The GEO Agency Buyer's Checklist: Six Things That Separate Real From Fake
Generative engine optimization, GEO, is the work of making a brand easy for AI tools to recognize, trust and cite, across ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest. The terminology is a mess. You will hear GEO, AEO, AI visibility and more for the same goal, which means comparing two agencies by the words they use tells you nothing. Compare them by what they can prove instead. Six checks do most of the work.
One: How They Measure
This is where most promises fall apart. AI answers change with almost every query, so a single flattering screenshot means nothing. A real agency reports how often a brand shows up across many runs of a prompt, and tests in a clean session rather than a logged-in account that already knows your domain. Ask how many times each prompt is run, and who chose the prompts. Vague answers here are the whole tell.
Two: Which Engines They Cover
The engines do not draw on the same sources. A brand strong in one can be invisible in another, because each pulls from different corners of the web. An agency tuned for a single engine may do nothing for you on the others. Ask which engines it tracks, and make sure they are the ones your buyers actually use.
Three: Where the Mentions Come From
AI answers reflect what the wider web says about you: reviews, forums, roundups, coverage. Content on your own site is only half the job, and off-site authority is the other half. Ask to see the kind of coverage an agency has earned for clients, not just counted, and be wary of anyone whose plan is to manufacture mentions. Bought presence is fragile and increasingly caught.
Four: What They Publish
The strongest long-term signal is material with a genuine point of view, first-hand experience or real expertise. Thin pages spun out for every keyword variation are not a strategy; they are a liability that can trip content-quality systems. An agency proposing hundreds of near-identical pages is proposing a future problem.
Five: Whether the Basics Hold
To be cited, a page still has to be findable: crawlable, indexed, eligible to appear. Ranking in ordinary search still helps a page get pulled into an AI answer, even if it is no longer the whole story. A GEO agency that treats crawling, indexing and content quality as someone else's department is missing the floor its own work stands on.
Six: What the Contract Says
No one can guarantee a citation or a ranking. Be careful with any company that will not explain plainly what it intends to do, because you are responsible for what it does in your name. Get the measurement method, the timeframe and the references in writing before you sign.
What Good Looks Like, by Workstream
Few agencies do all five equally well. Decide which you need most, and hire for that strength.
Where a Design-Led Studio Fits
Not every GEO provider is an outreach shop. Peppermint approaches AI visibility from the design side, building the on-site half, semantic structure, entity design and content shaped to be quoted, into a site from the first wireframe, and working as an extension of a startup's team through Slack and its sprint cycles. If your site is the weak link, that is the half to fix first. If off-site authority is your gap, ask any studio directly how it handles that side and who does the work, because the mentions a brand earns elsewhere sit outside the site anyone builds.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GEO different from AEO? In practice, barely. Both describe getting a brand cited in AI answers. Do not choose an agency on the term it prefers; choose on what it can show.
Does a GEO agency work on my site or off it? Both halves matter. On-site covers structure, entities and content. Off-site covers earned mentions and coverage. Ask which half an agency actually does.
How is GEO success measured? By how often a brand appears across many runs of a prompt, tested in a clean session, not by a single screenshot.
The Short Version
A real GEO agency defines its terms, measures across many runs, covers the engines you care about, earns its mentions and keeps your search base sound. A fake one sells certainty in a system that answers differently every time. And if the on-site foundation is where you are weakest, a design-led studio like Peppermint builds that half in from the start rather than patching it later.
