This is not a list of the best GEO agencies. Almost every “top 10 GEO agencies” page you will find in 2026 is published by an agency that also sells GEO, which makes it marketing wearing the costume of a ranking. What follows instead is seven criteria you can apply to any provider, including us, plus the five questions that sort the serious ones from the rebranded ones in a single call.
The English-speaking market has the opposite problem to Poland’s. In Poland the difficulty is that hardly anyone offers this work at all. In the US and UK the field is crowded: measurement platforms, specialist GEO shops on four- and five-figure monthly retainers, and SEO agencies that added “AEO/GEO” to the nav bar over a weekend. So before the seven criteria, there is a prior question worth settling.
Should you buy a tool, hire an agency, or build it in-house?
Buy a tool if you already have someone who can read the data and act on it. Hire an agency if you need the reading and the work done for you. Build in-house only if you can give one experienced person several hours a week for months. The distinction that matters: a tool measures, a human interprets.
That line is the whole decision. Every AI visibility platform on the market will tell you how often ChatGPT or Perplexity names your brand across a set of prompts. None of them will tell you that the reason is a robots rule blocking one crawler, a pricing page saved as an image, and a competitor whose reviews carry a location yours omits. Someone has to read the evidence and write the fix.
| Option | Typical cost | Fits you when | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool (subscription) | Otterly from $29/mo, Ahrefs Brand Radar from €358/mo (up to €654/mo for its full platform lineup), Profound from $99/mo (ChatGPT only) to $399/mo (multi-platform “Growth” tier) | You have an in-house SEO or content lead who will act on the numbers | It reports; it does not diagnose or fix. Dashboards accumulate, nothing changes |
| Agency (retainer or fixed audit) | Published rate cards vary enormously between agencies — commonly low thousands to tens of thousands per month in both the US and UK — plus one-off audits from a few hundred to several thousand | You want the interpretation and the work done, or you need a one-time baseline before committing to anything | Scope varies wildly at the same price. Some of it is SEO with a new label |
| In-house | Cost of a monitoring subscription (see above) plus real hours from a senior in-house SEO — there’s no credible independent benchmark for the blended monthly total | You have a senior person with genuine spare capacity and a multi-month horizon | Ramp-up is slow, and the person you assign usually already has a full job |
The tool prices above come from the vendors’ own pricing pages, checked in July 2026 — expect them to move, so check the current page before you decide. We deliberately don’t quote a specific blended monthly figure for doing this in-house: we couldn’t find a source for that number we’d be willing to stand behind, and neither should you accept one without asking where it comes from. Budget the tool cost plus real hours from a senior person, and expect several months before they’re autonomous on GEO-specific workflows.
For most small and mid-sized businesses the honest first move is none of the three. It is one fixed-scope audit to find out whether you have a problem worth paying to solve monthly. You can run a rough version of that yourself with our DIY AI SEO audit checklist.
How do you choose a GEO agency?
Check seven things: a published measurement method, the number and names of AI systems tested, transparent pricing, a report that gives instructions rather than only a diagnosis, a stated procedure if the work finds nothing, re-measurement after implementation, and whether the agency applies its own advice to itself. A provider who answers all seven concretely deserves a conversation.
Each criterion below comes with the question to ask and the answer that should worry you. Work through all seven before you sign anything, and note that they apply just as well to a monthly tool subscription or an internal plan as they do to an agency.
Criterion 1: a published measurement method
Ask exactly how visibility is measured: how many criteria, in which areas, how many prompts, how many repetitions, which languages, and how the score is calculated. A good answer is a specific number and a list the provider will put in writing. A bad answer is “we have a proprietary methodology” with nothing behind it.
There is now research showing why the details matter. In a variance-components study published on arXiv in July 2026, Dmitrij Żatuchin decomposed where the noise in LLM brand answers actually comes from and found that run-to-run non-determinism (repeating the identical prompt) accounted for 34.8% of the variance, with query language a separate, smaller source at 26.5%. His allocation analysis concludes that adding languages and models reduces error far more than adding repeats of the same prompt, and that a repeat past the fifth reduces variance by only 0.0003.
Two practical consequences. First, an agency that runs each prompt once is measuring noise. Second, an agency that runs the same prompt fifty times in one language and calls it rigour is spending your budget on the least useful axis. Ask which knobs they turn, not just how many queries they fire. The same paper reports that even the full crossed design (spreading across languages and models, not just repeats) reached brand-ranking reliability of only about 0.36, which is a useful reminder that anyone promising precise, stable AI rankings is overselling. Our own method for handling this is laid out in how to measure AI visibility when answers change.
Criterion 2: the number and names of AI systems tested
ChatGPT alone is not enough, because your customers also ask Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews, and the same question returns different businesses in each. Ask outright how many systems are covered and which ones. One system in the offer means you are buying a fraction of the picture and will make decisions on partial data.
Watch for the softer version of this gap too: an agency that covers four systems in its marketing but samples only one properly, or one that checks Google’s AI features and calls the job done. Google’s own developer documentation on AI features in Search states plainly that “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary” and that “you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup” to appear in them. That is Google talking about Google. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, which crawl separately and weight signals differently.
Criterion 3: transparent pricing
Individual GEO and AEO agencies increasingly publish their own rate cards, and where they do, the ranges swing enormously — from a few hundred dollars for a one-off audit to five-figure monthly retainers, with little consistency in what’s actually included at each price point. Plenty of “2026 GEO pricing guide” roundups circulate online with tidy tiers and precise numbers; several we looked into turned out to be published by sites that don’t actually sell or research this, or don’t say what they’re credited with saying. Treat any such roundup, including ones with confident tables, the same way you’d treat an unpublished agency quote: as a claim to verify, not a fact to cite.
You’ll sometimes see a rule of thumb along the lines of “anything sold as full GEO below £X or $Y a month is rebranded SEO.” Treat that as a directional signal from an interested party, not a law — it’s usually published by an agency whose own floor happens to sit just above the line it draws. The more useful test is the one you can verify yourself: does the provider publish a price and a scope on their own page, without a form? A published price implies a repeatable, standardised product. A quote-only page can mean a genuinely custom engagement — or an undefined scope priced by how much you look like you can pay.
Criterion 4: a report with instructions, not just a diagnosis
“Your AI visibility is weak” is worth nothing without an answer to “what exactly do I change.” Ask for a sample page of a real report, or at minimum a description of what a single recommendation looks like. You are checking one thing: is it a general suggestion, or a step-by-step instruction naming what to change and where.
Nearly all the value of a GEO audit sits in that second half. A diagnosis with no instructions leaves you precisely where you started, plus an invoice. This is also the clearest dividing line between a tool subscription and a service: the tool produces the table, and the recommendation is the part a person writes.
Criterion 5: a stated procedure if the work finds nothing
Ask what happens if the audit surfaces nothing meaningful, or the report comes back disappointingly generic. An honest provider has a ready answer: a specific guarantee, refund conditions, a described complaints process. No answer at all, or a breezy “that never happens,” is the warning sign.
This question does more work than it looks like it does. It reveals whether the provider has sold enough of these to have hit the edge cases, and whether the scope is defined tightly enough that “nothing found” is even a checkable outcome.
Criterion 6: re-measurement after implementation
Without a second measurement on the same prompts, you will never know whether the changes worked. AI visibility is a trend, not a one-off state, so a provider who delivers the report and stops is selling you half a product. Ask whether re-measurement is included, when it happens, and whether it uses the identical prompt set.
Insist on the identical prompt set specifically. Given how much of the variance is run-to-run noise, a “before” and “after” run on different questions tells you nothing at all. Same prompts, same conditions, enough repetitions to see past the wobble.
Criterion 7: does the agency apply its own advice?
Run your seven criteria against the agency’s own site. Does it publish a price? Are its pages quotable, with answers in plain text rather than locked in images? Does its llms.txt file exist, and is it a real, curated file rather than auto-generated noise? A provider that does not follow its own advice is selling theory it has never tested on itself.
This is the cheapest check on the list and often the most revealing. It takes about ten minutes and needs no access to anything private. If you want to know what you are actually looking for in that file, we wrote the sceptical version in what is llms.txt, and do you actually need it.
Five questions to ask before you sign
Ask these directly, on a call, and listen for whether the answers are specific or scenic:
- How many criteria do you check, and in which areas? Please send the list in writing.
- How many AI systems do you measure, which ones, and how many times do you run each prompt?
- Who interprets the results — a person or purely an automated system — and can I speak to that person?
- What happens if the report finds nothing worth fixing?
- What does implementing the fixes cost afterwards, and does the audit fee count toward it?
Question three is the one that separates a service from a subscription. Question five catches the common pattern where a cheap audit is a loss leader for a retainer you never agreed to. For the underlying price ranges behind that conversation, see how much an AI visibility audit costs.
Is a GEO agency the same as an SEO agency?
Not always, and this is a frequent source of confusion. Many SEO agencies bolt an AI section onto an existing audit without a separate method for AI systems, while GEO needs a different measurement approach and a different toolset. Strong SEO helps your AI visibility considerably; it does not automatically produce it.
The term itself has a traceable origin. “Generative engine optimization” was introduced in a paper by Aggarwal et al., published on arXiv in late 2023 and presented at KDD 2024, which was the first controlled study showing content could be deliberately tuned for higher visibility in AI-generated answers. So GEO is a real, defined thing — which is exactly why it is worth checking whether a given provider is doing it or borrowing the word.
One related red flag: if a vendor quotes GEO, AEO, and LLMO as three separate line items on one proposal, treat that as pricing creativity rather than expertise. It is one discipline wearing three hats, as we set out in GEO vs AEO vs SEO. And if you are weighing whether any of this is worth buying yet, we made the case for both sides in is an AI visibility audit worth it.
Audit us by the same seven criteria
The strongest thing we can do here is invite you to apply all seven to our own AI visibility audit. Published method: 39 criteria across 6 scored areas. Four AI systems named: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude. Published price on the page with no form in the way: PLN 499 net (roughly $125) for the Report, PLN 949 net (roughly $240) with the Action Plan. A report built as instructions, not just a score. A stated procedure if we find nothing: at least 5 concrete fixes or 100% of your money back within 7 days. Re-measurement 30 days after the first report in the higher package. And a real, hand-written llms.txt on this domain that you are welcome to open and judge.
If a competitor answers those seven better than we do, hire them. That is the point of publishing the criteria rather than a ranking. If you would rather put the questions to us live first, book a free 20-minute consultation — no script, no obligation, and we will tell you if the answer is that you do not need this yet. If you want a broader picture of your marketing before you narrow in on AI, our free Marketing Audit scores the whole thing in about three minutes.
FAQ
Should I choose the cheapest GEO provider? Not automatically. Price says little without scope, so compare what each quote actually buys: how many AI systems, how many criteria, what form the report takes, what guarantee applies. A cheap diagnosis with no implementation instructions often costs more in lost weeks than a pricier audit with a concrete plan. Equally, a five-figure retainer is not proof of rigour — ask the seven questions and compare the answers, not the totals.
Can a big SEO agency handle GEO as well as a specialist? It can, but check whether it has a separate, published method for AI systems or has simply added “we’ll check ChatGPT” to a standard SEO audit. Company size does not substitute for specialisation in a field this young. The useful test is criterion 1: ask for the criteria list in writing and see whether one exists.
Can I verify an agency’s results myself? Yes, and you should. Ask for the exact prompt list they used and run a few of them yourself in a signed-out or incognito session. Do not expect word-for-word agreement — models answer variably by design, and roughly a third of the variance in brand answers comes from run-to-run randomness alone, per the 2026 arXiv study cited above. But the broad picture, whether you appear at all, should match what they reported.
How long should a GEO audit take? For a small or mid-sized business, several working days up to about a week is a reasonable standard. An audit that drags on for months usually reflects the provider’s queue rather than greater depth. An audit delivered in a few hours raises the opposite question: were four AI systems really tested with enough repetitions, or was one prompt fired once at one model?