A GEO Agency that Treats Citation as the New Ranking

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

What is GEO?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the discipline of making your content discoverable, parseable, and quotable by large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, so that when a buyer asks one of those engines a question in your category, your brand shows up as a cited source.

How is GEO different from SEO?

SEO optimises for ranked blue links inside Google's results page. GEO optimises for inclusion inside an AI-generated answer. The technical work overlaps, clean HTML, schema, authority, but the success metric is different. SEO measures rank and clicks. GEO measures inclusion and attribution inside AI answers, even when the user never clicks through.

Will GEO replace SEO?

No. They are layered, not substitutive. Traditional search still drives a majority of B2B research traffic in 2026, and AI engines themselves rely heavily on web crawl signals that SEO already optimises. The right model is to do both, keep your SEO foundation strong and add a GEO layer on top so you remain visible as buyer behaviour shifts.

How do I know if AI engines are citing my site?

We run a fixed set of commercially relevant prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews on a schedule and record which sources are cited, using tracking tools such as Profound, Peec, and AthenaHQ alongside manual checks. Server logs show whether AI crawlers such as GPTBot or PerplexityBot are fetching your pages, which is useful for confirming access, but a crawl is not evidence of a citation. The audit deliverable includes a baseline citation map.

Do AI engines respect robots.txt?

Most do, including OpenAI's GPTBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and PerplexityBot. Each runs a distinct user agent that can be allowed or blocked independently in robots.txt.

What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is an emerging standard for giving large language models a clean, structured summary of your site. It typically lives at /llms.txt and contains a markdown overview of what your company does, your key pages, your services, and your published content. A longer llms-full.txt expands this with more context.

Does schema actually help with AI engines?

Yes. Structured data, Organization, Service, Article, FAQ, HowTo, DefinedTerm, and Speakable, gives engines machine-readable definitions of what your content means. AI engines use these to disambiguate entities and to decide which sources to cite. Schema is one of the highest-leverage GEO investments because the work is one-time but the payoff compounds.

How long until GEO work shows results?

There is no reliable timeline, because AI engines re-crawl and change how they select sources on their own schedules. Technical fixes can be confirmed quickly, since we can check that pages are readable and accessible, while changes in citation share usually take longer and depend on authority and competition. We set a baseline in the audit, report citation share monthly, and adjust the plan based on what the data shows rather than promising a date.

What's the ROI of GEO?

It depends on how much of your category research has already moved to AI engines. For B2B technology, professional services, and considered consumer purchases, AI-mediated research is now a meaningful share of pipeline-influencing touchpoints. We model expected citation lift and downstream pipeline contribution before any engagement.

Can you guarantee citations?

No, and we'd be lying if we did. AI engines change their citation behaviour without notice. What we can commit to is the underlying work: content that is readable without JavaScript, structured data that matches the visible page, crawler access that is configured on purpose, and authority building on the sources AI engines tend to reference. Schema, crawler access, and an llms.txt file help machines read your site, but none of them guarantee rankings or citations, so we measure citation share over time and adjust based on what actually moves it.

What does a generative engine optimization agency actually do?

A GEO agency makes sure AI answer engines can find, trust, and cite your brand. That means auditing how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews currently describe you, restructuring your content and schema so models can retrieve it cleanly, and building the authoritative citations those systems pull from. Then it tracks how often you appear in AI answers and with what sentiment.

How is GEO different from traditional SEO?

SEO works to rank a page in a list of blue links. GEO works to get your brand named inside the AI generated answer that now sits above those links. The tactics overlap (clean content, schema, authority), but GEO optimizes for being the source a model quotes, not just the result a user clicks.

How is an AI marketing agency different from an agency that just uses AI tools?

Using AI tools just speeds up the same old work. An AI marketing agency rebuilds the strategy around how buyers now discover brands through AI answer engines, which changes what content you create, how you structure it, and how you measure visibility. The output is getting cited where decisions start, not producing more content faster.