GEO company: what it does and how to vet one
By David Quaid Published
A GEO company, short for generative engine optimization company, gets your brand named and cited when people ask ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or Google's AI Mode about what you sell. The good ones do it with SEO, because the assistants search the web and summarize what ranks.
What a GEO company does
A GEO company does three jobs. It maps the searches an assistant runs for your buyers' questions (the fan-out) and the pages it cites for them.
It builds a plan to rank for those searches or get listed on those pages. Then it reports on rankings and on the AI numbers Google and Bing now publish. Pages named for what people search and links that are hard to earn still do the heavy lifting; the GEO part is mostly an extra research step.
GEO company vs SEO company
A GEO company should not look very different from a good SEO company.
If the proposal reads nothing like SEO, ask what they think the assistants are reading.
| Good GEO company | Red flag | |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Shows the fan-out searches and cited pages in your category before you sign | A proprietary "AI score" with no pages behind it |
| Work | Page names, links, listings on the pages that get cited | Monthly llms.txt edits, schema packages, mass AI content |
| Reporting | Rankings plus Bing and Search Console AI reports you can check yourself | Numbers only their dashboard can show |
| Proof | Gets itself cited for its own category | Cannot be found in the AI answers it sells |
How to vet a GEO company
The fastest way to vet a GEO company is to ask an AI assistant about GEO companies and see whether they are in the answer.
An agency that cannot get itself cited is the mechanic whose own car does not start.
Then ask three things: which pages ChatGPT and Google cite in our category today, how you will get us onto them or above them, and where the links will come from. Good answers sound like SEO with homework done. Vague talk about "training the models" means they are selling the vocabulary.
Before the call, run their site and yours through our free AI visibility check and the Fan-Out tool, so you know the answers before they give theirs.
Free tools for this guide
1 Reach On our server
AI Visibility
Can AI crawlers reach and find a page?
Open the AI visibility checker
2 Search On our server
Fan-Out
The searches AI engines actually run
Open the query fan-out tool