What a GEO service should actually include (and what's snake oil)
Shopping for generative engine optimization services? Here's what legitimate GEO work includes, the red flags to avoid, and how to judge results.
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Short answer
Legitimate generative engine optimization services are mostly good SEO with a sharper focus: making sure AI systems can reach your site, writing pages that answer buyers' questions with specifics, keeping your business information consistent, earning real mentions, and measuring honestly. Anyone who guarantees you'll appear in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers is selling something nobody can deliver.
GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the most-pitched service in marketing right now. I get it. AI answers are real, they're growing, and business owners are rightly asking whether they show up. But the market for generative engine optimization services is full of vague promises, made-up metrics and recycled SEO with a new label and a higher price.
So here's my attempt at a buyer's guide: what the work should actually include, what's snake oil, and the questions I'd ask before signing anything.
Where "GEO" came from
The term comes from a 2023 research paper by a team from Princeton and IIT Delhi, later presented at KDD 2024. They built a benchmark of queries, rewrote web content in various ways, and measured how visible each version was in AI-generated answers. They reported visibility gains of up to 40% in their setup. Two findings are worth knowing: adding quotations, statistics and citations to sources helped the most, and keyword stuffing, the old SEO trick, actually made things slightly worse.
That's a useful lesson, and it isn't a secret technique. It says AI systems prefer content that contains real, specific, sourced information. Good writers already knew that.
What Google and OpenAI say
Before paying anyone, read what the platforms themselves say. It takes ten minutes.
Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features says you don't need special AI files, special markup, or content broken into chunks. It says "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." And it warns: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems."
OpenAI's publisher FAQ says "any public website can appear in ChatGPT search" and asks you to make sure you aren't blocking its search crawler. And when OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT this year, it said plainly that "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you".
Put those together and the shape of honest GEO work becomes clear. There's no back door. There's only being the best, most findable source.
What legitimate generative engine optimization services include
Here's what I'd expect a real GEO engagement to cover. If a proposal skips most of these, it's not GEO; it's a report.
1. Technical access
AI systems can't cite what they can't reach. This part is concrete:
- Check robots.txt for accidental blocks on search crawlers such as Googlebot, Bingbot and OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot. If you've blocked AI crawlers, make sure you separated training crawlers from search crawlers: OpenAI uses GPTBot for training and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, and blocking the second keeps you out of its search results.
- Confirm your important pages are indexed and eligible for snippets in Google. Google says that's the requirement for appearing in its AI features.
- Make sure key content is in the HTML as text, not only in images, PDFs or scripts that load after the fact.
- Fix slow, broken or cluttered pages. People who click through from an AI answer want detail, fast.
2. Content that answers the real questions
This is most of the value. A good GEO service maps the questions your buyers ask before they choose a provider, including the follow-ups, and makes sure your site answers them with specifics: what you do, for whom, where, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, what can go wrong, how you compare to alternatives.
It also means adding the things the GEO paper found helpful when they're true: real numbers, cited sources, quotes from your own experts, first-hand detail. Not invented statistics. Real ones.
3. Entity clarity
AI systems need to be confident about who you are. That means a consistent business name, address, phone and description across your site, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, major directories and social profiles; an About page that names real people and credentials; and structured data (like Organization or LocalBusiness) that matches what the page actually says.
4. Earned mentions and reviews
Being mentioned by credible sources has always mattered. In AI answers it matters in a slightly different way, because these systems summarize what multiple sources say about you. Real work here looks like digital PR, local press, industry associations, partner pages, expert quotes and steady, honest review requests. It does not look like buying placements on "best of" listicle sites or seeding fake forum posts. Google explicitly calls inauthentic mentions less helpful than they seem, and other systems are built to catch spam.
5. Measurement you can verify
You should get numbers from sources you can check yourself:
- GA4: since May 2026 there's a built-in AI Assistant channel. We wrote a guide to measuring AI search traffic in GA4.
- Search Console: AI Overview and AI Mode traffic is counted in your overall data. Google's new Generative AI performance report, announced in June 2026, adds impressions by page, though it started with a limited UK rollout.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: its AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, shows citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries.
- Leads: form fills and calls, with an "AI assistant" option in your "how did you hear about us" question.
Prompt-tracking tools, which ask AI systems a list of questions and record whether you appear, can be useful for spotting trends. Treat them as a sample, not a ranking. AI answers shift with how a question is worded and, increasingly, with who's asking: Google said in August 2025 that AI Mode was starting to tailor some recommendations to personal preferences. A tool asking from a data center isn't your customer.
The snake oil: red flags to walk away from
| What they say | Why it's a problem |
|---|---|
| "We guarantee you'll appear in ChatGPT" | No one controls AI answers. Google says the same about its own rankings: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking." |
| "We have a partnership with OpenAI/Google" | Google says no third-party tool has access to its ranking or AI systems. Ask for proof. |
| "Our proprietary AI visibility score" | Fine as an internal metric, meaningless as a goal. Ask how it's calculated and what it predicts. |
| "We'll add llms.txt and AI schema" as the main deliverable | Google says Search doesn't use llms.txt and needs no special markup. See our llms.txt explainer. |
| "We'll get you mentioned on hundreds of sites" | Sounds like link schemes with a new name. Inauthentic mentions don't help and can hurt. |
| "We'll rewrite your whole site for AI" | Google says you don't need to write differently for AI. Rewrite for clarity and specifics, for people. |
Google's own advice on hiring an SEO applies word for word to GEO: be wary of anyone who's secretive about what they'll do, contacts you out of the blue, or claims a special relationship with Google.
Questions I'd ask before hiring
- What exactly will you do in the first 90 days, and what will I be able to see?
- Which of the five areas above do you cover, and which do you leave to us?
- How will you measure results, and can I check those numbers myself?
- What will you change on my site, and who writes the content?
- How do you get mentions and reviews, specifically?
- What happens if AI tools change how they choose sources next quarter?
A good provider will answer these plainly. If the answers are all about their proprietary platform and none are about your content, keep looking.
What should it cost?
Because legitimate GEO is mostly SEO and content work, it should cost roughly what good SEO and content work cost, not a premium for the acronym. If you're already paying for solid SEO, ask your provider how they're handling AI answers before you buy a second service. Our post on what local SEO costs has typical ranges and what drives them.
What I'd do
If I were a small or mid-sized business deciding where to spend:
- Check the basics yourself first. robots.txt, indexing in Search Console, Business Profile accuracy. Free.
- Fix your five most important pages so they answer real questions with real specifics.
- Turn on measurement: GA4's AI Assistant channel, Bing Webmaster Tools, an AI option on your forms.
- Build mentions the slow, real way: reviews, local press, associations, partners.
- Then decide whether you need outside help, and judge any proposal against the five areas above.
For the bigger picture of what changes and what doesn't, read SEO vs GEO. If you'd like a partner for the work, our SEO and local SEO service includes everything in the "legitimate" list, without the guarantees we can't make.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO different from SEO?
Mostly no. The foundations are the same. What's different is the emphasis: being quotable, being clearly identifiable as an entity, and earning mentions matter more when an AI is summarizing several sources at once.
How long until GEO work shows results?
Technical fixes can matter as soon as pages are recrawled. Content and reputation work usually take months, like SEO. Be skeptical of anyone promising AI visibility in a few weeks.
Can I do GEO myself?
A lot of it, yes. The technical checks and Business Profile cleanup are a good start. Content and PR take time and skill, which is where outside help usually earns its fee.
