Looking for a GEO agency or an AI SEO agency?
An agency does the work and is paid for output. An advisory sets direction and is paid for judgement, with your team executing. Capacity but no direction means you want an advisory. Direction but no hands means an agency.
Start here: we are not an agency
If you searched for a GEO agency or an AI SEO agency, you have landed on an advisory. That is a genuinely different thing, not a nicer word for the same one, and it is worth thirty seconds to check which you actually want before reading further.
An agency sells output. You brief them, they produce the work, and the expertise stays with them. That is the right model when you know what needs doing and lack the hands to do it.
An advisory sells judgement. We set the direction, sit in your reviews, brief your leads, and your team executes. The expertise compounds with you rather than with us. That is the right model when you have a capable team and no senior person who has done this specifically.
Neither is better. They solve different problems, and buying the wrong one is the most common way an AI search budget produces nothing.
Our position
If you need someone to write forty pages and rebuild your schema, hire an agency and do not let us talk you out of it. We would be an expensive way to get that done.
What a GEO agency should actually be doing
The offers in this market vary enormously behind identical language, so it is worth knowing what a competent one covers. Roughly in order of how often it is missing:
Crawler policy for AI agents
Retrieval crawlers and training crawlers are different. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT citations; blocking GPTBot does not. Any agency that conflates them will misconfigure the single highest-leverage file on your site.
Answer-first content restructuring
Retrieval selects passages, not pages. This is a change in how existing pages are written more than a content production programme.
Entity and structured data work
Consistent description of what you are, across your site and the third-party properties that describe you. Necessary, cheap, and not sufficient.
The off-site citation-sources programme
Review platforms, community, publisher round-ups, video. Most citations come from here, and this is the part most commonly absent from an agency scope because it is slow and hard to bill by the deliverable.
Measurement against fixed definitions
A frozen prompt set, repeated runs, per-platform reporting. If this is a dashboard licence rather than analyst time, you are buying data and not insight.
How to tell them apart in a pitch
The row worth pressing on is the fifth. An agency's revenue is tied to producing work, which is not cynicism but incentive design, and it shows up most clearly in whether they can tell you to stop. Ask the question directly and listen for whether they have an answer ready.
| Signal | Agency | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Priced on | Deliverables or hours | Seniority and scope |
| First proposal | A content and technical plan | A baseline, then a plan |
| Who executes | Them | Your team |
| Knowledge ends up | With them | With you |
| Answer to "should we stop?" | Structurally difficult | Should be readily available |
| Scales by | Adding people | Adding scope, not headcount |
| Exit leaves you | The output | The method and the data |
How to judge either one
The same nine technical questions work regardless of model, and most have a single correct answer. They separate a supplier who has run this work from one who has read about it.
- 1Which crawler controls whether we appear in ChatGPT citations? (OAI-SearchBot.)
- 2Does your citation rate include unlinked brand mentions? (It should not, and they should report both.)
- 3How many times do you run each prompt? (More than once, across a window.)
- 4Do you average platforms into a single score? (They should not.)
- 5Which domains currently carry citations in our category? (They should find out, or admit they have not.)
- 6What does Google-Extended control? (Grounding for Gemini and Google's AI surfaces, not just training.)
- 7Do you sell llms.txt? (Ideally not, with the evidence to hand.)
- 8What would you do if we do not need you yet? (They should have an answer.)
- 9Can we see the raw responses behind a number you report? (Always yes.)
When you need neither
If you have never checked your crawler directives, do that first. It is an afternoon and it is occasionally the entire problem.
If your organic search is weak, fix that before anything AI-specific. Google's AI surfaces are grounded in Google Search, AI Overviews are generated from pages already ranking, and Copilot runs on the Bing index.
If you have not measured anything, buy nothing yet. The four common causes of low AI visibility have wildly different remedies, and choosing a supplier before the diagnosis is choosing a treatment before the test.
Our position
Roughly a third of the free audits we run end with us saying the problem is not AI visibility, or that the fix is small enough to do in-house. Saying so is cheaper for us than a badly-scoped engagement.
Related questions
See what an advisory engagement actually looks like
Related answers
AI search: advisory, agency or in-house?
Hire in-house if AI search is permanent and full-time.
Read the answerDecisionWhat does generative engine optimisation cost?
Across the market in 2026: AI visibility tooling runs roughly £200 to £2,000 a month, freelance GEO £2,000 to £6,000, agency retainers £4,000 to £15,000, senior advisory £8,000 to £35,000.
Read the answerDecisionHow to brief and evaluate a GEO partner
Brief on the outcome and the constraint, not the tactics: what you want to be found for, which competitors you lose to, and what you will not do.
Read the answer