How to Evaluate Whether a GEO Agency Is Credible (And What SEO and AEO Have to Do With It)
- Linda Orr
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
The GEO agency market is having its gold rush moment. Every SEO shop has added "AI visibility" to their 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 been working in search, content strategy, and marketing analytics for 25+ years. I work with GEO as part of my fractional CMO practice, and I've reviewed enough agency pitches to know the difference between a team that understands how large language models actually work and one that repackaged their existing SEO services and changed the label.
This is a guide for founders and marketing leaders who want to evaluate a GEO agency honestly — without getting sold a $5,000/month retainer for something that doesn't exist yet.
First: What GEO actually is — and what it isn't
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing your brand's digital presence so that AI-powered search platforms — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — are more likely to cite, reference, or surface your brand when generating answers.
It is not the same as SEO. It is not the same as AEO. And it is not magic.
Here's how the three disciplines actually relate:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about ranking in traditional search results. Keywords, backlinks, technical site health, page speed, crawlability. It has been around for decades and the fundamentals are well understood. SEO is the foundation. Without it, GEO doesn't work.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about appearing in answer-style results — featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and the kinds of structured responses that search engines generate for direct questions. It focuses on question-and-answer content structure, clear definitions, and formatting that makes your content easy to extract and display as a direct answer.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) goes a layer deeper. It focuses on how LLMs (large language models) parse, trust, and retrieve your content when building their responses. The goal is not just ranking — it's being cited. That requires entity clarity (AI needs to know exactly who you are and what you do), authority signals across the web, structured data, and content that is designed to be extractable and trustworthy to an AI system.
The three are not competing disciplines. They compound. Strong SEO makes AEO more achievable. Strong AEO makes GEO more achievable. Any agency telling you they do GEO without first asking about your SEO foundation is selling you something incomplete.
Why the GEO agency market is a minefield right now
GEO is genuinely new. The academic paper that introduced the term was published in 2023. There are no industry certifications. No established benchmarks. No decade of case studies to draw on.
That creates a specific problem: it is impossible for a buyer to distinguish 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.
This combination — new discipline, technical vocabulary, difficult measurement — is exactly the environment that attracts people selling things they can't deliver.
Here is how to cut through it.
The five things a credible GEO agency can actually do
1. Explain how LLMs retrieve and evaluate content — 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 second answer is not wrong. It's just not GEO. It's SEO rebranded.
2. Show you a measurement framework you can actually use
GEO performance is genuinely hard to measure. Traditional metrics — rankings, traffic — do not capture AI citation frequency. A credible agency should be tracking brand mentions across AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini), using a consistent set of queries run at regular intervals, and showing you how those citations change over time.
If an agency cannot show you what their measurement process looks like before you sign anything, that is a significant red flag. Reporting that consists only of organic traffic and keyword rankings is not a GEO program.
3. Execute the technical foundations — not just recommend them
GEO has a real technical layer: JSON-LD schema markup, structured data implementation, content architecture, entity consistency across your site and across third-party sources. An agency that can tell you what needs to be done but positions implementation as "your team's problem" is a strategy consultant, not a GEO agency.
Ask specifically: who on your team implements schema, and can you show me examples? Ask them to explain what llms.txt is and whether they use it. If they fumble on the technical questions, they are not ready to deliver results.
4. Build authority outside your own site
This is the piece most agencies underinvest in because it is harder and slower than on-site optimization. LLMs form their understanding of your brand from everything they have been trained on — not just your website. That means press coverage, third-party mentions, academic or industry citations, podcast appearances, and consistent brand presence across trusted sources.
An agency focused only on your own site is optimizing a fraction of the signal. The ones doing the harder work of building authority across the broader web are the ones actually moving the needle.
5. Understand the SEO and AEO foundations — and insist on them
Any GEO agency worth hiring will tell you that GEO without strong SEO foundations 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 are less exciting to pitch.
Similarly, AEO is often the most immediately actionable layer. Structuring content to answer specific questions clearly — with definitions, direct answers, and FAQ formats — improves both featured snippet performance and AI citation likelihood. It is also faster to execute than full GEO programs and produces measurable results within weeks rather than months.
Use the following table to help evaluate GEO agencies
Questions to ask before you sign anything
These are not trick questions. They are things a genuine GEO practitioner should answer 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 your engagement?
What is your schema implementation process, and who executes it — your team or ours?
How do you approach authority building outside the client's own website?
What changed on the AI search platforms in the last 90 days, and how did you adapt?
What metrics do you not trust, and why?
What does your measurement stack look like for GEO specifically?
The last question is revealing. A practitioner will name specific tools and processes. Someone who repackaged their SEO service will give you a vague answer about "monitoring AI presence."
Red flags to walk away from
Guaranteed results in a specific timeframe. Nobody can guarantee AI citation outcomes. The platforms change constantly, the signals are not fully understood, and the results compound slowly. Anyone promising you top-of-AI-results in 30 days is lying.
No case studies with GEO-specific metrics. Traffic graphs are easy to produce and easy to misattribute. If an agency cannot show you actual AI citation tracking data — mentions across specific AI platforms, measured against a consistent query set — they have not done this work.
Technical questions that get deflected. If you ask about schema implementation and the answer is "we handle that at the strategy level," they are not implementing. If you ask about RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and get a blank look or a buzzword cloud, they do not understand the mechanics.
No mention of SEO foundations. A GEO agency that does not talk about your existing SEO health in the first conversation is not thinking about your actual situation. They are pitching a service.
Measurement only in traditional SEO metrics. If their reporting is rankings and organic traffic with "AI optimization" mentioned in the narrative but not measured separately, that is an SEO report with a GEO wrapper.
What good GEO actually looks like in practice
A credible GEO program typically works in layers, over time.
The first layer is technical and foundational: schema markup, entity consistency, content structure for extraction, and a clean crawlable site. This is where AEO and SEO do most of the work and where measurable progress comes earliest.
The second layer is content architecture: topic clusters that demonstrate comprehensive domain expertise, direct-answer content for the questions your buyers actually ask, and clear entity definitions so AI systems understand exactly who you are, what you do, and who you serve.
The third layer is authority: third-party mentions, press coverage, industry citations, expert profiles, and consistent brand presence across the sources AI systems treat as credible. This is the slowest layer and the most impactful long-term.
Genuine results — meaningful improvement in AI citation frequency — typically take three to six months to compound. Anyone promising faster than that should be asked to show prior evidence.
The honest bottom line
GEO is real and it matters. As AI-powered discovery becomes a meaningful share of how buyers find vendors, service providers, and information, being cited in those answers is a legitimate business outcome worth investing in.
But the agency market is currently flooded with providers who understand the vocabulary better than the mechanics. Protecting yourself from that requires knowing what to ask, what the answers should sound like, and what the red flags are.
The evaluation framework is simple: can they explain the technical foundations clearly, show you measurement that goes beyond traditional SEO metrics, execute implementation rather than just recommend it, and demonstrate prior results with GEO-specific evidence?
If the answer to all four is yes, you have found a real practitioner. If the answer to any of them is a deflection or a buzzword, keep looking.
Dr. Linda Orr, PhD is the founder of Orr Consulting, a fractional CMO practice working with growth-stage brands in healthcare, DTC, and B2B. She provides SEO, AEO, and GEO strategy as part of her organic growth services.
Comments