A founder somewhere is reading a proposal right now. "Generative Engine Optimization" sits in the header, and the number in the footer would pay for a quarter of content. The question in their head is whether this is 2013 SEO all over again as the smart early money, or 2013 SEO all over again as the other kind.
My verdict comes first, from someone who watched this market form on the software side. The problem these agencies sell against is real, and you can measure it. Most of the agencies selling against it aren't ready yet, and one meeting with six questions is enough to find the ones that are.
You should know my bias. We make AI visibility software, which agencies might buy for their clients or might compete with, and a buyer who measures first ends up spending less with everyone, including us. Weigh my opinion with that in mind.
The problem is real, and that's half the trouble
I'll start with the skeptics, because their strongest argument against GEO doesn't survive the evidence. An agency in one r/DigitalMarketing thread laid out the pattern that created this whole category. Its clients ranked completely fine on Google, with solid SEO and decent traffic, and yet they were near-invisible when you put the questions they should own to ChatGPT or Perplexity. Other shops replied with the same story, and one claimed that a large share of LLM answers about their clients' industries leave those clients out entirely.
GEO(Generative Engine Optimization) as a service - will it work?
We’ve been noticing something weird with a few clients lately and wanted to sanity check if this is just us or actually a thing. Their sites rank completely fine on Google. Like, solid SEO, decent traffic, everything looks normal. But when...
We see that gap in our own data every week, and the mechanism isn't mysterious. Rankings and citations draw on the same inputs but weigh them differently, and corroboration (what reviews, communities and third parties say about you) counts for far more in the answer layer than in the ranking layer. Ranking first on Google does not guarantee being cited, so a business that discovers the gap has found a legitimate problem.
That legitimacy is the trouble. A real problem pulls in real solutions and costumes at the same time, since nobody bothers selling snake oil against a fake disease.
What the agencies are actually selling
Sit through enough GEO pitches and they sort into three piles, and the biggest one is SEO with a new label. The on-page, technical and content work is whatever the shop always did, and sometimes a mention-tracking dashboard gets bolted on. I don't call that fraud. Extraction-ready structure and clean retrieval really do feed AI visibility, and the straight version of the pitch ("SEO with the answer layer instrumented") is a fair thing to sell. The crooked version charges a premium for the rename.
The second pile, dashboard resale, is the one that's growing. A monitoring tool's output gets forwarded to you monthly with some commentary, at several times what the tool's subscription costs. Practitioners are right to be skeptical of it. Would-be founders in one thread asked whether they should start an AI visibility agency, and the replies had the sharpest take I've seen. One called the whole category new snake oil. Another went further: from an execution standpoint SEO is GEO, and the agency world has done a great job pretending otherwise.
Anyone here running an AI visibility agency?
I’m thinking about starting one, but I’m curious how clients actually perceive it. Are businesses specifically asking for “AI visibility/GEO,” or are they still thinking in terms of SEO and content marketing? It feels like there’s a lot of...
The smallest pile is the one worth paying for. Before proposing anything, these shops run a fixed-query baseline. The work that follows is the dull corroboration and consistency kind that actually moves answers, and every month they report against the same twenty queries. They're usually SEO or digital-PR firms that added a scoreboard rather than GEO-branded startups. They earn real money because what they do is what the discipline requires, and much of it happens outside any dashboard.
All three piles talk the same way, and that's the buyer's problem. They use the same vocabulary and the same charts, and more and more often the same case-study format, so listening won't sort them. The right questions will.
That founders' thread also shows where the good agencies are going. Companies with real money increasingly have a sentiment problem more than a visibility problem: the engines mention them but describe them wrongly or stalely. Fixing a description is closer to relationship work than dashboard work, and the shops building that skill now are building the defensible half of this category.
Why "yet" is doing heavy lifting
I put "yet" in the title on purpose. Three maturity problems are real today, and each of them is fixable within a couple of years.
Nobody has an agreed methodology. Put the question "what moves citations?" to five GEO agencies and you'll hear five weightings of the same ingredients, which makes sense when the engines change quarterly and public evidence is thin. PPC is the opposite case: its mechanics are settled, and agencies differ only in how well they execute. An immature method still has value. You're buying judgment under uncertainty, though, and that should cost less than expertise, while right now it costs more.
Prices are chaotic, too. The same set of deliverables sells for fifty dollars or for five thousand depending on how sophisticated the buyer is, which tells you information hasn't equalized in this market yet. Informed buyers do spectacularly well in chaos like that, which is the one good reason to engage now instead of waiting. Shops that will be expensive and booked solid two years from now are affordable and hungry today.
The deliverables are also easy to fake, and that's the problem that most justifies caution. A mention count without a fixed query set, an appearance chart with no baseline, citations on queries nobody buys from: these are the category's vanity metrics, and they're young and unstandardized. A bad agency can look productive for two quarters before the fakery surfaces. You can neutralize the whole problem with one habit, which is running your own baseline before the first meeting so that every claim lands against your data instead of your hopes.
Opinions should show their work, and mine moved on this. A year ago my answer to this essay's title would have been a flat "no, buy software and wait." I changed it after watching the corroboration layer's weight grow. Corroboration is execution work, the earning of reviews and mentions and the honest showing up in communities, and execution work is what agencies are for. Software should do the measuring. The legwork is something you can legitimately hire out, and pretending otherwise was my own version of the vocabulary mistake.
15 hours a week manually. Or 15 minutes with RankControl.
Track citations, monitor competitors, and fix content gaps across every AI search engine. Automatically.
A pitch, dissected
Buyers have shown us enough real GEO proposals that I can assemble a composite and take it apart page by page.
The first page leads with "AI is the new search, 60% of journeys now touch an AI surface," and cites nothing for it. It's directionally true, which is the most you can say for it. Page two unveils "Our proprietary GEO Framework" as a pyramid, and when you read the layers, they're on-page SEO, schema, content and PR under new names. That's the repackaging tell.
Page three is where the composite splits. The weak version promises "AI visibility monitoring, monthly optimization, citation building," three phrases that could mean anything and therefore will.
The strong version does exist, and it reads like a work order: "20-query baseline across four engines with screenshots, extraction rewrite of 10 pages you designate, reconciliation of your pricing and category descriptions across 14 third-party surfaces, review-velocity program on two platforms, month-three rerun with variance analysis." You'd never guess from the fonts or the stock photos, which are identical, that these are completely different purchases.
Then comes page four, the price. My rule is to divide the number by the deliverables you could verify happened. The weak version divides by zero. The strong one divides into day rates you can compare with any other execution work you buy. At that point GEO stops being a mystique purchase and turns into what it always should have been: skilled labor against a scoreboard.
AI search traffic grew 835% this year. Is your content ready?
RankControl generates 26 content formats optimized for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Published on your domain, matched to your brand.
The rhyme buyers over forty will recognize
If you bought SEO around 2010-2013, you've seen this market before. The problem was real and growing then, too. Nobody had a settled methodology and prices were all over the place. Clients couldn't verify what they were paying for, while a gold rush of shops sold links and secrets.
Both ends of what happened next are instructive. Enforcement wiped out the bad pile. Once the penalty eras arrived, "we build links" became a liability sentence, and the clients still on those retainers inherited the damage. The good pile was made of shops that had done durable technical and content work without fuss under the fashionable label, and they became the respected firms that still exist. Their early clients compounded for a decade.
The rhyme even tells you how the sorting will happen. I'd bet on the engines to clean this market, the way Google's updates cleaned SEO, well before buyers get sophisticated enough to do it. When the first well-publicized wave of AI-visibility spam gets neutralized (and the early signs are already visible), the tactics pile will vaporize overnight and the execution pile will still be standing.
Pay for work that survives enforcement, which means structure, facts and genuine corroboration, and treat any tactic sold to you as a secret as a liability with a countdown attached.
The six questions
Bring these to the first meeting and ask them in this order, and the market sorts itself in front of you:
| The question | What a good shop does | What the wrong pile does |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Show me your own citations. | Shows which queries cite the agency itself; the good ones increasingly walk in with their receipts unprompted | Can't demonstrate the discipline on its own domain, so it's selling a playbook it hasn't run |
| 2. Show me the query-set methodology. | Explains how it picks the queries that represent your pipeline and keeps the set fixed for reporting; the right answer involves your sales team | Any version of "our proprietary index" |
| 3. Price me deliverables. | Prices an extraction pass on ten pages, a consistency reconciliation, a review-velocity program and a monthly fixed-set report, each on its own line | Quotes a "GEO retainer" and resists itemizing |
| 4. Show me month three's report, blank. | Fixed queries, description accuracy, competitor columns, and you'll know in thirty seconds | Drifting mentions, appearance counts, vanity charts |
| 5. What won't you claim? | Volunteers its limits: it can't guarantee citations, can't control model updates, can't move enterprise-competitive queries in a quarter | No disclaimed territory at all |
| 6. What happens in month four if nothing moved? | Diagnosis and redirection (extraction versus corroboration versus retrieval) and the willingness to say the last quarter's emphasis was wrong | More months of the same retainer |
In practice, question one does most of the sorting, and the blank template in question four takes thirty seconds to read.
What waiting actually costs, priced fairly
I owe the wait-and-see argument a fair hearing before the verdict, because for some buyers it wins. Give it a year and the methodology settles as the engines stabilize and evidence piles up. Prices converge as buyer information evens out, and the enforcement wave clears out the worst pile for you. Those are real gains. If your company has no content operation, no reviews and no corroboration footprint yet, you lose little by spending that year building the prerequisites instead of hiring anyone to amplify what doesn't exist.
Waiting costs you position, though. Answer placements pile up the way the early map of any territory does, and the models' associations for your category harden with repetition. A competitor who spends the chaotic year on real corroboration work walks into the settled era as the incumbent in your category's answers.
So it comes down to how contested your category is. If it's sleepy, wait and build. If it's contested, the chaos year is exactly when informed buyers with fixed-query baselines pick up ground at confused-market prices. Waiting blind is the popular choice and the one I can't defend, since the homework hour is free either way and the monitoring costs almost nothing.
The verdict, sized by buyer
If you're a small business or an early startup, I'd mostly hold off. Run the baseline yourself in an hour, fix what it turns up with your own hands and let software do the monitoring. The agency premium buys you little at your size, and you're precisely the buyer the worst pile goes hunting for.
Mid-market companies with a real content operation are where I'd say buy now, selectively. Keep the engagements bounded and run them against the six questions, favoring corroboration pushes and restructures from shops that pass question one. For you, the pricing chaos is an arbitrage.
At enterprise scale the answer is yes, carefully. Your queries are competitive enough that the corroboration work gets heavy and internal coordination becomes the hard part, and the good shops earn their five figures. The risk I'd watch is paying the wrong pile for two quarters of unfalsifiable charts, which worries me more than overpaying, and a fixed-query baseline prevents it.
The prep work is the same for all three. Measure first, then show up with your own twenty queries and your own screenshots, so every claim an agency makes lands against evidence you control. In general, this market becomes worth it once its methodology settles and its pricing converges. Until that happens it's worth it for the buyer who does an hour of homework first, and that homework is the same weekly discipline you'll want running whether or not you ever hire anyone.
Built by the team that got cited in 48 hours.
Content generation, backlink building, AI visibility tracking, and Google rankings. One platform, zero guesswork.
