How to choose a GEO agency
Eight criteria, a scorecard, the red flags, and the questions to ask before you sign, benchmarked against how the AI engines answer the same question.
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Resources
Field notes on how AI assistants find and choose.
Guides to generative engine optimization, written from our own measurements of what the AI engines cite. Our figures come from repeated runs, and you can ask us for the data behind any of them.
What does a GEO agency do?
A GEO agency gets a brand cited, mentioned and recommended in AI answers. The nine things it does, what it costs in 2026, and how the AI engines themselves describe the job, measured across 22 runs.
Guide · AI search
Key takeaways
- A GEO agency works on the pages, the structured data, the brand’s entity and the third-party sources the engines cite.
- Published 2026 price guides put agency retainers between about $1,500 and $50,000 a month; the cheapest useful engagement is a repeated audit.
- On Google’s AI surfaces, a top-three ranking roughly doubles a page’s chance of a citation compared with positions 7 to 10; on Perplexity and ChatGPT, ranking counts for much less.
Four guides to hiring a GEO agency
Is a GEO agency worth it?
When hiring one pays back, when it does not, what it costs, and the three numbers that decide it.
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GEO agency vs SEO agency
What each does, where they overlap, where measurement says they differ, and whether you need one, the other or both.
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What does a GEO agency do?
The nine things a generative engine optimization agency does, what it costs, and how the engines describe the job.
Underneath team
The AI search glossary.
26 terms, from canonical URLs to query fan-out, defined in a sentence or two each.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- AI Mode
- AI Overviews
- AI share of voice
- AI visibility
- Answer accuracy
- Buyer prompt set
- Canonical URL
- Citation rate
- Crawl budget
- Entity
- Featured snippet
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Grounding
- Hallucination
- hreflang
- Knowledge graph
- llms.txt
- LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization)
- Local citation
- People Also Ask
- Query fan-out
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- Schema markup
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Zero-click search
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