How to choose a GEO agency: what to check in the proposal
Give each candidate the same brief: website, priority service, language, market and the decision you need to make. Are you buying diagnosis, changes to selected pages or ongoing observations of AI answers? An audit quote and a multi-month implementation proposal cannot be compared by their totals alone.
Look for a provider that can explain its method and has the people needed to carry out the work. Agencies may use GEO and AEO to describe overlapping services, so ask which tasks are included under each name.
Ask the agency to explain one finding
Choose a finding in the sample report and ask the agency to explain what it observed, how it checked it and why the proposed change would help. If the evidence is a screenshot of an AI answer, ask for the question, date, mode, language and results of repeat checks.
One answer mentioning the agency does not establish the quality of its client work. Its absence from your own ad hoc prompt does not establish the opposite. Compare evidence under equivalent conditions and relate it to the work you need.
Put the proposals into one comparison sheet
| Question | What you need to establish |
|---|---|
| Which pages are covered? | URLs or sampling rules, templates and languages |
| Who writes and implements? | Named roles and work left to your team |
| Who supplies the facts? | Approval of service terms, specifications and case evidence |
| What is delivered? | The report, task list, agreed site changes and original test results |
| How will completion be checked? | Checkable completion criteria for each stage |
| What does your company retain? | Access to results, code, materials and working data |
Use the comparison sheet to identify requirements and gaps, rather than inventing a score for each agency. A specialist who provides analysis but no development may suit a business with its own developers. If you do not have that team, find out who will implement the recommendations before signing.
Check the work separately from traffic and sales
You can check a corrected server response as soon as the change is published. To assess changes in AI answers, you need repeat tests. To establish an increase in inquiries, you need inquiry data. Ask how the agency reports results it cannot yet measure and explanations its tests did not support.
If every observation is presented as a win, it will be hard to judge what happened. Google's advice on hiring an SEO recommends understanding proposed actions and being skeptical of guaranteed first-place rankings. It is a useful principle when examining a GEO proposal too.
Start with a small paid review
Commissioning a review of one agreed section gives you a way to assess the agency before a larger project. Specify the pages to review, evidence to collect and report to deliver. A complete unpaid audit is a poor substitute for this: it tests how much free work a provider will do, rather than whether a defined assignment meets your requirements.
When the report arrives, try to reproduce a finding and ask your developer whether the recommended task is clear enough to implement. Check that the provider explains what it could not establish. You should receive usable recommendations even if it is too early to measure a traffic change.
Also agree where working materials will live and who controls the relevant accounts. Access should match the task. A first public review does not require full control of your infrastructure.
Our GEO audit example shows a complete finding. If you already have a diagnosis, compare implementation proposals against the same task list.
Published: · Reviewed by the geo-rank.ai editorial team · How we check