TL;DR: Real generative engine optimization services make your company easier for AI systems to understand, cite and recommend. A good engagement starts with a baseline built on a fixed set of prompts and an audit of how AI tools describe your brand. It then improves your pages, your technical access and your third-party presence, and measures change against that same baseline. Expect early signals around 60 days, a meaningful comparison at 90 and a commercial read at 180. At Top Search Agency, GEO runs as part of an SEO or content engagement at $3,500–$12,000 a month. Be wary of anyone selling llms.txt, blanket schema or guaranteed ChatGPT placement as a strategy.
“Can you get us into ChatGPT?”
It’s the most common question we hear from B2B SaaS and AI companies right now. It’s a fair question. Buyers are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI results to build software shortlists, and nobody wants to be missing from that shortlist.
The trouble is that the market for GEO services is full of noise. Some providers sell a monthly screenshot of a few prompts. Others sell an llms.txt file and some FAQ schema and call it a strategy. Very few explain what they’ll actually change, how they’ll measure it, or how long it should take.
I’m Usman Tauqir, Founder and CEO at Top Search Agency. We run search and AI-visibility programmes for B2B SaaS and AI companies. This guide explains what generative engine optimization services should include, realistic timelines, what GEO costs in 2026, and the lessons we’ve learned from doing the work. I’ll also cover the tactics we’ve found overrated.
What are generative engine optimization services?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) services improve how AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews understand, describe, cite and recommend your company. You’ll also see them sold as AEO, LLM SEO or GEO SEO services. The labels differ, but the goal is the same. (Our glossary has a fuller definition of generative engine optimization.)
GEO isn’t a replacement for SEO. AI systems draw heavily on the same web that search engines index, so most of the foundations are shared. We’ve covered that relationship in detail in GEO vs SEO. The difference is in what you optimise for and how you measure it:
- SEO asks whether your pages rank and earn clicks.
- GEO asks whether AI answers mention you, describe you accurately, recommend you, cite your pages and send buyers your way.
Why does this matter now? AI systems also seem to weigh your wider reputation more heavily than your link profile. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, brand web mentions showed a far stronger correlation with visibility in Google’s AI Overviews (0.664) than backlink counts did (0.218). That’s a correlation, not proof of cause, but it explains why GEO work has to reach beyond your own website.
Being cited also seems to pay off in clicks. Seer Interactive’s analysis of AI Overviews found that brands cited in an AI Overview received 35% more organic clicks than brands that weren’t, though Seer also treats this as correlation.
What do generative engine optimization services deliver?
Here’s what a client receives from us, in the order they receive it. Use it as a checklist when comparing proposals.
Month one: the baseline and the audit
A proper generative engine optimization service starts with measurement, not a batch of new content.
In the first month we:
- Run a fixed prompt set across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and other relevant answer engines. It covers category searches, problem-based searches, competitor searches, alternative searches and recommendation queries. This gives us a repeatable starting point rather than a few one-off screenshots.
- Audit your brand and entity. Do AI systems associate you with the right category, product, audience, use cases and differentiators? Or are they confusing you with another company? We’ve seen AI answers attribute one SaaS brand to a better-known company with a similar name, and that kind of problem changes the whole plan.
- Review your commercial pages. We check whether your category, product, use-case, comparison and alternative pages give search engines and AI systems enough clear, useful information to understand what you do and when you should be recommended.
- Review third-party sources. We look at Reddit, Quora, G2, Capterra, industry directories and other platforms, because AI systems draw on information from across the web when forming an answer.
- Check technical access. We confirm that search and AI crawlers can reach the pages you want them to understand. More on that below.
At the end of month one, you should receive three things: a GEO audit, a content and entity-gap map, and a recommended plan for publishing and building authority. Together they show what needs to improve on your website, what information is missing or unclear, and where credible third-party visibility would strengthen your presence.
Ongoing work: on your site
Month-to-month work usually includes:
- New commercial pages: category, product, use-case, comparison, alternative and integration pages
- Refreshing existing content with clearer answers, stronger entity context and first-hand expertise
- Improving internal links and site architecture, so related pages connect and informational content leads to commercial pages
- Adding or improving structured data where it accurately reflects what’s on the page
The goal is pages that answer engines can understand, extract and represent accurately. That doesn’t mean pages written for machines. It means pages that make your product, expertise and evidence clear to anyone reading them.
Ongoing work: off your site
Strong GEO services also work beyond your website:
- Review sites and directories: correcting G2 and Capterra profiles, category placement and product descriptions, and building an honest process for collecting genuine customer reviews
- Digital PR and editorial mentions: industry articles, “best tools” and comparison lists, partner or integration announcements, and customer stories
- Community participation: finding Reddit and forum threads where your team can add genuinely useful answers
I’ll explain how we approach the off-site work, and what we refuse to do, further down.
Reporting: what a monthly GEO report should show
A monthly GEO report should compare everything against the original baseline. Ours includes:
- Visibility across the fixed prompt set
- Brand mentions and whether you’re described accurately
- Citations of, and links to, your site
- How often competitors are mentioned and recommended, and your share of voice against them
- Referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other AI platforms, kept separate from organic search (a GA4 channel for AI referrals does this)
- Where tracking supports it, the trials, demos, leads or pipeline those referrals produced
AI responses vary by platform, model, prompt, user, location and date. So we treat GEO reporting as directional measurement, not a stable ranking report. Logging the exact prompts and platforms lets us compare like with like over time.
How we build and score the prompt set
The prompt set is the foundation of every GEO report, and it’s where most providers are vaguest. Here’s exactly how we do it.
We track 50 to 100 prompts per client, depending on the size of the category, the number of competitors, the target audiences and the scope of the engagement. We never reuse a generic list. Prompts come from:
- Commercial and comparison keywords
- Organic search data and keyword research
- Google Search Console queries
- Customer interviews and questionnaires
- Founder and subject-matter-expert interviews
- Questions and objections from sales calls
That mix tests more than broad category terms. It shows whether you’re visible when buyers compare solutions, look for alternatives, describe a problem or ask which product suits a particular use case.
We run the set weekly and repeat each prompt, because AI answers vary from one run to the next. We run the checks logged out, which gives a more neutral test and reduces the influence of any one account’s history. A third-party AI-visibility platform supplements the manual checks. (If you’re choosing a tool yourself, see our comparison of AI visibility tools.)
We don’t treat every mention as a win. Each result is scored against five levels:
- Mentioned: the brand appears at all.
- Described accurately: the answer gets your category, product and audience right.
- Recommended: you’re presented among the leading options, not as a footnote.
- Referred: the AI platform sends visits to your site.
- Converted: those visits contribute to trials, demos, leads or pipeline.
This matters because a company can be named without being recommended, or recommended while being described wrongly. A passing mention isn’t the same as being presented as a credible option for the right buyer.
We also benchmark every client against named competitors, so the report shows where you sit within the full answer, not just whether you appeared. And we never change the prompts week to week to manufacture a better-looking chart.
How long do generative engine optimization services take to work?
Expect stages, not a switch. Different platforms respond at different speeds, and AI visibility is never as stable as a ranking position.
| Timeframe | What should be happening | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| First 30 days | Baseline documented, audit and gap map delivered, priority pages being created or restructured | A clear plan. AI referrals may appear, but it’s too early to judge |
| Around 60 days | Priority pages crawled and indexed | Early increases in citations and links, first AI referral traffic |
| Around 90 days | First meaningful comparison against the baseline | Prompt visibility, accurate descriptions, citations, competitor share of voice, AI referrals |
| Around 180 days | A clear view of consistency and commercial impact | Consistent visibility for priority prompts, meaningful AI referral traffic, contribution to leads, trials, demos and pipeline |
We don’t promise that a brand will appear consistently in ChatGPT, Gemini or anywhere else within 30 days. Some platforms show little immediate change, especially for newer or less established brands.
What moves fastest
In our experience, Google AI Overviews and Claude can sometimes respond relatively quickly to changes in available content and references. That isn’t a universal rule. Results depend on the query, source quality, platform behaviour, location, model updates and whether the system is pulling from the live web.
One of the fastest changes we’ve seen was a new alternative page appearing in AI-generated answers within a few weeks of publishing. We’ve also seen a relevant third-party mention picked up by an AI platform quickly. Both suggest that a clear, commercially relevant page or an authoritative external reference can move faster than a general brand-awareness campaign. Neither proves that every new page will be cited that quickly.
What slows GEO down
Progress is usually slower when:
- The brand is new or weakly recognised
- There are few authoritative third-party mentions
- The site lacks category, product, use-case, comparison and alternative content
- The domain is new or has limited organic visibility
- Technical problems limit crawling or indexing
In those situations, the problem isn’t just that content needs writing. Search engines and AI systems don’t yet have enough reliable evidence to understand and recommend the company.
How much do GEO services cost in 2026?
At Top Search Agency, GEO engagements typically run from $3,500 to $12,000 a month. We don’t currently sell GEO as a standalone package. It’s delivered as part of a broader SEO or content engagement, because meaningful GEO work requires changes to your website, content, authority signals and measurement. Monitoring AI responses on its own changes nothing.
We recommend a three-month starting period. That gives us time to set the baseline, find content and entity gaps, implement priority changes and start measuring movement against the original prompt set.
What moves the price
- The number of AI platforms monitored
- The number of markets, countries or languages
- How deep the initial audit and entity analysis need to go
- The number and complexity of pages to create or refresh (a detailed comparison or integration page that needs expert interviews takes far more work than a simple product page)
- How many product, technical or subject-matter-expert interviews are needed
- Digital PR and authoritative mention-building
- Reddit, community or forum work
Cheap GEO versus a complete GEO programme
| Low-cost “GEO package” | Complete GEO programme | |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt tracking | A handful of prompts, often chosen fresh each month | 50 to 100 fixed prompts, repeated weekly, benchmarked against competitors |
| Brand and entity audit | Rarely | Yes, including how accurately AI tools describe you |
| New or improved pages | Usually not included | Category, product, use-case, comparison and alternative pages |
| Original expertise | Rewrites of existing content | Interviews with your founders and product experts |
| Off-site work | None | Review sites, digital PR, community participation |
| Reporting | Screenshots of answers | Mentions, accuracy, recommendations, citations, referrals and conversions |
You can underpay as easily as you can overpay. A generative engine optimization service priced at a few hundred dollars a month is almost always monitoring only. Expecting content, technical work, authority-building, community work and rigorous measurement for a few hundred dollars a month is unrealistic. The question isn’t whether a fee is high or low. It’s what the fee includes.
Questions to ask before you compare quotes
- How many AI platforms and prompts are included?
- Are the prompts fixed and repeatable, or chosen differently each month?
- Are competitors and alternatives part of the analysis?
- Will you create or improve pages, or only monitor AI responses?
- Will the work add original expertise, or just rewrite what we have?
- Are third-party mentions, digital PR, community work or review sites included?
- What’s excluded?
Put simply, a low-cost package tells you whether an AI platform mentioned you. A complete programme works on the information, content, entity signals and authoritative references that decide whether you’re understood, cited and recommended in the first place.
Off-site GEO: Reddit, review sites and digital PR
Off-site GEO is about making sure your company is represented accurately in the sources buyers and AI systems consult. It isn’t about manufacturing mentions everywhere.
Reddit and communities. We monitor relevant threads and find conversations where your company can genuinely help, such as product and category questions, comparisons, alternatives and problems your product actually solves. We draft suggested responses for your founder or team and coach them to take part authentically. A good contribution should be useful even if the reader never clicks through.
Review sites and directories. We improve or correct G2 and Capterra profiles, check category placement and product descriptions, encourage genuine customers to leave reviews, and keep listings consistent across industry directories. Out-of-date or incomplete profiles can shape how buyers, and potentially AI systems, understand your brand.
Digital PR. Useful opportunities include editorial mentions in industry publications, “best tools” and comparison lists, partner and integration announcements, and customer stories. Each one reinforces your category, use cases, relationships and evidence. Pitching still works when it’s relevant: 86% of journalists say at least some of their published stories started with a PR pitch, according to Muck Rack’s 2026 survey in our statistics on digital PR and journalists.
What we won’t do
We won’t create fake Reddit or community accounts, pose as customers or independent users, buy upvotes, manipulate engagement or incentivise reviews in ways that compromise their honesty. We also won’t present a paid placement as independent editorial coverage. Sustainable off-site GEO depends on useful contributions, accurate information and mentions people can trust.
We don’t claim that any single Reddit answer, review profile or listing will automatically produce an AI citation. We judge this work on source quality, accuracy, repeated prompt checks, citations, AI referrals and, where the data allows, leads.
Technical GEO: crawlers, schema and llms.txt
Technical work is a prerequisite for GEO, not a strategy. It removes barriers. It doesn’t create visibility by itself.
AI crawler access. We check access for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Googlebot and other standard crawlers. We review robots.txt, Cloudflare bot-management settings, and any WAF, CDN, firewall or server rules. A site can look fully open in a browser while specific crawlers are blocked at one of those layers. OpenAI documents its crawlers and what each one does, which helps when you decide what to allow.
In our Early-Stage SaaS Search Visibility Benchmark, 4% of the 95 SaaS sites we fetched blocked AI crawlers. It’s worth checking, because a blocked crawler limits discovery. But allowing every crawler doesn’t make you visible, citable or recommendable.
Structured data. Depending on the business, we use Organization, Product, SoftwareApplication, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, WebSite and accurate sameAs links. These help clarify the company, product and relationships between entities, but only when they reflect what’s visible on the page. Google’s own guidance on AI features in Search says there are no additional requirements or special schema for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It also says you don’t need new machine-readable files or AI text files. Structured data should simply match the visible text on the page.
llms.txt. We’ll implement it where it fits a site’s technical setup. In the same benchmark, 37% of the SaaS sites published an llms.txt file. That makes it a common choice, but having one doesn’t prove it helps. If a client asks for llms.txt, we’ll set it up. We won’t let it stand in for better pages or stronger authority.
Two GEO case studies
Here’s what generative engine optimization services looked like in practice for two of our clients. Both are anonymised, and both results come from the clients’ own tracking or a third-party tool.
Case study 1: an AI cold-calling assistant
The starting point. The client, an AI cold-calling assistant for B2B sales teams, had fewer than 50 pages, limited organic visibility and little presence in AI-generated answers.
What we did. We ran a consistent programme of informational, comparison, alternative and commercial content (three to five long-form articles a week), alongside page refreshes, better internal linking, schema and clearer trial calls to action.
What happened. During the engagement, HubSpot recorded referrals from ChatGPT and Perplexity, and some new trial users said they’d found the company through ChatGPT or another AI tool. Monthly trials went from about 150 to more than 300 over a three-month period, according to the client’s HubSpot.
We present that as growth observed during the engagement. Content, organic search, AI referrals, conversion improvements and other marketing all played a part, so we don’t credit GEO alone for every extra trial.
Case study 2: a social commerce platform
The work. Between June 2024 and October 2026, we worked on an anonymised social commerce platform’s category and product pages. We created comparison, use-case and commercial pages, improved internal linking and site architecture, and supported digital PR and editorial mentions.
The aim was to make the platform easier to understand across traditional and AI search: what category it belongs to, who it serves, what problems it solves and how it compares with other options. The moves that mattered most were broader commercial page coverage, stronger links between related pages, and more authoritative external references to the brand.
The result. In Semrush’s AI Search report, the platform currently shows an AI Visibility score of 48, 333 AI mentions and 444 cited pages.
| Platform | AI mentions | Cited pages |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 56 | 205 |
| Google AI Overviews | 81 | 131 |
| Google AI Mode | 94 | 111 |
| Gemini | 102 | 119 |
Don’t add the cited-page column together. The same page can be cited on more than one platform, so the overall figure is 444 unique cited pages.
Notice that the platforms behave differently. Gemini mentions the brand most often, while ChatGPT cites the most pages. Some platforms appear to lean on live-web sources and others on broader web knowledge. I wouldn’t turn that into a universal rule, because results vary by prompt, source coverage, model, date and how each tool counts. It’s a good reason to track every platform separately.
We see this as evidence that a broad SEO, content, digital PR and authority programme can build AI-search visibility over time. We don’t claim that any single page or tactic caused it.
What GEO work has taught us
A few lessons have changed how we run GEO services.
llms.txt underdelivered. Publishing the file by itself had little observable effect on AI visibility. It doesn’t make up for weak content, unclear positioning, limited authority or a lack of credible third-party information.
Schema helped less than many providers claim. Structured data clarified site structure and entities, but on its own it didn’t noticeably increase citations or recommendations. A year ago I expected schema to move AI visibility faster. Now I treat it as supporting infrastructure.
Random prompt checks mislead. An answer can look great on Tuesday and change by Thursday. A brand can appear without being described accurately or recommended. That’s why we use fixed prompts, repeat them, and compare against competitors.
Commercial content worked better than expected. Comparison, alternative, product-led, use-case and industry pages often produced more useful visibility than generic informational content, because they answer the questions buyers ask when evaluating options. Fixing G2 profiles, earning one strong editorial mention and strengthening links between informational and commercial pages also paid off.
The most useful sources are specific. Review sites like G2 and Capterra, comparison and alternative pages, and original research all add context that isn’t repeated across hundreds of generic articles. But no source type works without accuracy, relevance and a clear link to your product.
My biggest takeaway: GEO is not a shortcut around weak positioning. A clear product and buyer journey matter more than technical GEO theatre.
Who should buy GEO services, and who should wait?
GEO is a strong fit if your buyers already use AI tools to research and shortlist products. It works best for companies with:
- Strong first-party expertise but weak visibility
- An existing SEO and content foundation
- A clear product, audience and category, but inconsistent or inaccurate appearances in AI answers
- Enough budget to act on what the audit finds: content, technical work, monitoring and authority-building
GEO is usually premature if:
- You haven’t reached product-market fit, or your category and audience are still unclear
- Your website is brand new with no meaningful SEO or content foundation
- You haven’t built core product and commercial pages yet
- You can’t give anyone access to founders or subject-matter experts
- You’re asking for GEO because it’s a buzzword, without a business problem behind it
- You expect guaranteed ChatGPT or Perplexity “rankings”
In those cases I’d tell you to fix the fundamentals first. Clarify the product and category, build the core product and commercial pages, create useful use-case and comparison content, get the technical SEO right, and make sure your expertise is available. There’s little point tracking whether an AI recommends you if your positioning, product pages and basic search presence aren’t in place.
How we split the budget
We don’t apply a fixed GEO percentage to every retainer. We put the budget where the biggest constraint is.
- Early-stage companies usually need most of the investment in core SEO and content: category, product, comparison and commercial pages.
- More established companies with a solid content base can move more budget into prompt monitoring, entity work, digital PR and AI-referral analysis.
- Companies with strong on-site content but weak third-party authority need more focus on editorial mentions, review-site accuracy, community participation and PR.
Whatever the split, the objective is the same. Become the source through credible, relevant information. Create incremental value through first-hand expertise, original data, product-led experiences and clear points of view. And become the obvious choice through stronger awareness, mentions, citations and buyer confidence.
Red flags in GEO proposals
Be cautious of any provider that:
- Presents llms.txt as a standalone GEO strategy
- Adds FAQ schema to every page without improving the content underneath
- Rewrites generic SEO content without adding real expertise
- Runs a few random ChatGPT prompts and calls it measurement
- Guarantees visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI results
- Publishes high volumes of AI-generated articles with no content or authority strategy
- Can’t tell you what they’ll change on your site or across the web
AI answers are generated fresh for each user. No responsible provider can guarantee you a permanent place in them.
Where GEO is heading
Over the next 12 to 18 months, AI platforms will shape software shortlists, vendor comparisons and early buying decisions, not just answer basic questions. Buyers will use them to find vendors, compare products, weigh alternatives and decide who deserves a demo.
As that happens, I expect standalone GEO agencies to become less useful. Meaningful AI visibility depends on your content, product and category pages, technical access, entity clarity, editorial mentions, review sites, community presence and consistent measurement. You can’t reduce it to running prompts or adding a file to your server. That’s why we bundle GEO with SEO and content, and it’s the same reason we’ve written about how to get recommended by LLMs as a whole-programme job.
I also expect paid placements and ads inside AI answers to become more common. That will make organic citations and earned third-party references more valuable, not less. Being recommended because an AI found reliable evidence about you will matter more once paid exposure sits next to it.
“The biggest misconception about GEO is that it’s a technical hack. Technical fixes are foundations. Content, expertise, authority and distribution are what create visibility.”
Frequently asked questions
What do generative engine optimization services include?
A real GEO engagement includes an AI-visibility baseline across a fixed prompt set, a brand and entity audit, a content and entity-gap map, new and improved commercial pages, technical access and structured data checks, off-site work on review sites, PR and communities, and monthly reporting against the baseline.
How long does GEO take to show results?
Expect the first 30 days to set the baseline and start priority fixes. Around 60 days, look for crawling, early citations and first AI referrals. Around 90 days, compare visibility meaningfully against the baseline. By 180 days, judge consistency and commercial impact.
How much do GEO services cost?
At Top Search Agency, GEO engagements typically cost $3,500–$12,000 a month as part of a broader SEO or content programme, with a recommended three-month starting period. Price depends on platforms tracked, markets, page volume and complexity, expert interviews, digital PR and community work.
What’s the difference between GEO services and SEO services?
SEO focuses on rankings and clicks in search results. GEO focuses on whether AI answers mention, accurately describe, recommend and cite your company. They share most foundations, which is why we run GEO as part of SEO and content work rather than as a separate service.
Can any agency guarantee placement in ChatGPT?
No. AI answers vary by platform, model, prompt, user, location and date. A responsible provider offers a measurable baseline, a prioritised plan and repeated tracking, not guaranteed placement.
The bottom line on generative engine optimization services
The best generative engine optimization services make your company easier for both buyers and AI systems to understand. That means clear pages, real expertise, accurate third-party information and measurement you can repeat. Before you sign with any GEO provider, ask them three questions:
- What will you actually change on our website and across the wider web?
- How will you measure visibility consistently, rather than relying on random prompts?
- Who will understand our product and bring genuine subject-matter expertise into the work?
Their answers will tell you whether you’re buying a real visibility programme or standard SEO and prompt monitoring with a new label. If you’d like to see how we run GEO as part of a wider programme, our B2B GEO services page explains our approach.
Want to know where your brand appears, or disappears, in AI search? Book a GEO baseline call through our search visibility strategy service. We’ll set a baseline, identify the content and entity gaps limiting your visibility, and recommend the highest-priority next steps.
Usman founded Top Search Agency in 2024 and leads strategy on every engagement, from the first AI visibility baseline to the quarterly roadmap, for B2B SaaS and AI companies including Y Combinator-backed Markaz (around 150K monthly organic visits and 444 pages cited in AI answers).
Before that he ran the marketing agency ConvertBunny for more than 20 clients and led digital marketing at nTask, where organic traffic grew from 20K to 280K monthly visitors in 18 months.
He has spent more than a decade in growth and marketing roles, and writes about what actually moves B2B buyers in Google and AI search, based on the programmes his team runs every week.
Connect with Usman on LinkedIn · Meet the team
