The short version
- A GEO agency makes a brand the one an AI answer engine names, cites or recommends. It does that by working on four things: the brand’s pages, its structured data, its entity footprint and the third-party sources the engines draw on.
- The work has nine parts: an AI visibility audit, prompt and fan-out research, content restructuring, structured data and crawler access, entity work, consolidation, citation building, daily measurement, and team training.
- Published 2026 price guides put agency retainers between about $1,500 and $50,000 a month; the cheapest useful engagement is an audit that shows where you are cited today.
In September 2026 the question “what does a GEO agency do” produces a full AI answer on every platform, and the answers agree with each other more than the agencies do. This guide sets out the job in plain terms, then compares it with what the engines say, since their answer is what a buyer who asks an assistant reads before any agency’s website.
What a GEO agency is
A generative engine optimization agency is a marketing firm whose deliverable is presence inside AI-generated answers rather than a position on a results page. When a buyer asks an assistant “which accounting software handles multi-currency” or “who is a good plumber in Leeds”, the engine retrieves pages, selects passages, and names a few brands. The agency’s job is to make its client one of the brands named, to make sure the engine describes the client accurately, and to make the pages that carry the client’s facts the ones the engine cites.
The same firm may call itself an AI search optimization agency, an answer engine optimization (AEO) agency, an LLM optimization agency or an AI visibility agency. The label varies; the job does not. When we asked ChatGPT the question, its first search was “geo agency meaning generative engine optimization agency”: it expanded the acronym before answering. A page that wants to be read for this question should do the same in its first sentence.
The nine things a GEO agency does
Agencies package the work differently, but the AI answers to this question converge on the same activities. These are the nine that recur, in the order an engagement usually runs them.
| Activity | What it changes | Typical deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| AI visibility audit | Where the brand is cited or recommended today, and by which engine | Question-by-question citation map, run daily for at least ten days |
| Prompt and fan-out research | Which questions and sub-questions the engines actually run | Question list per page, including the engines’ hidden follow-up searches |
| Content restructuring | Whether a passage can be quoted on its own | Definition-first openings, question headings, complete FAQ answers, comparison tables |
| Structured data and crawler access | Whether the engines can read the page and its facts | Organization, Service, Product, FAQPage schema; crawler rules for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended |
| Entity and knowledge-graph work | Whether the brand is one recognizable entity | Consistent name, description and identifiers across the site, Wikidata, LinkedIn and directories |
| Consolidation | Which single page the engine picks per topic | Merged overlapping pages, redirects |
| Citation and digital PR | Whether third parties the engines trust name the brand | Listings and mentions on the roundups, directories, forums and publications the engines cite |
| Measurement and reporting | Whether you know what changed | Daily tracking of every target question, monthly report on mentions, citations and share of voice |
| Training | Whether the results survive the engagement | Writing standards, schema checklist, monitoring routine |
Three of these separate a GEO agency from a content agency with a new label. The audit must be repeated, because a single check of an AI answer is a coin toss: in Underneath’s own tests a source cited once in twelve runs was noise and one cited in ten of twelve was a position. The citation work must target the specific third-party pages each engine uses, which differ by platform. And the measurement must be per engine, because ChatGPT, Google’s AI surfaces and Perplexity do not share sources.
What the AI engines say a GEO agency does
Underneath asked the five main engines this exact question 22 times between 15 and 25 September 2026: twelve times over ten days and ten times in one afternoon. The answers were consistent.
- Every platform opened with a definition that expands the acronym: “A GEO agency (generative engine optimization agency) helps businesses…”. Google’s AI Overview cited about eight sources per answer, AI Mode seven, Perplexity nine, Gemini three, ChatGPT one.
- Every platform then listed services, and the lists overlap almost completely with the nine above: content optimization for AI answers, structured data, entity work, citation building, monitoring and reporting.
- The sources were agency explainers and directory guides, not roundups. On Google AI Mode the five most-cited pages were all agency pages titled around the same question; on Perplexity a directory’s guide was cited in 22 of 22 runs. Reddit was named inside 31 of the 110 answers.
- The People Also Ask box under the Google result was mostly about SEO: “is it worth hiring an SEO agency?” (16 times), “is GEO replacing SEO?” (12), “which are the best GEO agencies?” (7). Buyers asking what a GEO agency does are also asking whether they still need SEO. The next section answers that.
GEO agency, SEO agency or both
A GEO agency does not replace an SEO agency. Google’s guidance for its generative AI features says the same SEO fundamentals apply to them, and our measurements bear that out: for the query “generative engine optimization services”, Google’s AI Overview cited 75% of the pages ranked 1 to 3 in the same search but only 42% of those ranked 4 to 10. That was one keyword. Across 486 searches, 41.7% of pages ranking 1 to 3 were cited against 20.1% at positions 7 to 10, while 71.3% of all AI Overview citations went to pages outside the top 10. On Google’s surfaces, then, ranking helps a great deal but does not decide the citation. On ChatGPT it mattered even less: 26 of 28 ChatGPT citations for that keyword came from outside Google’s top 10.
| Column 1 | SEO agency | GEO agency |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank pages and earn clicks | Be the brand the AI answer names and cites |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot |
| Unit of work | The page | The passage, the entity and the third-party mention |
| Off-page work | Links | Listings and mentions on the pages the engines cite |
| Measurement | Rankings, organic traffic | Mentions, citations, share of voice, AI referral traffic |
The practical answer for most companies is to keep SEO as the foundation and add GEO as the layer that decides whether the ranking page is also the cited one. The full comparison is in GEO agency vs SEO agency.
What a GEO agency costs in 2026
Published price guides from 2026 put GEO agency retainers between about $1,500 and $50,000 a month. WebFX (opens in a new tab) (May 2026) lists $1,500 to $5,000 a month for small businesses, $5,000 to $25,000+ for mid-sized companies and $25,000 to $50,000+ for enterprises, with projects at $5,000 to $50,000 and hourly consulting at $50 to $300. Underneath’s programs are priced in three bands, $5,000 to $10,000, $11,000 to $20,000 and $20,000+ a month, each beginning with a Marketing & AI Visibility Audit whose fee is credited if you continue.
Two things to check before paying any of those figures: whether the audit repeats each question over several days rather than once, and whether the reporting is per engine. An agency that shows you one screenshot of one ChatGPT answer has measured nothing.
What to expect in the first 90 days
- Weeks 1 to 2: the audit. Your buyer questions run daily on each engine; you get a map of who is cited today and which pages and third parties the engines used.
- Weeks 3 to 8: the pages. Priority pages are restructured so their first sentences can be quoted, structured data and crawler access are fixed, overlapping pages are merged.
- From week 4: the third parties. The agency pitches the roundups, directories and forum threads the engines cite for your category.
- Day 30 and monthly after: the report. Mentions, citations and share of voice by engine against the baseline; pages the engines retrieved but did not cite get reworked.
Changes to pages that are already indexed can show up in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode within weeks, and in Perplexity once it recrawls them. ChatGPT recommendations lean on third-party sources, so they take longer.
Frequently asked questions
What is a GEO agency?
A GEO agency, or generative engine optimization agency, is a firm that gets a brand cited, mentioned and recommended in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and similar engines, and makes sure the engines describe the brand accurately.
What services does a GEO agency provide?
An AI visibility audit, prompt and fan-out research, content restructuring for quotability, structured data and crawler access, entity and knowledge-graph work, page consolidation, citation and digital PR building, daily measurement with monthly reporting, and team training.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. Google’s AI features draw on Google’s index, and in Underneath’s study of 486 searches the AI Overview cited 41.7% of the pages ranking in the top three, twice the rate of pages ranking 7 to 10. GEO adds the passage, entity and third-party work that decides whether a ranking page is also the one the engine cites; it does not replace ranking.
Is it worth hiring an SEO agency if I want AI visibility?
For Google’s AI surfaces, yes: a top-three ranking roughly doubles a page’s chance of being cited compared with positions 7 to 10, even though most AI Overview citations still come from outside the top 10. On Perplexity and ChatGPT ranking matters far less, so an agency that only does SEO will miss those engines. Keep the SEO foundation and add a GEO specialist who measures each engine separately.
How do GEO agencies measure success?
By tracking a fixed set of buyer questions on each engine daily and reporting mentions, citations of your pages, share of voice against named competitors, and sessions and leads from AI referrals, against a baseline taken before the work started.
Which are the best GEO agencies?
The engines cannot answer that consistently: in 22 runs no agency was named in more than a quarter of answers to this question, and the agencies named were those whose own explainers were cited. Judge an agency by whether it can show you a repeated, per-engine measurement of a client’s visibility, not by a list.