Three ways to tell a GEO agency is about to rip you off
The internet is suddenly full of people selling AI SEO. Some are good. Many are selling you a mystery. After 17 years in search, here are the warning signs I look for.
Recently the internet has become flooded with people who want to sell you GEO or AI SEO services. These are typically agencies that promise to get you recommended by large language models or ranked in AI search. I have been doing SEO for 17 years, and I believe all search will be AI search within a few months, so I have watched this new industry form in real time. And I know from talking with a lot of business owners that it is genuinely hard to tell if you are being ripped off. So here are the warning signs I look for.
Red flag one: they sell GEO as something separate from SEO
The truth is the only way to get recommended by an AI is to first appear in a search engine, because AI uses a search engine to find the information it needs before it recommends you or your competitors. The differences are in how AI uses search engines compared to humans. Personally, I think this is moving so fast that it no longer makes sense to optimize for humans at all. We are very near the point where AI is doing all of the searching. But at the very least, your GEO strategy needs to be integrated with your SEO strategy. If someone presents GEO as a completely separate service with its own separate invoice, that is a red flag.
Red flag two: they are not tracking citations
If an agency is not tracking which websites AI cites when people look for your product or service, they cannot do the job. There are plenty of services for this now, some better than others. Peec AI is the one I find myself recommending, and Profound is probably the biggest player in the space. Tools like Ahrefs will show you how often you appear for common queries, but the prompts people type into AI are never actually common, which is why you want a service that tracks the specific prompts you care about.
Why does this matter so much? When someone enters a prompt, the AI immediately runs what is called a fan-out query: three to twelve separate searches in a search engine. It then looks through as many as a couple hundred potential results and cites maybe a dozen of them. If your brand is recommended more often than your competitors on the pages that get cited, the AI recommends your brand. Otherwise it recommends your competitor. That is the entire game with AI search, and I walked through the repair side of it yesterday. If you do not know which pages are being cited, you are not doing GEO. Not tracking citations is perhaps the biggest red flag there is.
Red flag three: they talk about GEO as a technical implementation
Just like SEO, 90 percent of GEO comes down to content. Content on your website, and content on the other pages AI is citing. If a campaign is not focused on creating or editing content that gets cited by AI to recommend your brand, it is not really GEO. Now, there are a ton of genuinely cool technical things you can do on a website these days, from integrating AI into the site itself to making it easier for agents to use your pages. I am glad that work exists. But that is not GEO. It will not get you recommended by a language model, and it will not put you in an AI answer. If the deliverables list is full of schema tweaks and mystery infrastructure and light on content, you are paying for theater.
Opinion columns reflect the personal views of the author. Our reporting on the stories referenced here lives on the linked pages.