"GEO" went from a 2023 research paper to a sales category very quickly. There are now agencies, tools and consultants selling generative engine optimization to anyone worried about showing up in ChatGPT. Some of them do careful, useful work. Some are selling old SEO tricks under a new name. A few are selling things that can hurt you.
This guide covers what a GEO agency should do, the questions to ask on a first call and the answers that should make you look elsewhere. We run a GEO program ourselves, so we're not neutral. The questions are the same ones we'd want a client to ask us.
What does a GEO agency actually do?
GEO is the work of making your brand easy for AI assistants to find, understand and recommend. If you want the longer definition, start with what GEO is and how it differs from SEO.
In practice, the work falls into four parts:
- Audit. Check whether AI crawlers can reach your site, whether your content shows up in the raw HTML, how pages are structured and how well they answer the questions buyers ask.
- Fixes. Remove technical blockers, restructure key pages so the answer comes first, and add structured data that matches what's on the page.
- Off-site presence. Earn real mentions in reviews, comparisons, communities and creator content, since assistants read those as well as your site.
- Tracking. Measure how often you're named and cited, and how you're described, over time.
An agency that only offers one of these, usually "AI content," is covering a small part of the job.
Is GEO different from SEO?
Partly, and a good agency will be honest about where the line is.
For Google, there's very little difference. Google's own guide says that "from Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." Pages need to be indexed and eligible for snippets to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Google says you don't need special markup, AI text files or content "chunking" for its AI features (Google Search Central).
Other assistants work differently in the details. ChatGPT search relies on OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says sites that opt out of it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI). Many AI crawlers also don't run JavaScript, so a site that looks fine in Google can be empty to them. That's where GEO-specific checks earn their keep.
So the honest pitch is: solid SEO, plus the checks and off-site work that matter for assistants beyond Google. Be wary of anyone who says SEO no longer matters, or who says GEO is just SEO with nothing to add.
What should you ask on the first call?
Google publishes a list of questions to ask before hiring an SEO, and it now explicitly covers "AEO" and "GEO" services (Google Search Central). These are adapted from that list and from our own audits.
How will you measure results?
This is the most important question. Good answers include both first-party data and repeated prompt tracking.
First-party data now exists. Google's Search Console has a Generative AI performance report that shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device. It rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026, though it doesn't include click or query data (Google Search Central Blog). Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report that shows how often your content is cited in Copilot, Bing and partner AI answers, and in June 2026 it added intents, topics and Citation Share, the percentage of citations for a grounding query that went to your site (Bing Webmaster Blog).
Neither covers ChatGPT or Perplexity, so the agency should also run a fixed set of buyer prompts across those assistants on a schedule and report mention rate, citations and how you're described. AI answers vary between runs, so ask how many prompts they track and how often. A screenshot of one good answer proves very little.
What will you change first, and why?
Ask for the order of work. A sensible plan fixes access and rendering first, because nothing else matters if crawlers get an empty page. Structure and structured data come next, then content gaps and off-site work. Our GEO readiness checklist shows that order in detail.
Google also suggests granting only read access to Search Console for an initial audit, and asking whether the agency will share every change it makes along with the reasoning (Google Search Central).
Where does your advice come from?
Google recommends checking whether third-party advice cites official documentation or is clearly labeled as opinion based on data or experience, and notes that third-party tools don't have access to its internal ranking data (Google Search Central). A good agency should be able to point to OpenAI's, Perplexity's, Google's and Microsoft's own documentation for its technical recommendations, and tell you when something is a judgment call.
What do you think of llms.txt?
It's a useful test question. llms.txt is a proposed standard for a plain-text summary of your site. Google says Search ignores it and that you don't need it for AI features (Google Search Central). Other tools may read it. A good answer is "cheap to add, don't expect much from it." If an agency puts llms.txt at the center of its plan, it's probably selling the easy part.
How do you earn third-party mentions?
Assistants lean on what other sources say about you, so off-site work matters. Ask what it looks like. Good answers involve real coverage: honest comparison articles, customer reviews, community participation and creator content. Google's guide says inauthentic mentions won't help (Google Search Central). If an agency talks about seeding forum threads with fake accounts or buying placements in listicles, stop there.
We pair GEO with creator programs for this reason. Creators describing your product in their own words create the kind of independent mentions assistants read. There's more in how creator content feeds AI search visibility.
What will you write, and how much?
Content should fill real gaps between the prompts buyers ask and the pages you have. Ask to see the prompt list and the gap analysis behind any content plan. Hundreds of thin pages written to match every possible query variation is a risk, not a strategy.
What are the red flags?
- Guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. Nobody can promise this. Google's hiring guidance says to find someone else if an SEO guarantees first place, and the same applies here.
- Claims of special access. No agency has a partnership that makes assistants recommend its clients.
- Proprietary scores with no method. An "AI visibility score" is fine if they explain how it's built. If they can't, it's decoration.
- Fake mentions and mass content. Planted reviews, sock-puppet forum posts and auto-generated pages can damage your reputation and your search presence.
- No baseline. If they don't measure before changing anything, they can't show what their work did.
- Secrecy. You should know every change made to your site and why.
How long before you see results?
Technical fixes can show up fast. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to reach its search systems (OpenAI). Content changes depend on recrawling, and off-site mentions build over months. A reasonable agency will give you a baseline in the first weeks and report trends monthly after that, rather than promising a date.
How does Dime run GEO?
Our GEO program has three parts: a readiness audit, optimization, and ongoing AI visibility tracking. The audit covers crawler access, rendering, content structure and prompt fit, and we record a baseline across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot before we touch anything. Because we're also a creator marketing agency with 3,000+ creators activated, we can build the off-site side too.
If you're comparing GEO agencies, book a 30-minute call or ask for a free GEO readiness check. We reply within 24 hours.