How to Evaluate a GEO Agency: A Credibility Checklist (and What SEO and AEO Have to Do With It)

The GEO agency market is having its gold rush moment. Every SEO shop has added "AI visibility" to its homepage. Every agency deck now includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews in the logo strip. Most of them have no idea what they're doing. I've worked in search, content strategy, and marketing analytics for more than 25 years, I work with GEO as part of my fractional CMO practice, and I've reviewed enough agency pitches to tell a team that understands how large language models work from one that repackaged its SEO services and changed the label.

Here is the short answer on how to evaluate a GEO agency. A credible agency can explain in plain English how AI systems decide what to cite, insists on fixing your SEO and AEO foundations first, implements schema and site changes itself, builds authority beyond your own website, and measures AI citations against a consistent set of queries. Anyone who guarantees placement in ChatGPT, sells backlink packages, or reports only rankings and traffic is selling SEO with a new wrapper.

1. What does GEO actually mean, and does the agency mean the same thing?

Start by confirming the definition, because the acronym is used two ways. Some providers use GEO to mean geographic SEO: local rankings, maps, and local landing pages. Others mean Generative Engine Optimization, which is the practice of making your brand more likely to be cited, referenced, or surfaced when AI platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini generate answers. If an agency can't tell you which one it means in plain English, that's your first red flag.

Generative Engine Optimization sits on top of two older disciplines. SEO is about ranking in traditional search results through keywords, backlinks, technical site health, page speed, and crawlability. AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is about appearing in answer-style results such as featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes, which depends on question-and-answer structure, clear definitions, and formatting that makes your content easy to extract. GEO goes a layer deeper into how language models parse, trust, and retrieve content when they build a response. The goal is to be cited, and that takes entity clarity so AI knows exactly who you are and what you do, authority signals across the web, structured data, and content designed to be extractable and trustworthy.

The three compound. Strong SEO makes AEO more achievable, and strong AEO makes GEO more achievable. I go further into that relationship in why AEO is not just SEO.

2. Why is it so hard to judge a GEO agency right now?

GEO is genuinely new. The academic paper that introduced the term was published in late 2023. There are no industry certifications, no established benchmarks, and no decade of case studies to draw on.

That creates a specific problem for buyers. It's very hard to tell real GEO expertise from a convincing pitch. The vocabulary sounds technical (entities, retrieval-augmented generation, semantic chunking, LLM trust signals), the concepts are unfamiliar enough that most clients don't push back, and the results are hard to measure in the short term. A new discipline, technical vocabulary, and difficult measurement together are exactly the conditions that attract people selling things they can't deliver. The rest of this checklist is how you cut through it.

3. Can they explain how AI systems choose what to cite, without buzzwords?

Ask a potential agency to explain how a large language model decides whether to cite a piece of content. The right answer involves entity recognition, trust signals, content structure designed for extraction, and authority across third-party sources. The wrong answer sounds like SEO with AI words added: "comprehensive, high-quality content that answers user questions thoroughly." That answer isn't wrong. It just describes SEO.

The best GEO work starts with an entity map rather than a promise of more blog posts. That map covers your brand, your services and sub-services, your locations and experts where relevant, and your proof points such as outcomes, certifications, awards, and partnerships. If an agency jumps straight to "we'll publish ten posts a month," it is skipping the part that helps AI systems consistently understand and trust you. Ask how they'll define and reinforce your core brand and service entities across the site.

4. Will they implement the technical work, or just recommend it?

GEO has a real technical layer: JSON-LD schema markup, content architecture, and entity consistency across your site and across third-party sources. Schema isn't magic, but it is foundational for machine understanding. A strong agency evaluates and implements the right types for your business, which might include Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, Person for your experts, Article for editorial content, FAQPage where it genuinely fits, and Review markup only when it is accurate and policy-compliant. The red flag is "we install a schema plugin and you're done."

An agency that tells you what needs doing but treats implementation as your team's problem is a strategy consultant. Ask who on their team implements schema, how they validate it, and whether you can see examples. Ask them what llms.txt is and what it does and doesn't do. If they fumble the technical questions, they aren't ready to deliver. Also ask what site changes they typically make in the first 30 to 60 days, since real GEO work often touches navigation, internal linking, service page architecture, author pages, content templates, FAQ sections, and indexing cleanup.

5. Do they insist on your SEO and AEO foundations first?

Any GEO agency worth hiring will tell you that GEO without strong SEO is a house built on sand. If your site has indexing issues, thin pages, duplicate content, or broken technical structure, GEO efforts will produce minimal results. A credible agency does not skip the fundamentals because they're less exciting to pitch. Most AI visibility gains come from better page structure, better internal linking and topical coverage, cleaner technical SEO, stronger experience and author credibility signals, and better off-site evidence.

AEO is often the most immediately actionable layer. Content that answers specific questions clearly, with a short direct answer near the top, subheadings that match real questions, definitions, and simple comparisons, improves both featured snippet performance and the odds of an AI citation. It is also faster to execute than a full GEO program. Ask them what parts of your SEO foundation must be fixed before GEO can work, and ask to see how they structure a page for AI extraction and human scanning at the same time.

6. How will they measure AI visibility, honestly?

GEO performance is genuinely hard to measure, because rankings and traffic don't capture how often AI platforms cite you. A credible agency tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini using a consistent set of queries run at regular intervals, and shows you how those citations change over time. It blends that with organic impressions, clicks, and conversions, SERP feature tracking, branded search lift, and how newly published or refreshed pages perform, and it is open about the limits of third-party visibility tools.

If an agency can't show you its measurement process before you sign, that's a significant red flag. Reporting that consists only of rankings and organic traffic, with "AI optimization" mentioned in the narrative but never measured separately, is an SEO report with a GEO wrapper. Measurement should also follow the visitor past the click. Visibility without conversion is vanity, so look for an agency that talks about calls to action, proof placement, page speed, and clear next steps once the traffic arrives.

7. Do they build authority beyond your own site, the right way?

This is the piece most agencies underinvest in, because it is harder and slower than on-site work. Language models form their understanding of your brand from far more than your website: press coverage, third-party mentions, industry citations, podcast appearances, expert profiles, and consistent presence across trusted sources. An agency focused only on your own site is optimizing a fraction of the signal.

Good authority work looks like digital PR, earned mentions, partnerships, expert contributions, consistent directory and profile listings where relevant, and content that naturally earns citations. "We sell 100 backlinks" is a reason to leave the call. In regulated categories such as healthcare, legal, and finance, the agency should also bring up review policy compliance, claims and disclaimers, author attribution, and sourcing on its own, because accuracy is part of what earns trust from both people and AI systems.

8. What should the first 90 days and the contract look like?

A credible GEO program works in layers. The first is technical and foundational: a technical and indexing audit, the entity and service map, schema, and a clean crawlable site. This is where SEO and AEO do most of the work and where measurable progress shows up earliest. The second layer is content architecture: upgraded core service pages, topic clusters that show real expertise, direct answers to the questions your buyers ask, and refreshes of pages that earn impressions but not clicks. The third layer is authority, the slowest and most valuable long term.

You can see movement early, but meaningful improvement in AI citation frequency typically takes three to six months to compound. Anyone promising faster should be asked to show prior evidence. The contract should be just as specific: which pages will be created or updated, how technical fixes are handled, who writes and who approves, what gets reported and how often, which tools are included, and how you'll communicate. "We do GEO" with no deliverables list is a red flag on its own.

9. What questions and red flags should decide it?

These aren't trick questions. A genuine practitioner answers them fluently.

• How do you define GEO, and how is it different from AEO and SEO in your actual workflow?

• Can you show me a client example where you tracked AI citation frequency before and after the engagement?

• What is your schema process, and who executes it, your team or ours?

• How do you build authority outside the client's own website?

• What changed on the AI search platforms in the last 90 days, and how did you adapt?

• What will you do in the first 30 days, and what does the program look like at month 6 and month 12?

• Who actually does the work, the senior team or outsourced staff?

• What metrics do you not trust, and what does your measurement stack for GEO look like?

The measurement question is the most revealing. A practitioner names specific tools and processes. Someone who repackaged SEO gives you a vague answer about "monitoring AI presence."

Walk away from guaranteed results in a set timeframe, because nobody can guarantee AI citations when the platforms change constantly. Walk away from case studies with traffic graphs but no GEO-specific citation data, technical questions that get deflected to "the strategy level," a first conversation that never mentions your existing SEO health, "secret GEO hacks," and pricing that is ultra-low next to huge promises.

The test is simple. Can they explain the technical foundations clearly, measure beyond traditional SEO metrics, implement rather than just recommend, and show prior results with GEO-specific evidence? If the answer to all four is yes, you've found a real practitioner. If any answer is a deflection or a buzzword, keep looking. If you'd like to see how I approach this work, here are my SEO, AEO, and GEO services, or you can book a free 30-minute introductory call here and I'll give you an honest read on an agency proposal or your own foundations.

Dr. Linda Orr, PhD, is the founder of Orr Consulting, a fractional CMO and marketing analytics practice serving brands from $5M to $500M in revenue. She built Upwork's first enterprise marketing mix model, covering an $88M annual media portfolio, and spent about 20 years as a marketing professor before moving fully into consulting.