What a real GEO engagement contains
A genuine GEO program has deliverables a classic SEO retainer doesn't. It starts with an AI visibility audit: running a panel of buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and recording where you appear, who beats you, and which sources the engines cite.
Then comes source-graph work: earning presence in the specific listicles, comparison posts, review platforms, Reddit discussions, and news coverage those engines retrieve. This is closer to digital PR than to keyword optimization.
Finally, entity engineering — making your brand description consistent across your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, directories, and coverage so models learn one clear story. If an agency's 'GEO' deliverables are just schema markup and blog posts, you're buying relabeled SEO.
When classic SEO is genuinely all you need
Honesty first: plenty of businesses don't need a GEO line item yet. Local services, e-commerce categories driven by product listings, and industries where buyers still search transactionally on Google get most of their return from classic SEO.
The same is true if your fundamentals are broken. A site with thin content, crawl errors, and no authority won't be cited by any engine, generative or otherwise. Paying a premium for GEO before fixing that is buying a roof before the walls.
The test: run ten buying-intent questions about your category through ChatGPT and Perplexity. If competitors appear and you don't — and those answers plausibly influence your buyers — GEO has become urgent. If the answers are generic and brandless, SEO-first remains correct.
The case for one team, not two
Splitting SEO and GEO across two agencies creates a coordination tax with no upside. The workstreams share roughly 70% of their substance — content quality, technical health, structured data, authority — and the remaining 30% (prompt-panel tracking, citation acquisition, entity work) builds directly on the shared layer.
Two vendors means two content calendars fighting over the same pages, duplicated audits, and finger-pointing when visibility stalls.
Chalk Labs runs SEO, AEO, and GEO as a single engine — one strategy, one content system, one report covering rankings and AI share of voice together, from around $3k/month. Whoever you hire, the structural point stands: this should be one integrated program, not two invoices.
Questions that expose a fake GEO agency
Ask to see a real AI visibility report from an existing client — actual prompt panels with dated results, not a screenshot of ChatGPT mentioning them once. Ask which sources they've earned citations in for a past client, and how they identified those sources.
Ask how they measure success: if the answer is only rankings and traffic, they're an SEO agency in a new shirt. If it's only vibes about 'AI presence' with no methodology, they're worse.
Good answers sound like: 'We track a 50-prompt panel monthly across four engines, we've moved client X from 2 to 14 category-prompt appearances in two quarters, and here's the citation-source map we worked from.' Specificity is the whole tell.
- Demand a dated, methodology-backed AI visibility report
- Ask for named citation sources earned for past clients
- Reject 'GEO' pitches that are schema markup plus blog posts
- One integrated team beats two coordinating vendors
Questions we hear about this
Usually not — you need your SEO agency to demonstrate real GEO capability, or one integrated replacement. Splitting the two across vendors duplicates audits and content work while fragmenting strategy, because the disciplines share about 70% of their substance.
Run ten buying-intent prompts about your category through ChatGPT and Perplexity. If competitors are recommended and you're absent, GEO is urgent. If answers are generic with no brands, classic SEO remains the priority.
A prompt-panel AI visibility audit across multiple engines, a citation-source map with earned-mention outreach, entity consistency work across your web presence, answer-formatted content, and monthly AI share-of-voice reporting alongside traditional SEO metrics.
As an added capability within an integrated retainer, marginally. As a standalone premium service, agencies charge anywhere from $2k to $20k+/month. Be skeptical of large GEO-only price tags on top of unfixed SEO fundamentals — the foundation drives most of the result.