How to choose a GEO agency
Generative engine optimization is a young category with no certifications and no accepted benchmark, which makes it easy to sell and hard to buy. These are the questions worth asking any vendor, including this one, and the answers that should end the conversation.
On this page
- How do you tell a real GEO agency from a repackaged one?
- What twelve questions should you ask before signing?
- Which answers should end the conversation immediately?
- How much should this cost, and what is a fair range?
- What should you ask AI Visibility Partners specifically?
- Can you do this yourself instead of hiring anyone?
- Where do these numbers come from?
How do you tell a real GEO agency from a repackaged one?
You tell them apart by asking what they measure and how, before asking what they charge. A practice that genuinely does this work can hand you the exact prompt strings it intends to track, the number of runs per prompt, the rule that decides whether a mention counts as a citation, and a sample report with dated screenshots. A repackaged SEO retainer answers those questions with a dashboard tour and a traffic graph. The distinction is not sophistication or price. It is whether the number they report can be reproduced by someone who does not work there.
What twelve questions should you ask before signing?
Ask them in this order, because the early ones disqualify fastest. The first four cover measurement, which is where most of the category falls apart. The next four cover the work itself and who performs it. The last four cover commercial terms and conflicts. Any vendor should be able to answer all twelve in a single call without checking with anyone, and a vendor who treats the list as hostile has told you something useful. Bring the list to us as well as to the others.
| # | Ask | A bad answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Which AI engines do you score, and how often? | "All of them." Coverage claims across a dozen assistants usually mean sampling, not measurement. |
| 2 | How many prompts are in the tracked set, and does it change between cycles? | A set that grows or shifts each month. Then nothing is comparable to anything. |
| 3 | How many times is each prompt run, and what counts as a citation? | "We check them." No run count and no scoring rule means the number is a judgement call. |
| 4 | Can I see the exact prompt strings before I pay? | Any refusal. The prompt set is the product. |
| 5 | Are prompts run signed out, from clean sessions? | Anything vague. A signed-in session can surface a firm the account has already visited. |
| 6 | Show me a sample report with dated screenshots. | A single flattering screenshot, or a report with no dates. |
| 7 | Who actually does the work, is any of it subcontracted, and what tools do you use? | Evasion. You are entitled to know whose hands are on your site, and whether the number comes from manual runs or a tracking platform such as Otterly, Profound, or the Semrush AI toolkit. |
| 8 | What happens in months four through twelve, once the structural fixes are done? | No answer. This is where retainers quietly become maintenance invoices. |
| 9 | Will you take on a direct competitor in my market? | "We'd never do that" with nothing in writing. |
| 10 | What do I keep if I leave — the pages, the schema, the prompt set? | Anything that implies the work is rented rather than yours. |
| 11 | What is your price range, and what moves a quote inside it? | Refusal to name a range before a call. |
| 12 | What result will you guarantee? | Any specific guarantee at all. See below. |
Which answers should end the conversation immediately?
Three specific answers should end a vendor conversation on the spot. First, a guaranteed position in an AI answer: engines do not sell placement, do not publish ranking rules, and change retrieval behaviour without notice, so a guarantee is either ignorance or a lie. Second, a refusal to show the prompt set before payment, because the prompt set is the entire measurable product. Third, a report that consists of traffic graphs with no verbatim AI answers, which means they are measuring search and invoicing for something else. Any one of these is enough. You do not need to catch all three.
- "We guarantee you'll be #1 in ChatGPT." There is no position one. There is a paragraph that names three firms or does not name yours.
- "Our prompt methodology is proprietary." Prompts are questions your customers type. There is nothing proprietary about them, and withholding them makes the reporting unfalsifiable.
- "Here's your traffic dashboard." Traffic is downstream and shared with every other channel. Ask what the engines actually said.
How much should this cost, and what is a fair range?
A one-time audit for a small local firm generally runs several hundred dollars to somewhere under a thousand, and ongoing retainers for firms of this size sit in the low four figures a month. At AI Visibility Partners the audit is $500 to $900 and retainers run $750 to $3,500 depending on tier. Prices far below that band usually indicate an automated report with no human measurement. Prices far above it are usually agency overhead rather than more measurement. The number to interrogate is not the price, it is what recurs monthly for it.
Ask specifically what the monthly fee buys after the first ninety days, when the structural fixes are finished. A retainer that produces two new pages, a re-measured prompt set, and citation outreach every month is buying something. A retainer that produces a report is renting you a spreadsheet. Our full ranges and what moves a quote inside them are on the pricing page.
What should you ask AI Visibility Partners specifically?
The same twelve, plus three that are particular to this practice and are easier to raise now than later. There is no published case study yet, because the first engagement is still inside its measurement window. The founder also runs an interior design studio, which sells into an overlapping market. And the practice is deliberately small, which is a genuine constraint as well as a positioning claim. None of those are disqualifying, but a buyer should hear them from us rather than discover them afterwards.
- "Where is your case study?" In progress. Results publish after a matched re-measurement window closes, not before, because a before-and-after figure taken outside a matched window has not been checked. If you need proven results in this vertical before spending, that is reasonable and this is the wrong month to hire us.
- "You run a design studio too — are you competing with me?" Austin Brewer founded Astratto Design, an interior design studio, alongside this practice. Ask directly whether that overlaps your market and get the answer before anything is signed.
- "How many clients do you have?" Ask for the number rather than accepting "deliberately small". A small roster means real attention and it also means a short track record. Both are true at once.
For the record on question seven: the work is done by Austin Brewer, none of it is subcontracted, and prompt runs are performed manually from clean sessions rather than through a tracking platform, which is why the tracked set is 25 prompts rather than several hundred. The method itself is published rather than described in a sales call: how citation share is measured, what an audit delivers, and what it costs are all on this site in writing.
Can you do this yourself instead of hiring anyone?
You can do a large part of it yourself, and the cheapest parts are the ones most worth doing first. Any owner can unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt, rewrite headings as the questions buyers ask, move the answer to the top of each section, add a named byline and an updated date, and publish the cost page they have been avoiding for three years. That is most of the structural work. What is hard to do yourself is disciplined measurement over time and the third-party citation work, both of which are labour rather than knowledge.
If the answer is Houzz, Angi, and two competitors, you now know the problem is real before anyone has quoted you for it. Whether you fix it in-house or hire it out is a capacity question rather than a knowledge one.
Where do these numbers come from?
Every figure on this page comes from a named third-party study, listed below. None of the numbers are ours. Full samples, the scope limits each study states, and the four commonly repeated statistics removed from this site rather than published with a vague attribution are all set out on the sources page.
- 5W Public Relations, The Local Services AI Visibility Crisis 2026: national chains, platform aggregators, and the structural exclusion of independent operators, April 2026. View the study ↗
- Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update, 4 November 2025. View the study ↗
- Seer Interactive, Study: Content Recency’s Impact on AI Visibility in 2026, 24 July 2026. View the study ↗
Full sources, samples, scope limits, and the four removed figures →
What else should a buyer check?
Are there certifications or accreditations for GEO?
No recognised ones. The category is roughly two years old, there is no governing body, no standard benchmark, and no exam. Anyone advertising a GEO certification is describing a course they or someone else sold. Judge vendors on published method and reproducible measurement instead, because those are the only things a buyer can actually verify.
How long should I commit for?
Long enough for two or three measurement cycles, because a single cycle cannot separate a real movement from ordinary variance between AI answers. That usually means thinking in quarters rather than months. Be wary of any long lock-in that starts before a baseline exists: the baseline is what makes every later number meaningful, so the sensible sequence is audit first, then decide.
What if my current SEO agency says they already do this?
Ask them questions one through six from the table above. If they can name the engines they score, the size and stability of the prompt set, the run count, the citation rule, and can show a sample report with dated verbatim answers, they do. If the answer is that AI Overviews are covered by their existing SEO work, they are describing a hope rather than a measurement.
Is it worth hiring anyone before my website basics are fixed?
Usually not. If crawlers are blocked, service pages are thin, and the site has no reviews, that is a foundational problem and no amount of AI-visibility work will route around it. Fix the foundation, then measure. A vendor who takes your money without telling you this is a vendor who needed the month more than you needed the service.
Where should you read next?
Use the checklist against the published method, the published prices, and the published deliverable.
Austin Brewer founded AI Visibility Partners in 2026, and also founded the interior design studio Astratto Design — a connection disclosed on who we work with because this practice sells to design firms. hello@aivispartners.com