What Is a GEO Agency? What Generative Engine Optimization Agencies Do and Charge

A generative engine optimization agency is the full name for a GEO agency: a firm hired to raise how often AI answer engines mention a brand, cite its pages and recommend it for the questions its buyers ask. A generative engine is any system that writes an answer from web sources instead of returning a list of links. GEO here has nothing to do with geography; it is not geo-targeting or local marketing.

The term comes from a research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, first posted in November 2023 by researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi and presented at the KDD 2024 conference. In their lab setup, where GPT-3.5 wrote answers from the top five Google results, rewriting a page to cite sources, add quotations or add statistics raised a visibility score, based on how much of the answer drew on that page, by up to 40 percent. Tested on Perplexity, the gains on the same word-share measure were smaller, 22 percent at best, and keyword stuffing did 10 percent worse than leaving the page alone. That lab result is the source of the "up to 40 percent" many agencies quote; it was never a traffic or ranking figure.

Agencies sell the same work under many names. In our comparison of 18 AI SEO agencies, the labels included GEO, AEO, AI SEO, AI search optimization, SAIO, LLM SEO, Relevance Engineering and Information Gain SEO. Read what an agency does, not what it calls itself.

A GEO agency does five kinds of work. Of 10 GEO agency service pages we read in October 2026, all 10 sold content work, 9 sold audits, prompt tracking and reporting, 8 sold schema markup and 7 sold off-site mentions or digital PR:

• Measure where you stand. A fixed set of buyer questions runs through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features, and every answer is coded for which brands it names, which it recommends and which pages it cites. Search Console now helps on the Google side: since August 31, 2026, its Generative AI performance report shows every site's impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our guide to measuring AI visibility sets out the rest of the method.
• Fix access. AI search engines can only cite pages their crawlers can reach, and the crawlers are not interchangeable. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot, its training crawler, is set separately. For Google's AI features the control is ordinary Googlebot. Our AI crawlers guide lists which bots do what.
• Rewrite pages so they can be quoted. Plain statements of who a product is for, what it costs and how it compares, with numbers and sources a model can lift into an answer.
• Work on the sources AI reads. Review sites, comparison articles, directories, forums and press coverage. In our four-industry study, only 31 percent of the sites ChatGPT cited ranked in Google's top ten for the same question, so much of the job happens off the client's own site.
• Report outcomes, not a single score. How often the brand is recommended and cited, question by question, against named competitors, month after month.

None of this needs secret techniques. Google's own guide says that from its point of view, optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO: its AI features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems, and you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or special schema to appear in them. A GEO agency's technical work should look a lot like good SEO.

A GEO agency and an SEO agency share most of their foundations: pages search engines can crawl, content that answers the question, and mentions on sites people trust. The differences are in the goal and the evidence:

The gap between the two is real. Across our 21 software teardowns, 74 percent of ChatGPT's recommendations went to brands whose own site did not rank in Google's top ten for the question. A brand can rank well and still be left out of the answer, or the other way round. Our GEO vs SEO guide covers the full comparison.

A GEO agency costs from about $3,000 to more than $50,000 a month among the established firms that publish a price. That range comes from our review of 18 AI SEO agencies' own websites on August 30, 2026, a 16x spread for services sold under the same names. Only 8 of the 18 showed any pricing, and several of those figures were general SEO retainers rather than AI search programs. Our guide to AI SEO pricing breaks these prices down by audit, plan and retainer.

Smaller and productized offers start lower. Among the pages we read in October 2026, one plan began at $499 a month for 40 tracked prompts, and a UK agency listed small-business retainers from £1,200 a month. Three things drive the cost:

• Scope of measurement: how many questions, on how many AI surfaces, in how many markets and languages.
• Off-site work: digital PR and outreach to the sites AI answers cite take the most hours.
• Content volume: how many pages get rewritten or built each month.

A sensible way in is a paid audit before any retainer. Ours, the Category Salience Brief, costs $750 and the price is on its page; the GEO engagement that can follow is scoped from what the audit finds.

To choose a GEO agency, ask questions that force specific answers:

• Which questions will you track? Ask to see the list before work starts. It should be written in your buyers' words, not as keywords.
• What counts as a result? Being mentioned, being recommended for a stated case and being cited as a source are three different things. A good agency reports them separately.
• How many times do you run each question? AI answers vary from one run to the next, so one run per question is an anecdote. None of the 10 service pages we read said how many runs they use, or how they tell a real change from noise.
• What changes on our site, and what happens off it? If the plan is only on-site content, it skips most of the sources answers rely on.
• What do the first 90 days cost and deliver? A written scope with a baseline at the start and a remeasure at the end.
• Can you show measured results for a client? With the method: which questions, which surfaces, over what period.

Two red flags come up often. The first is guaranteed placement. OpenAI says placement in ChatGPT search is not guaranteed, and Google says the same of indexing and serving, so no agency can promise it. A guarantee on an outcome metric, such as a fee refund if fewer tracked prompts name you, is a different thing; read its terms closely. The second red flag is a required special format, such as a file or markup sold as the key to AI answers. Google says none is needed for its AI features, and our llms.txt guide explains why that file in particular does not do what it is often sold as doing.

These GEO agency FAQs cover how GEO relates to AEO and SEO, what can be promised, and how long it takes.

Is a GEO agency the same as an AEO agency?

A GEO agency and an AEO agency sell nearly the same thing. AEO (answer engine optimization) grew out of featured snippets and voice search; GEO comes from the 2023 research on generative engines. Google treats both labels as names for SEO aimed at its AI features, and in practice the work overlaps almost completely.

Do I need a GEO agency if I already have an SEO agency?

You need a GEO agency only if your SEO agency does not measure AI answers. Ask whether it tracks how often ChatGPT and Google's AI features recommend you against competitors. If it does, and works on the third-party sources those answers cite, you may already be covered. Our five-question check on whether you need a GEO agency walks through the decision step by step.

Can a GEO agency guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my brand?

No, a GEO agency cannot guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend your brand. OpenAI says placement in ChatGPT search is not guaranteed, and answers change between runs and over time. What an agency can promise is a defined method, a baseline and a remeasure against the same questions.

How long does GEO take to work?

How long GEO takes to work is the question with the least evidence behind it. The agency pages we read quoted anything from four to eight weeks to three to six months, and none published how they measured it. Our own method remeasures at 60 to 90 days, against the same question set measured the same way.

What does a GEO agency measure?

A GEO agency should measure how often AI answers mention your brand, how often they recommend it for a stated case, and how often they cite your pages, across a fixed set of buyer questions and against named competitors. One blended score hides which of the three is the problem.

Does GEO mean geographic marketing?

No, GEO in this sense does not mean geographic marketing. It stands for generative engine optimization, the work of getting a brand into AI-written answers. Geo-targeting and local SEO are separate disciplines, even though some agencies use the same three letters for both.

• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024 (arXiv 2311.09735)
• Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search
• Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report
• OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
• OpenAI Help Center: Searching the web with ChatGPT
• High Salience: ChatGPT vs Google, how often they agree

Every High Salience engagement starts with the Category Salience Brief, which shows where your brand stands before you commit to a retainer: your commercial questions run across Google and the AI surfaces, competitors side by side, and a ranked list of what to fix first.