This is a buyer's guide, not a ranked agency list. UnderAI publishes this guide and also sells GEO software and managed services. Evaluate UnderAI with the same evidence, delivery, and commercial questions you would use for any other provider.
Quick answer
Choose a GEO agency that can show you:
- where its prompts and questions came from;
- which answers succeeded, failed, or were unavailable;
- the full answers and citation URLs behind its metrics;
- how each gap maps to an official page, external source, or technical owner;
- what its team will implement and what remains with your team;
- how it will retest the same scope after a change;
- which outcomes it can measure without promising model behavior.
If a provider cannot trace a recommendation back to inspectable evidence, it is selling an opinion rather than a controlled GEO program.
First decide whether you need an agency
| Operating model | Best fit | Main responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| In-house program | Your team already has research, content, SEO, PR, engineering, and analytics owners | Build the method, assign work, and maintain comparable measurement |
| Monitoring software | Your team knows what to track and can act on raw answer evidence | Collect and review prompts, answers, competitors, sentiment, and citations |
| Advisory engagement | You need an independent baseline, architecture, measurement design, or roadmap | Diagnose the constraint and define an accountable plan |
| Managed GEO agency | The gap spans research, website implementation, content, external sources, and retesting | Coordinate evidence, delivery, release acceptance, and measurement |
Buying managed services makes sense when execution ownership is the constraint. It does not remove the client's responsibility to approve facts, claims, legal language, or publication decisions.
What should a GEO agency actually do?
Define the decision scope
The agency should identify the markets, audiences, products, competitors, platforms, and buyer tasks being measured. It should preserve the exact prompt wording and explain which questions came from customer research, search data, sales evidence, support evidence, or editorial judgment.
Establish an inspectable baseline
A useful baseline preserves successful, failed, empty, excluded, and unavailable observations separately. Every summary metric should lead back to the full answer, brand and competitor roles, sentiment or description, and citation URLs where available.
Diagnose the real constraint
Not every visibility gap is a content gap. The constraint may be an unclear entity, a missing page owner, conflicting product facts, crawl or index eligibility, weak independent evidence, an incomplete comparison, or a measurement failure. The agency should identify the layer before recommending production.
Assign work to owners
Each accepted action should name the responsible page, source, technical system, reviewer, and release condition. The agency should distinguish work it performs from work owned by the client's product, legal, compliance, PR, engineering, or analytics teams.
Implement or specify the change
Clarify whether the engagement includes strategy only, briefs, copy, design, development, structured data, internal links, external-source research, publication support, or quality assurance. A proposal should not hide implementation gaps behind the word “optimization.”
Retest comparable evidence
The agency should define the retest before implementation begins. Prompt wording, market, platform route, collection method, and interpretation rules should remain comparable, while unrelated changes in the test window are documented.
GEO agency evaluation scorecard
| Criterion | Evidence to request | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt research | Source labels, approved prompt library, market and audience scope | A generated prompt list with no buyer evidence or owner |
| Collection health | Scheduled, successful, failed, empty, excluded, and unavailable units | Missing observations silently reported as zero visibility |
| Answer evidence | Full responses, brand roles, competitors, sentiment, exact citation URLs | A dashboard score that cannot be traced to answers |
| Page ownership | Question-to-page map, canonical owner, fact owner, update responsibility | “Publish more content” without identifying the right URL |
| Source strategy | Exact external pages, authors or accounts, relevance, and publication route | A generic media list or paid-placement promise |
| Implementation | Named deliverables, approvals, technical owner, release acceptance | Recommendations with no delivery or handoff boundary |
| Retesting | Frozen scope, version history, comparison rules, interpretation limits | A before-and-after claim built from different prompts or routes |
| Commercial scope | Brands, markets, prompts, platforms, users, production, review, and exclusions | A headline fee with undefined limits or client responsibilities |
Questions to ask before hiring
- Where did the prompt library come from, and who approves it?
- How do you report failed or unavailable answer collection?
- Can we inspect the full answers and exact citation URLs behind every metric?
- How do you separate official-page gaps from external-source gaps?
- How do you decide whether to improve an existing page or create a new one?
- Which deliverables will your team implement, and which remain with ours?
- How are product, legal, compliance, and market facts approved?
- What changes must stay stable for the retest to be comparable?
- Which outcomes are directly observed, assisted, modelled, or unavailable?
- What happens if the baseline shows that content is not the primary constraint?
Minimum deliverables
A defensible GEO engagement should leave the client with:
- a dated scope covering markets, audiences, products, competitors, prompts, and platforms;
- a collection-health record and answer-level evidence;
- a brand, competitor, page, and source gap analysis;
- a question-to-owner map for official pages and external evidence;
- prioritized actions with facts, reviewers, owners, and acceptance criteria;
- publication or implementation records for completed work;
- a fixed retest plan with comparison limits;
- an explicit list of unknowns, exclusions, and claims the agency cannot support.
Common red flags
- guaranteed inclusion, ranking, recommendation, or citation in an AI answer;
- a universal visibility score with no documented denominator;
- recommendations based only on domain totals rather than exact pages and answers;
- large content quotas before the agency identifies distinct buyer tasks and page owners;
- “AI-friendly” rewrites that weaken approved facts or compliance language;
- external placement promises based only on a publication's domain name;
- traffic or revenue claims that cannot be separated into direct, assisted, or modelled evidence;
- a retest that changes the prompts, market, platform route, or scoring rules without disclosure.
How to compare proposals
Compare providers on the same written scope. A lower price may exclude implementation, external-source work, engineering, review, software access, or retesting. A higher price is not proof that those responsibilities are included.
| Proposal field | What must be explicit |
|---|---|
| Measurement | Prompt count, platforms, markets, cadence, repeats, and failed-unit treatment |
| Delivery | Research, audit, architecture, copy, development, source work, and QA |
| Ownership | Agency tasks, client tasks, reviewers, approvals, and dependencies |
| Evidence | Raw answers, normalized facts, exports, dashboards, and retention |
| Retesting | Trigger, stable inputs, comparison window, and decision rule |
| Commercial terms | Setup, recurring scope, add-ons, usage limits, and exclusions |
Do not compress these fields into one “best agency” score. The right choice depends on the constraint your team needs to remove.
GEO agency, AEO agency, or AI SEO agency?
The labels overlap, so compare capabilities rather than acronyms.
- A GEO agency usually emphasizes brand representation across generated answers, official pages, external sources, and measurement.
- An AEO agency usually emphasizes questions, answer ownership, content structure, and citation readiness.
- An AI SEO agency usually emphasizes the website's technical, content, entity, and search-discovery layer.
A capable provider may cover all three. Ask it to show where each responsibility appears in the scope instead of assuming the label proves the method.
How to evaluate UnderAI
UnderAI combines GEO Workspace with managed prompt research, visibility auditing, website and content implementation, source analysis, and retesting. Public list pricing for managed GEO work is not documented; the proposal should state the included brands, markets, products, competitors, prompts, platforms, users, implementation work, review responsibilities, and retest scope.
Because UnderAI is the author of this guide and a commercial provider, its inclusion is not an independent recommendation. Review the UnderAI AEO and GEO service workflow against the same scorecard and questions above.
Frequently asked questions
What does a GEO agency do?
A GEO agency researches buyer questions, measures how a brand appears in generated answers, diagnoses page and source gaps, coordinates approved changes, and retests comparable observations. Exact delivery varies by scope.
Can a GEO agency guarantee AI visibility or citations?
No. A provider can improve public evidence, technical eligibility, content ownership, and measurement, but third-party search and model systems decide what they crawl, index, retrieve, generate, recommend, or cite.
How much does a GEO agency cost?
There is no responsible universal price. Compare proposals using the same brands, markets, prompts, platforms, cadence, implementation responsibilities, review depth, software access, and retest requirements.
Should we hire an agency or buy GEO software?
Buy software when your team can design the measurement, review raw evidence, assign work, implement changes, and interpret retests. Hire managed support when one or more of those operating responsibilities is missing.
How quickly should GEO work produce results?
Require the provider to define a baseline, implementation milestone, and retest window, but do not accept a guaranteed visibility or citation timeline. Search discovery, crawling, indexing, source adoption, and model behavior occur on different schedules.
What proof should a GEO agency provide?
Ask for inspectable prompts, answer status, full responses, exact citation URLs, page and source ownership, implementation records, and compatible retest evidence. Client names or outcome claims require their own verification and permission.
Next step
Use this guide to compare providers before you choose a commercial model. If UnderAI fits the evidence and delivery requirements, review the AEO and GEO service workflow and request a scope that names every included responsibility and limitation.