What Is a GEO Agency?

A GEO agency is a services firm that improves how clients appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. The market emerged in 2024-2025 as SEO agencies rebranded and specialists launched, mirroring how SEO consultancies formed in the early 2000s — and, like that era, the label currently spans everything from rigorous practitioners to rebadged link sellers.

What a competent engagement includes

Deliverables, not vibes, separate real GEO agencies from opportunists:

1. Baseline audit — current visibility across a designed prompt corpus, crawler access verification (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot in server logs), schema coverage, and extractability review of key pages. See what a proper GEO audit covers.
2. Prompt corpus and measurement setup — a representative set of category prompts tracked on a fixed cadence, since single-run checks are noise.
3. Citation gap analysis — per-prompt comparison of who engines cite versus you, converted into a prioritized content backlog.
4. Content and entity work — answer-first rewrites, statistics and quotable claims added (the Aggarwal et al. KDD 2024 findings put the lift at 30-40%), schema.org markup, Wikipedia/Wikidata entity hygiene.
5. Monthly reporting — share-of-answer trends tied to shipped work, per engine.

Red flags when evaluating

• Guarantees of specific placements ("we'll get you into ChatGPT's top answer") — engines are non-deterministic; nobody controls a generated answer.
• No measurement methodology, or reporting on one engine with single runs.
• "Proprietary submission to AI engines" — no such channel exists; visibility is earned through crawlable, citable content.

Example

A fintech hires a GEO agency at 12% share of answer in its category. The audit finds Cloudflare blocking PerplexityBot and no comparison content. Ninety days later — bot allowlisted, six comparison pages shipped, org schema fixed — share of answer reaches 23%, verified in the client's own reporting rather than the agency's slides. That independence of measurement is the single best procurement practice in this market.