What is a generative engine optimization agency?
A generative engine optimization (GEO) agency works to get your brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers, on engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It overlaps with SEO but optimizes for a different outcome: being selected as a source inside an answer, rather than ranking as a link on a results page.
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO optimizes for position on a results page. GEO optimizes for being extracted and cited inside a generated answer. The inputs differ too. Rankings lean on links and relevance, while citation selection leans on entity clarity, extractable answer structure, schema, and whether AI crawlers are even allowed to read your site.
What does a generative engine optimization agency cost?
Ours is priced by who signs it. A founder or small business pays $1,500 for the Citation Gap Diagnostic, $4,500 for a four-week sprint, and $1,500 per month for the managed retainer on a 3-month minimum. A team or agency pays $3,500, $9,000, and $5,000 per month on a 6-month minimum, with white-label reporting from $2,500 per month. Enterprise starts with a credited $18,000 90-day pilot and moves to $12,000 per month. Self-serve monitoring is $49 per month at every size. Retainer-based GEO agencies commonly price in the four-figure-per-month range, which is where our retainer sits. Be sceptical of any engagement that cannot tell you what it will measure.
Can a GEO agency guarantee my brand gets cited?
No, and an agency that offers a guarantee is telling you something useful about itself. Answer engines do not publish their source-selection criteria and revise them continuously. What an agency can commit to is a measured baseline, a specific set of fixes, and an identical re-test that shows whether the number moved.
How long does generative engine optimization take to work?
Crawler-access fixes such as robots.txt and llms.txt can change what an engine is able to read within days. Entity authority and content restructuring take longer, because engines have to re-crawl and re-select sources. We re-test at the end of a four-week sprint, which is long enough to see movement but not long enough to call a trend.
Do I need an agency, or can I use a tool?
If you have someone in-house who can act on the findings, a monitoring tool is usually enough, and we compare six of them including ours. An agency makes sense when the fixes need building rather than only tracking.