An agency that blocks AI crawlers from its own site has either not thought about it (red flag) or has a defensible reason (interesting answer). Both are useful to hear.
- 03
Walk me through your monitoring stack. Which tool, which engines, refresh frequency, how do you handle non-determinism?
Real answer names specific tools (Profound, Peec, TurboAudit, in-house) and discusses statistical sampling. Marketing answer says 'proprietary AI dashboard.'
- 04
Show me an llms.txt file you've shipped for a client.
llms.txt was proposed in late 2024 and is becoming common in 2026. An agency that hasn't shipped one for any client is behind. An agency that calls it 'not necessary' may be right, but they should be able to defend that position.
- 05
What's your typical scope-of-work — the literal bullet list of monthly deliverables and cadence?
Real agencies have a standard SoW they tune per client. Vague answers ('we do whatever needs doing') correlate with retainers that drift into 'monthly reporting plus one blog post.'
- 06
What does success look like at month 3? Month 6? Month 12? What's the leading indicator versus the lagging indicator?
Honest answer separates leading indicators (schema deployed, crawl access granted, content restructured) from lagging ones (citation share, mention share). If success at month 3 is described in revenue terms, the agency is overpromising.
- 07
What percentage of your clients have measurable citation share growth, and how do you prove it?
Honest answer is a fraction, not 'all of them.' AI search visibility is hard. An agency that claims 100% success rate is either lying or measuring something that doesn't matter.
- 08
Have you ever fired a client? Why?
Tests whether the agency has standards. An agency that has never fired anyone takes everyone — which means they take clients they cannot serve. The answer reveals more than any case study.
Five red flags that should disqualify an agency
If two or more of these appear, walk away. Each one is individually defensible in context; the combination is not.
- 01
'AI SEO' or 'GEO' used twenty-plus times on their site with no concrete deliverables
Marketing-language density without a scope-of-work attached is the signature of a traditional SEO agency that added a category page in 2025. Read their site looking for specific verbs (audit, monitor, restructure, build, report) attached to specific objects (robots.txt, FAQPage schema, citation share, llms.txt). If the verbs and objects are missing, the deliverables are missing.
- 02
Self-ranks #1 on their own listicle with no methodology disclosure
This is the pattern Lily Ray documented in February 2026 as the trigger for visibility losses across multiple B2B SaaS sites. An agency that self-ranks itself #1 on a 'best GEO agencies' listicle without disclosing the scoring criteria is running the playbook Google is downweighting. It also tells you they will run the same playbook for your brand.
- 03
Claims to get clients cited in ChatGPT but their own brand doesn't appear when searched
The eat-your-own-dog-food test. Search the agency's own brand name and the obvious category queries in Perplexity and ChatGPT. If they don't appear, ask why. The answer will be revealing.
- 04
Conflates backlinks with citations
Backlinks and AI citations are different mechanisms. Backlinks are HTML href elements; citations are brand mentions inside generated answers. An agency that says 'we get you AI citations by building backlinks' is selling 2018 SEO with a new label. Real citation engineering targets sources LLMs already pull from — which is not the same as building any backlink anywhere.
- 05
No first-party measurement tooling — they're reselling vendor dashboards
Most agencies use a third-party monitoring tool (which is fine). But an agency that has no opinion about the tool's methodology, no view on its limitations, and no internal QA process for the data — is renting a dashboard, not delivering insight. Ask which tool they use, what they think of it, and what they do when the tool's data looks wrong.
Honest pricing reality
Pricing data on this category is hard to come by because most agencies hide it. The bands below are synthesised from agencies that do disclose, conversations with buyers, and the public scope-of-work documents that have surfaced in industry coverage.
Boutique / consultant
$1,500–$3,000/moPart-time strategy work, monitoring tool subscription bundled in. Best fit when you have an in-house person who can execute. Common arrangement: 4–8 hours per week of consultant time plus a $50–$500/mo tracker.
Mid-market agency
$3,000–$8,000/mo1–2 GEO-specific deliverables per month (audit, llms.txt, schema rollout, content restructuring on 20–40 pages, monthly reporting). Best fit when you need execution capacity but don't have a full content team. Most common tier in the category.
Full-service agency
$8,000–$20,000/moGEO + traditional SEO + digital PR integrated. Includes citation engineering on third-party sources, dedicated account manager, weekly reporting. Best fit when your content velocity is high and you need the agency to operate as an extension of your team.
Enterprise
$20,000+/moDedicated team, custom dashboards, multi-region monitoring, integration with marketing analytics. Best fit when AI search visibility is a board-level metric and the agency is one vendor in a much larger marketing stack. Most agencies in this tier (Siege, Wpromote, Directive) don't publish pricing.
Across all four tiers: the 'AI' premium over a traditional SEO retainer typically runs $500–$2,000 per month. If an agency is charging twice the rate of a comparable traditional SEO retainer with the same deliverables list, the premium is a label, not a scope change.
Agency vs consultant vs tool vs in-house
The agency question is rarely the right first question. The right first question is: what is the smallest viable team that can ship GEO work for your situation? Often it isn't an agency.
Frequently asked questions
What does a GEO agency do?
A GEO agency runs six workstreams: an AI search audit, entity engineering, content restructuring for retrievability, citation engineering and digital PR on sources AI systems cite, cross-engine monitoring (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Copilot), and reporting against citation share rather than keyword rank. If a prospective agency doesn't discuss at least four of these in a discovery call, you're looking at a traditional SEO agency with a new marketing page.
How much does a GEO agency cost?
Realistic 2026 bands: boutique / consultant $1,500–$3,000/mo; mid-market $3,000–$8,000/mo; full-service $8,000–$20,000/mo; enterprise $20,000+/mo. The 'AI' premium over a comparable traditional SEO retainer typically runs $500–$2,000/mo. Agencies that charge double for the same deliverables list are selling a label, not a scope change.
Is a GEO agency different from an AI SEO agency?
In practice as of mid-2026 they overlap heavily. 'GEO agency' is the more academically-grounded label (the term was coined in the Princeton paper accepted at KDD 2024). 'AI SEO agency' is the broader marketing umbrella. 'AEO agency' predates both and tends to focus on direct-answer placement. The agency's positioning matters less than the answer to: which engines do they monitor, what do they actually deliver, and how do they report success.
Should I hire a GEO agency or just buy a tool?
Buy a tool first if you have someone who can act on the data. Hire an agency when you need execution capacity in addition to insight. The most common mistake is hiring an agency when you don't have a person internally who can interpret the agency's reporting — in which case you pay $5,000/mo for a PDF you don't read.
How long does GEO take to show results?
Leading indicators (schema deployed, crawler access granted, content restructured) show up in 4–8 weeks. Lagging indicators (citation share growth, mention share growth across engines) show up in 3–6 months. Revenue attribution is harder: the conversion path from 'cited by ChatGPT' to 'closed deal' is rarely linear. An agency that promises measurable revenue lift in 90 days is overpromising.
What questions should I ask before hiring a GEO agency?
Eight questions matter: (1) pull up Perplexity now and search a client's brand — what appears? (2) what's in your robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot? (3) walk me through your monitoring stack and non-determinism handling, (4) show me an llms.txt you've shipped, (5) what's your typical scope-of-work bullet list? (6) what does success look like at month 3, 6, 12 and what are the leading vs lagging indicators? (7) what percentage of clients have measurable citation share growth and how do you prove it? (8) have you ever fired a client? Why?
- Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)arxiv.org →
- Andreessen Horowitz — How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Rules of Search (May 2025)a16z.com →
- Chen et al. — Generative Engine Optimization: How earned media influences AI answers (arXiv 2509.08919)arxiv.org →
- Wikipedia — Generative engine optimizationwikipedia.org →
- Profound — AI Platform Citation Patterns (680M citations)tryprofound.com →
- Surfer — Scraped AI answers vs API results: a 1,000-prompt study (Dec 2025)surferseo.com →
- Lily Ray — Is Google Finally Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles? (Feb 2026)lilyraynyc.substack.com →
- Search Engine Land — What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?searchengineland.com →
- OpenAI — GPTBot crawler documentationplatform.openai.com →
- Anthropic — ClaudeBot crawler documentationanthropic.com →
- Schema.org — DefinedTermschema.org →
See what a GEO agency would see on your site.
TurboAudit runs the audit step of the GEO agency workflow — schema coverage, AI crawler accessibility, content extractability, citation density, freshness signals — across every page. From $49/mo. Useful before you hire an agency, useful instead of one for smaller sites.