The short answer
Ask what they will change, for which buying questions, and how they will measure it with repeated runs. Walk away from guaranteed rankings or placements in AI answers: the answers vary too much for anyone to promise that. Published agency prices run from about $1,500 to over $50,000 a month, but those figures come from agencies themselves, so get a baseline before you compare quotes.
GEO proposals have a type. There is a dashboard screenshot, a slide about the death of search, and a monthly fee that seems to have been chosen by vibes. Some agencies do excellent work. Others sell SEO with a new cover sheet. The trick is telling them apart before the contract, not six months in.
This is a buyer’s checklist: what the work should include, what it tends to cost, the questions worth asking and the promises that should end the call.
What you are actually buying
Strip away the acronyms and a good GEO engagement does three things. It finds the buying questions where you should appear in AI answers and do not. It works out why, by reading the answers and the sources behind them. And it fixes the cause, which is usually content, evidence, reputation or a technical block, then measures again.
Google is blunt about its part of this: “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO” (Google). The same page says you do not need special AI text files, chunked content or special schema for its AI features. Other assistants have published less guidance, so a good agency should say which advice applies to which platform.
What it costs (and why the numbers are fuzzy)
There is no independent price survey we could find. What exists are ranges published by agencies that sell the service, so read them as marketing, not market data.
| Source | What they publish | Caveat |
|---|---|---|
| WebFX, US agency | $1,500 to $50,000+ per month for agency services; $1,500 to $5,000 for small businesses | Sells GEO services on the same page. |
| Gripped, UK B2B SaaS agency | £1,500 to £6,000 per month for most B2B SaaS companies; a standalone audit at £3,000 to £8,000 | Its own pricing guide, for its own niche. |
| AI visibility tools | Entry plans such as Otterly.AI Lite at $29 and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 per month | Prompt limits differ a lot; compare what each plan actually runs. |
Sources: WebFX, Gripped, Otterly.AI pricing, Semrush. Prices change often; check the live pages.
Our assumption, based on how agency pricing usually works: most of the fee pays for people writing, fixing and doing outreach, not for monitoring. If a retainer is mostly a dashboard, you may be able to buy the dashboard directly for far less.
Seven questions to ask before you sign
- Which buying questions will you track, and can we approve the list? Vague answers like “thousands of prompts” are not a list.
- How many times is each question run, on which assistants, and with what settings? One run per prompt is not a measurement.
- Can we see the raw answers, not only the score? If the evidence stays inside their tool, you cannot check their claims.
- What will you change in the first 60 days, and why those pages? Expect named pages and reasons, not “content optimisation”.
- What do you do off our website? Ask how they handle reviews, communities and Wikipedia, and listen for disclosure and honesty.
- How will you separate visibility from traffic and revenue? Those are different measurements and should be reported separately.
- What happens to our data and content if we leave? You should keep the question set, the answers and anything they wrote.
Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO still fits surprisingly well: ask for past work, ask what results to expect and when, and “be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”
Promises that should end the call
- “We guarantee you will be recommended by ChatGPT.” In a SparkToro and Gumshoe study, the authors estimate less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI gives the same list of brands in any two of 100 responses. Nobody can guarantee what an answer will say.
- “You will rank #1 in AI.” The study’s authors put it plainly: any tool that gives a “ranking position in AI” is “full of baloney”. A visibility rate across many runs is meaningful; a position is not.
- “We have a special relationship with Google” or “internal AI data”. Google tells site owners to “be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use ‘internal’ Google metrics”, and its SEO guidance warns that “no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
- “llms.txt is the key.” Google Search ignores it, and Ahrefs measured almost no requests from AI crawlers. See our AI crawler guide.
- “We seed your brand across Reddit threads.” That runs against Reddit’s rules and, with fake or undisclosed reviews, against consumer law in several countries. Our Reddit and Wikipedia guide covers the legitimate alternatives.
Get a baseline before you compare proposals
The most useful thing you can bring to an agency call is evidence: your buying questions, the current answers, who is recommended instead and which sources they cite. It makes proposals comparable, and it gives you a before picture that does not belong to the agency you hire.
You can build that yourself with our free baseline method. We also sell a monthly brand scan for CHF 19 a month, billed in CHF, EUR, USD or GBP, so we have an obvious interest here; see what it includes and decide whether it saves you the work. Either way, our buying guide for AI visibility tools helps you match the purchase to the decision.
Sources & context
Examples and figures are illustrative unless explicitly stated otherwise. Written and published by Share of Voice, a Superstellar LLC product. We sell AI visibility reports; our commercial perspective is worth keeping in mind.
Spotted something we should correct? Let us know.