Hiring a GEO or AEO provider can make sense when your team needs specialist research, technical implementation, content operations, or a repeatable measurement program. The labels are not standardized, so compare the actual scope and evidence rather than the acronym.
Match the service to the bottleneck
- Measurement and research: prompt design, platform sampling, baseline reporting, and clear metric definitions.
- Technical discovery: crawlability, rendering, indexation, structured content, and analytics instrumentation.
- Content and information architecture: expert-led answers, useful supporting pages, clear sourcing, and internal linking.
- Authority and digital PR: credible third-party coverage and verifiable brand information.
- Implementation: engineering, content production, editorial review, and change tracking.
Ask for the work plan
Request a written scope that names the audit inputs, deliverables, responsible people, approval steps, timelines, access requirements, and what is out of scope. Ask which changes your team must implement and who owns the resulting work.
Ask how success will be measured
Good measurement starts with a baseline and a stated sample. Ask the provider to distinguish brand mentions from citations, sampled prompt results from platform-wide behavior, and observed changes from causal claims. A vendor dashboard score alone is not proof that a campaign caused an improvement.
Check proof carefully
- Request a relevant example with the client’s permission and enough context to understand the method.
- Ask for before-and-after dates, prompts, markets, answer engines, sample sizes, and definitions.
- Confirm whether the case study reports correlation, observed change, or a controlled causal test.
- Speak with a reference whose project resembles your own, when available.
Warning signs
Be cautious of guarantees of ChatGPT citations, undisclosed prompt lists, ‘secret’ schema tricks, unexplained visibility scores, guaranteed rankings, or claims that a crawler file alone controls inclusion. Google says its AI search features use the same foundational search eligibility requirements and advises following its established Search guidance rather than relying on special GEO hacks.
Our directory status
We are not publishing a ranked agency directory in this first release because we have not independently verified provider identities, service areas, deliverables, case studies, or commercial relationships. This guide is a due-diligence framework, not an endorsement list.
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