Ask a prospective GEO agency three things before you sign anything: how they specifically optimise content for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity rather than Google alone; whether they can show citation-rate movement on a comparable account; and what they report on beyond keyword position. The answers separate a genuine AI search specialist from a traditional SEO team that has added “GEO” to its service list without changing how it works.
That distinction matters more than it did a year ago. Every SEO agency now claims some form of AI search capability, and most of the language sounds identical from one pitch to the next. The only way to tell them apart is to ask specific, technical questions and see whether the answers hold up.
Key takeaways
- Vet a GEO agency on methodology, not vocabulary: ask how they track citations across individual AI platforms, not whether they “do GEO”
- A specialist should report on citation rate, AI share of voice, and sentiment as core metrics, not as an add-on slide to a traditional SEO report
- Genuine GEO work involves restructuring content for how LLMs retrieve and synthesise passages, which looks different from writing for rankings
- Ask to see one full reporting cycle, not a single screenshot of a favourable ChatGPT answer
- Budget should reflect technical content mapping and structured measurement work, not a relabelled link-building retainer
Evaluating GEO agency expertise
Most agency conversations stay at the level of “we help brands show up in AI search.” That claim tells you nothing. The useful conversation happens one level down, in the specifics of how the work actually gets done. Bring a list of pointed questions into the first call and pay attention to how concretely they’re answered.
Questions to ask about their platform-level methodology:
- Which AI platforms do you track separately, and how does your approach differ between Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude? These surfaces don’t behave the same way or draw on the same sources, so a single answer covering all of them is a warning sign.
- What tooling do you use to monitor citations and prompts, and can we see a live dashboard rather than a static report? Ask them to name the platform and show real output, not a mock-up.
- How do you decide which prompts to track for our brand, and how often is that prompt set revisited as buyer language and model behaviour shift?
- Walk me through how you’d diagnose why we’re cited for one query but not a near-identical one. This tests whether they actually investigate retrieval behaviour or just report on outcomes.
Questions to ask about evidence and case studies:
- Can you show citation-rate or AI share-of-voice movement for a client over a defined period, ideally in B2B SaaS or a comparable sales-cycle category?
- What did the baseline look like before you started, and what specifically changed to move it? An agency that can’t separate its own work from platform-wide shifts hasn’t been measuring rigorously.
- Have you worked with a brand that saw no meaningful movement? How did you diagnose that and what did you recommend? Anyone claiming universal success either hasn’t tracked outcomes closely enough or isn’t being straight with you.
Questions to ask about how they measure performance beyond keywords:
- What does your standard monthly report include, and where do citation rate, share of voice, and sentiment sit in it, headline metrics or a footnote?
- How do you connect AI visibility to pipeline, not just impressions? Full attribution is still difficult across the industry, but a competent partner should have a defensible way of linking AI referral traffic to downstream engagement.
- If AI Overviews or ChatGPT change their retrieval behaviour next month, how would you know, and how quickly would we hear about it?
The agencies worth shortlisting answer these in specifics: named tools, named metrics, named platforms, real numbers. The ones to be wary of answer in generalities and pivot back to traditional SEO deliverables within a few sentences. For a broader, more exhaustive checklist covering the full range of selection criteria, our GEO agency evaluation scorecard is a useful companion to this piece; this article focuses specifically on the questions to ask in the room.
Distinguishing specialised AI search partners from legacy SEO firms
The market has moved quickly enough that almost every SEO agency now offers some version of a GEO service. Relabelling isn’t inherently dishonest, plenty of the underlying skills genuinely transfer, but it does mean the label alone tells you nothing about capability. A handful of concrete signals separate a genuine specialist from a firm that has updated its website copy.
Look for a dedicated, answer-first content methodology. A specialist writes and restructures content specifically for how LLMs retrieve and synthesise information: self-contained passages of roughly 120 to 180 words, direct comparison content, and integration or use-case pages built to be extracted and paraphrased, not just crawled and ranked. A legacy firm applying old habits to a new label will still be optimising primarily for on-page keyword density and internal linking, with AI framing added on top rather than built in.
Check whether AI-specific metrics are structural to their reporting, not bolted on. Ask to see a real report. If citation rate, mention rate, and AI share of voice appear as a short section wedged between organic traffic and backlink counts, the agency’s actual operating model hasn’t changed, only its terminology has. A specialist treats these as the primary KPIs the engagement is judged against, alongside a clear point of view on which GEO metrics actually matter for a B2B sales cycle.
Ask how they think about expertise in a field that’s still forming. No agency has definitive answers on a discipline this young; model behaviour shifts monthly. What matters is whether they can describe a clear, testable methodology and a track record of adapting it, rather than either overclaiming certainty or falling back on generic SEO advice when pressed. We’ve written more on what genuine GEO expertise looks like in a market this new, and it’s worth reading before you sit down with any shortlist.
Watch how they talk about your buyers. Genuine GEO strategy is built around how a real decision-making unit searches and evaluates software, not a generic persona template. If prompt strategy and content planning aren’t grounded in your specific buying committee and sales cycle, the “AI search expertise” is more surface than substance.
Budgeting for AI search strategy
Investment in GEO should track the actual shape of the work: prompt mapping, technical content restructuring for retrieval, entity and third-party presence building, and ongoing platform-level measurement, rather than a traditional link-building retainer with a new name on the invoice. A partner charging GEO rates for SEO-era deliverables, content calendars and backlink outreach with a light AI framing, is not pricing for the work described above.
Budgeting in detail, including how to scope spend against company stage and how to structure a contract, is its own subject. Our companion guide on selecting and budgeting for a B2B SaaS GEO agency covers that framework in full; use the questions in this article to pressure-test whoever you’re evaluating against it.
Choosing a GEO partner comes down to whether their methodology, evidence, and reporting hold up under specific questions, not whether their pitch deck uses the right terminology. Ask the questions above directly, ask for real numbers and a real dashboard, and treat vague answers as the signal they are.