Questions to Ask Before Hiring a GEO Agency: A B2B Guide
AI assistants now answer many of the questions your buyers used to type into a search box. A procurement manager might ask ChatGPT to shortlist vendors in your category, or Google might show an AI Overview above the organic results. In both cases, your brand is either part of the answer or missing from it. This shift has created a new service category, generative engine optimization (GEO), and a growing number of agencies that promise to make brands visible in AI answers.
Some of these firms do rigorous work. Others repackage traditional SEO, sell guarantees no one can keep, or report numbers that cannot be reproduced. This guide lists the questions to ask before working with a GEO firm, explains why each one matters and shows you how to prepare. With that preparation, you can judge proposals on evidence rather than promises.
Short answer: Before hiring a GEO firm, ask which AI engines and buyer questions they will track, how they measure mentions, recommendations, citations and accuracy, how they handle answer variability, what baseline they start from, which concrete changes they will make, how GEO connects to your SEO, and what they refuse to promise. Clear, testable answers signal a credible partner.
What Is GEO, and Why Does Vetting a Firm Matter?
The term generative engine optimization comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi. The paper studied how changes to content affect visibility in AI-generated answers. In practice, GEO means improving how often and how accurately AI assistants mention, recommend and cite your brand. These assistants include ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews.
Vetting a GEO firm is harder than vetting an SEO agency because the measurement problem is harder:
- There is no single ranking position. An AI answer is a paragraph, a list or a comparison. Your brand can appear first, last, in passing or with an inaccurate description.
- Answers are non-deterministic. The same question asked twice can produce different wording, different brands and different sources.
- Context changes the output. Language, location, account history, model version and whether the assistant searches the web all affect the answer.
- Engines use different sources. Some retrieve live web pages and show citations. Others rely more heavily on what the model learned during training.
This means a firm can show you one flattering screenshot that proves very little. The questions below are designed to separate a repeatable method from an anecdote.
Questions to Ask Before Working With a GEO Firm
Group your questions into five areas: scope, measurement, method, risk and commercial terms. Ask them in writing, and compare the answers across every firm you evaluate.
1. Which AI engines will you track, and why those?
A credible firm names specific engines and explains the choice for your market. B2B buyers in different regions and industries use different assistants. Ask whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews are all included, or only a subset. If they track just one engine, you will not see the full picture.
2. Which buyer questions (prompts) will you monitor, and who chooses them?
This is the most important question on the list. GEO results depend entirely on the prompt set. A good partner builds prompts from real buyer intent, such as category searches, comparisons, problem-based questions and alternatives to a known vendor. They also include your sales team's input. Be cautious if the prompt list consists mostly of branded questions like What is [your brand]? Those make visibility look better than it is.
3. How do you define success?
Ask the firm to separate at least four outcomes:
- Mention: Is the brand named at all?
- Recommendation: Is the brand suggested as a fit for the buyer's need?
- Citation: Does the engine link to your site or to sources that describe you?
- Accuracy: Are your product, pricing model, market and positioning described correctly?
A firm that reports only mentions misses the outcomes that actually influence a shortlist.
4. How do you handle answer variability?
Because outputs change between runs, ask how many times each prompt is tested, how often tests run and how results are aggregated. Also ask whether they control for language and location. A serious answer describes repeated sampling and trends over time, not single snapshots.
5. What baseline will you measure before starting work?
Without a baseline, any later improvement is unprovable. Ask for a documented starting point that covers visibility per engine, per prompt group and versus named competitors in your category. Agree on the baseline before any optimization begins.
6. Will I see the raw answers, or only a score?
Composite visibility scores are useful summaries. However, you should also be able to read the actual AI responses and see which sources were cited. Raw outputs let your marketing and sales teams spot inaccurate descriptions that a score would hide.
7. What specific changes will you make?
Ask for a concrete list of work. Credible answers usually include:
- Rewriting key pages so they answer buyer questions clearly and directly
- Making brand facts consistent across your site, profiles and directories
- Adding or fixing structured data so search engines understand your organization and products
- Earning coverage in credible third-party sources that engines tend to cite, such as industry publications, reviews and comparison content
- Correcting outdated or wrong information that engines repeat
If the plan is mostly generic blog production, you are probably buying content marketing with a new label.
8. How does your GEO work relate to our SEO?
Many AI engines that search the web draw on the same pages search engines index. Strong SEO fundamentals therefore still matter. Ask how the firm coordinates with your existing SEO team or agency, and how they avoid changes that help one channel while hurting the other.
9. Will you review our technical access for AI crawlers?
AI companies publish their own crawler names. Examples include OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Anthropic's ClaudeBot. Google documents a separate Google-Extended token that controls whether content is used for Gemini models. That token does not remove a site from Google Search features such as AI Overviews, which rely on regular Googlebot crawling. A competent firm checks your robots.txt and CDN rules so you do not block the engines you want to appear in by accident.
10. What will you not promise?
This question reveals honesty quickly. No outside firm controls how a model ranks or phrases brands. A trustworthy partner commits to process, measurement and directional improvement, not to a guaranteed position in ChatGPT.
11. Which tactics do you refuse to use?
Ask directly about fake reviews, mass-produced low-quality AI content, manipulating community-edited sources and hidden text aimed at AI crawlers. These tactics can damage your reputation. They may also violate platform policies or be filtered out as engines improve.
12. Who does the work, and what happens if we stop?
Clarify who handles strategy, content and reporting, and whether that person knows your market and language. Confirm that you own the content, the prompt set and the historical data. Also confirm you can export everything if the engagement ends.
Red Flags That Should End the Conversation
- Guarantees of a specific position or a recommendation in a named AI assistant
- Reports built on a handful of screenshots with no repeated testing
- Refusal to share the prompt list or raw answers
- A plan that is mostly keyword-stuffed content volume
- No mention of accuracy, only of mention counts
- Vague answers on contract length, ownership and exit terms
How to Evaluate GEO Proposals Side by Side
Use a simple scorecard so the decision is not driven by the best sales presentation.
| Criterion | Strong answer | Weak answer |
|---|---|---|
| Engines | Named engines, justified for your market | A single engine, or AI in general |
| Prompts | Intent-based set, built with your input | Mostly branded questions |
| Metrics | Mention, recommendation, citation, accuracy | Mentions only |
| Variability | Repeated runs, trends over time | Single screenshots |
| Baseline | Documented before work starts | None, or created later |
| Method | Concrete page, source and data fixes | Generic content volume |
| Promises | Process and measurement | Guaranteed rankings |
| Ownership | You own data and content | Locked into vendor tools |
How to Prepare Before Your First Agency Meeting
You will get far better answers if you arrive with your own data. Before the first call:
- List 15 to 30 real buyer questions. Ask your sales team what prospects say in discovery calls, and turn that into prompts.
- Check your current visibility yourself. Run a quick audit to see whether AI engines mention, recommend, cite and correctly describe your brand. You can start with a free AI visibility check that requires no sign-up.
- Note inaccuracies. Wrong pricing models, outdated product names or a misdescribed market are concrete problems an agency should address first.
- Identify the competitors who appear instead of you. Their cited sources show you where the gaps are.
For ongoing tracking, Jumpix AI Visibility asks the questions your customers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. It measures whether your brand is mentioned, recommended, cited and described correctly, then lists what to fix. It costs 9.99 USD a month for one brand. Even if you hire a firm, an independent measurement layer lets you verify their reports rather than rely on them.
If you would rather hand the work to specialists in the Turkish market, you can compare agency answers against Jumpix's managed GEO service using the same questions in this guide.
Conclusion
GEO is a real discipline, but it is young, and the gap between strong and weak providers is wide. The firms worth hiring have three things in common. They are specific about engines and prompts, transparent about variability and raw outputs, and honest about what they cannot control. Ask the twelve questions above in writing and score the answers side by side. Above all, establish your own baseline before anyone starts optimizing. That way, you will choose a partner based on evidence and be able to prove whether the work moved your brand into the answers your buyers actually read.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to see GEO results?
It depends on the engine. Assistants that search the web live can reflect changes once the updated pages are crawled and indexed. Answers that rely on model training data change only when models are updated. Ask firms to give separate expectations for each engine type, and treat fixed timelines with caution.
Can a GEO firm guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my brand?
No. No external firm controls how an AI model selects or phrases recommendations, and outputs vary between runs. A credible firm commits to a clear method, regular measurement and directional improvement, not to a guaranteed outcome.
Is GEO different from SEO?
They overlap but are not identical. SEO focuses on rankings and clicks in search results. GEO focuses on whether AI answers mention, recommend, cite and accurately describe your brand. Strong SEO foundations usually support GEO, so the two should be coordinated rather than run separately.
What should I measure before talking to a GEO firm?
Measure your current visibility across the main AI engines for a set of real buyer questions. Record mentions, recommendations, citations and the accuracy of how your brand is described. This baseline makes agency proposals comparable and their later reports verifiable.
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