What a GEO agency actually does (and how to pick one)

Why “GEO agency” is suddenly a category

For two decades, hiring help with being found online meant hiring an SEO. The job was clear: rank on Google, earn the click. That job still exists — but a second one appeared almost overnight. People now ask an assistant and accept its answer. “Who’s the best non-toxic cleaning brand?” “Which agency should I hire for branding?” The assistant names one to three companies, and the rest of the market simply isn’t in the room.

A GEO agency exists to put you in that room. The discipline goes by a few names — generative engine optimization, answer engine optimization, AI SEO — but the goal is identical: become the brand the machine recommends.

The four things a real GEO agency does

Strip the jargon and a credible engagement is concrete and measurable:

1. Audit what AI already says about you. Before touching anything, a good agency asks the major engines your buyers’ actual questions and records what comes back — whether you’re named, what’s said, which page earned the citation, and where a competitor owns the answer instead. That baseline is the whole point of the work; everything is measured against it.
2. Fix the plumbing. Most sites fail GEO for boring technical reasons: pages built in JavaScript that AI crawlers can’t read, missing or contradictory facts, no schema markup, slow or blocked pages. This is a one-time pass plus permanent monitoring.
3. Publish extractable content, consistently. AI engines cite pages that state facts plainly — definitions, comparisons, numbered steps, prices, FAQs. A serious agency turns every question your buyers ask into a page that answers it cleanly, and it does this on a steady cadence rather than in one burst.
4. Spread consistent facts and earn citations. The same business description, numbers and category everywhere you appear — your site, directories, profiles, the articles that mention you. Then earning mentions on the specific sources each engine trusts for your category. This is the new link building.

What you should actually pay for

The fastest way to waste money on GEO is to buy a deliverable that looks impressive and changes nothing. Pay for outcomes you can verify:

• A citation baseline and a re-test schedule — not a one-off “AI audit” PDF. The value is the trend line over months.
• Technical fixes that ship, verified by viewing your pages the way a crawler does (raw HTML, no scripts).
• Published pages on a real cadence, each targeting a question with commercial intent.
• Reporting in the language of the new channel: share of AI answers, brand mentions, citations earned — alongside classic rankings and traffic, never instead of them.

Be wary of anyone promising “guaranteed #1 in ChatGPT.” No one controls a model’s output, and any agency claiming otherwise is selling certainty that doesn’t exist.

The 80/20 nobody likes to admit

Here’s the inconvenient truth a GEO agency should tell you on the first call: roughly 80% of generative engine optimization is classic SEO done properly. Crawlable pages, real content, technical hygiene, genuine authority. AI engines learned to trust the same signals Google spent twenty years refining. If an agency wants to sell you a magic “AI layer” while your fundamentals are broken, they’re selling the 20% and ignoring the 80% that makes it work.

The genuinely new 20% — extractability, cross-web consistency, citation-building on trusted sources, and measuring mentions inside answers — is real and it matters. But it sits on top of fundamentals, not instead of them.

Questions that separate the real ones from the hype

Ask a prospective GEO agency these five questions. The answers tell you everything:

• “Show me how you’ll measure success.” If the answer isn’t “we test the engines on your money questions on a schedule and track mentions,” keep looking.
• “How do you check whether AI can even read my site?” A real answer involves viewing raw, script-free HTML — not a vibe.
• “What’s your publishing cadence and who writes it?” Citations compound through consistency; one-off bursts fade.
• “Which sources do the engines trust in my category, and how do we get on them?” Category-specific, not generic directory spam.
• “What happens to my classic SEO?” The correct answer is “it gets better — it’s 80% of the job.”

We built our own engine answering exactly these questions for the brands we run — it’s the same system behind our AI SEO work. If you want to see where you stand before hiring anyone, the cheapest first move is a baseline: ask the engines your top three buyer questions today and write down whether you appear. That gap is what a GEO agency is paid to close.

Italo Campilii

Founder, Acromatico · runs AI visibility & brand systems across 10+ live brands