GEO Agency: What It Does, What to Ask & What It Costs (2026 Buyer's Guide)

Your competitors are showing up in ChatGPT answers when someone asks about solutions in your industry. You are not. You searched "GEO agency" because you have decided something has to change.

Here is the problem: the GEO agency market is new, inflated with empty jargon, and 70% of websites promising Generative Engine Optimization are selling the same thing they sold as SEO last year.

This guide gives you what no agency landing page will: what a GEO agency actually does, what to ask before signing, what you really pay in the market, and how to spot a smoke-and-mirrors agency in the first call.

What a GEO agency is

A GEO agency is a company that specializes in optimizing a brand's digital presence so it appears cited in the answers generated by AI search engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews.

Unlike a traditional SEO agency, which optimizes to rank links on Google, a GEO agency works to make your brand one of the 2 to 7 sources an AI chooses to cite when responding to a user.

Good providers combine four disciplines that overlap but are not the same:

• Classic SEO — technical and content foundation, still a requirement.
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — optimization for featured snippets and direct answers on Google.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — optimization to be cited in AI responses.
• Digital reputation — presence on G2, Trustpilot, Reddit, industry media, and Wikipedia, which are the sources AIs use most.

Anyone selling you only GEO without SEO is selling half the work. Anyone selling you SEO and calling it GEO is selling the same old thing with a new name.

What a good GEO agency does (and does not do)

What it should do

1. Multi-model citation audit. Running 20 to 50 real prompts from your industry through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, documenting when you appear and when you do not, and calculating a baseline Share of Answer (SoA).
2. Competitor analysis in AIs. Identifying which brands are being cited in your category and why: content, external mentions, schema markup, G2 presence.
3. Technical architecture for LLMs. Properly implemented Schema.org (Organization, Service, FAQPage, HowTo), review of robots.txt and llms.txt, ensuring GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot can crawl your site.
4. Citable content. Rewriting and creating content with direct answers at the start (40-80 words), explicit definitions, lists, comparison tables, and structured FAQ. AIs cite what is easy to extract.
5. Building external authority. Registration and optimization on G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, industry directories, and Wikipedia when applicable. Mention strategy in relevant media and communities.
6. Monthly measurement. Reporting on citations across each model, Share of Answer evolution, AI-sourced traffic in GA4, and competitor comparison.

What it should NOT do

• Sell GEO as a standalone service without integrating it with classic SEO.
• Promise ChatGPT visibility in 30 days.
• Charge for a "GEO audit" that you can do yourself in 30 minutes following a guide.
• Use jargon without defining it: "algorithmic citation engineering," "semantic shielding," "multi-layer entity architecture" are usually invented terms to justify prices.
• Not measure. If it does not deliver a monthly Share of Answer, it is not doing GEO. It is doing marketing.

What a GEO agency really costs in 2026

The market is disorganized. These are the real ranges observed across Spain, LATAM, and Western Europe as of April 2026:

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Two honest warnings:

• Under €800/month, serious GEO is not possible. The work of multi-model auditing, content, schema, external mentions, and reporting does not fit in that budget. If they sell it to you, they are cutting where it does not show.
• Over €3,000/month for a B2B SMB means you are paying agency overhead, not more results. The €1,000-€2,500 range is where the best value-price ratio exists today for SMBs.

At Solumize, our AI Search Optimization service starts at €1,100/month and includes SEO + AEO + GEO + content (4 monthly articles) + digital reputation. We share this because we want this article to be useful even if you do not hire us.

The 10 questions to ask before signing

Write these questions and ask them exactly as is in the sales call. The answers will tell you more than any presentation:

1. Which AI models do you audit exactly? Correct answer: minimum 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews). Claude and Copilot depending on industry.
2. How do you measure Share of Answer? If they cannot explain the metric in one sentence, they do not measure it.
3. How many prompts do you run per month per client? Correct answer: between 20 and 50, with repetitions in clean sessions.
4. Can you show me a real monthly report from another client (anonymized)? If they say no, that is an alert.
5. What schema markup will you implement? Correct answer: minimum Organization, Service, FAQPage, and Article with author.
6. What will you do on G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, and my industry directories? Correct answer: concrete plan for registration, optimization, and review management.
7. How much content does the plan include, and who writes it? Correct answer: 2 to 4 articles per month, written by human specialists with strategic review, not unsupervised AI.
8. What happens with llms.txt and robots.txt on my site? Correct answer: review and configuration to allow specific AI crawlers.
9. How long before I see measurable results? Correct answer: first GEO visibility improvements in 60 to 90 days, full SEO impact in 4 to 6 months. If they promise less, they are lying.
10. Is there a mandatory annual contract? Correct answer: monthly or 6-month contracts maximum. Mandatory annual contracts usually hide that the agency knows results do not come fast.

7 red flags that say do not hire them

1. "We guarantee you will show up in ChatGPT." Nobody can guarantee it. Not them, not OpenAI. False promise.
2. They will not show you the audit before charging. A good agency runs an initial audit (free or very cheap) before proposing a plan. If they ask you to sign before seeing data, escape.
3. They use non-standardized proprietary terminology. "Patented generative algorithmic optimization" or "proprietary level-3 multi-modal methodology" are marketing signals, not method signals.
4. They do not mention classic SEO. GEO without SEO is a sandcastle. 82% of Gemini citations come from pages that rank on Google. If they do not do SEO, they do not do GEO.
5. They do not show success cases with concrete metrics. "We multiplied our clients' visibility" is not a metric. "We went from 3 to 47 monthly citations in ChatGPT in industry X" is.
6. They charge extra for each AI model audited. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews are the minimum baseline. Charging separately for each is breaking up what is the product.
7. Their own site ranks nowhere. If a GEO agency does not appear cited in ChatGPT when you search "GEO agency," how are they going to do it for you?

How to check if a GEO agency is good in 10 minutes before the call

Open an incognito window, log out of all AIs, and run these three searches:

1. In ChatGPT: "What Generative Engine Optimization agencies exist?"
2. In Perplexity: "Best GEO agencies for B2B companies in 2026"
3. In Google: "GEO agency [your country]" and check if the agency shows up in AI Overviews.

If the agency you are evaluating appears in any of those three responses, you already have half the validation. If it does not appear in any, ask why in the call — and listen to how they respond. A serious agency owns it, explains what they are working on, and shows you their roadmap. A smoke-and-mirrors agency gets nervous.

Types of companies a GEO agency makes sense for right now

Not every company needs a GEO agency today. It clearly makes sense if you check at least three of these boxes:

• You are a B2B company with an average ticket of €1,000 or more.
• Your end customer is someone who researches before buying (compares tools, requests demos, checks reviews).
• Your competitors already show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers and you do not.
• You are over-dependent on paid (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads) and want to reduce acquisition cost.
• You have a stable marketing budget above €1,000/month.

It does not make sense to invest in GEO yet if you are pure B2C with low tickets, you do not have a website with basic content, you want results in less than 60 days, or your total marketing budget is below €800/month.

→ Request your free GEO audit at solumize.com/contact-us

At Solumize, we help B2B companies show up on Google and in the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Our AI Search Optimization service combines SEO, AEO, GEO, and digital reputation. Last updated: April 2026.

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