How to Choose a GEO Agency in the UK: A Buyer's Guide to Generative Engine Optimisation

"We closed $2M last quarter, have G2 reviews, case studies, logos... not a small company."

That's how one founder opened a post on Reddit in April 2026. They'd asked ChatGPT to list the tools in their space. It named five competitors. One of them the founder had never even heard of.

If that sounds familiar, you've probably started looking at GEO agencies. Fair enough. But it's also the exact moment you're easiest to sell to. The market is young, the acronyms change every few months (GEO, AEO, AIO, "LLM SEO"), and almost nobody can show you two years of results yet.

I wrote this for founders and marketing leads at established B2B companies who want to buy this work without getting burned. It covers what GEO really is, what the evidence says, how AI tools pick who to mention, the questions I'd ask any agency (including us), and what fair pricing looks like.

What GEO Is, and What It Is Not

GEO is the work of making sure AI assistants can find your company, describe it correctly and have a fair chance of recommending it. Picture a buyer typing "who are the best providers of X for a company like mine?" into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Google. The tool writes an answer, and very often it names a short list of companies. GEO covers everything that decides whether you're on that list, and whether what it says about you is true.

The name comes from a research paper. In GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, presented at the KDD 2024 data-mining conference, Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues tested how changes to a web page affected whether AI search engines cited it. They reported that their methods "can boost visibility by up to 40%". Adding statistics, citing sources and including quotations helped. Stuffing in keywords didn't.

I'd treat that 40% as a lab result. The researchers built their own set of test queries. Your market isn't in it. The useful takeaway is simpler: AI tools like content that's specific, sourced and easy to quote. Most good B2B content should be like that anyway.

What GEO can't do is buy you a mention in ChatGPT, or make an AI tool say something its sources don't support. And if your positioning is fuzzy, GEO will just make a fuzzy company easier to find. It's an easy step to skip. Sometimes the first job is sharpening your B2B positioning, and the GEO work comes after.

Why Buyers Are Asking About GEO Now

AI answers now sit between your buyer and your website, and fewer people click through. A few numbers are worth having in your head before you speak to any agency.

Start with scale. In its Q1 2025 earnings update, Alphabet said AI Overviews had "over 1.5 billion users per month". If your buyers use Google, plenty of them see an AI summary before they see a single link.

Then clicks. Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a normal result on 8% of visits. Without one, it was 15%. Links inside the summary itself got clicked on just 1% of visits. People were also more likely to stop browsing altogether after an AI summary (26% of pages against 16%).

B2B buyers are changing too. In G2's 2025 buyer survey of 1,169 decision-makers, nearly 8 in 10 said AI search has changed how they research. 29% said they now start in an AI tool more often than in Google. A smaller survey of 350 B2B buyers by Responsive in October 2025 found generative AI had overtaken search for about a quarter of them, with a big difference by region.

If you sell mostly outside the US, look at that second chart twice. Adoption elsewhere was much lower in that sample. To me that's a reason to measure your own market before spending heavily, rather than a reason to ignore it.

One more thing. You'll probably see Gartner's forecast that search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 in agency decks. It was a prediction, made in February 2024. If someone presents it as a measured fact, that tells you something about how they handle evidence.

GEO vs SEO vs "AI Visibility": Where They Overlap

Think of GEO as SEO with a different scoreboard. The groundwork is the same. What changes is what you count, and which websites you spend time on.

Google doesn't mince words here. Its guidance on AI features says "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." Your page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and that's it. Its newer guide to optimising for generative AI features, last updated in July 2026, goes further. You don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup, and there's "no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it."

Google's Danny Sullivan, for years the company's public Search Liaison, summed it up at WordCamp US in August 2025: "Good SEO is good GEO." Understanding how people search, and making content that really helps them, is the same job whatever you call it. The clip below starts at his takeaways.

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John Mueller, also at Google, said much the same to a founder on r/SEO in January 2026. According to Search Engine Roundtable, his answer was: "What you call it doesn't matter, but 'AI' is not going away." His advice was to look at real usage numbers and understand your audience before deciding how much to spend.

Plenty of respected SEOs agree on the naming point. Aleyda Solis, who runs the Orainti consultancy, put it this way in May 2026:

Lily Ray, one of the better-known voices in SEO, made the commercial version of the argument in August 2025:

So why does GEO exist as a separate service at all? Partly because other AI tools don't work exactly like Google. Partly because being named in an answer is a different result from ranking on page one. And partly because many of the sources that shape an AI answer live on other people's websites. The table shows how the labels line up, which helps when two proposals use different words for the same thing.

When you read a proposal, check it covers both measurement and fixes. A dashboard shows you the problem. Somebody still has to fix it. If you want the brand-side version of this argument, I go through it in AI visibility for B2B brands.

How AI Assistants Decide Who to Name

AI assistants tend to name the companies their sources mention clearly, consistently and often. Knowing roughly how that works makes it much easier to tell whether an agency's plan touches anything that matters.

They search before they answer

For most buying questions, assistants with web access run their own searches first, then write an answer from what they find. Google calls this "query fan-out" in its AI features documentation. The system fires off several related searches across subtopics and sources and stitches one answer together. OpenAI says its search crawler is what surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, so the same logic applies there. A single question like "best fixed-price go-to-market consultancy UK" might quietly turn into five or six searches about pricing, reviews, comparisons and alternatives. You need to show up for those too.

They lean on other people's websites

Your own site matters, but AI tools also read directories, review sites, comparison articles, trade press, forums and Wikipedia. A company that turns up in lots of independent "best of" lists gets named more than one that only describes itself well at home. Lily Ray made the same point about where the work has shifted:

That's why decent GEO work includes getting your facts right on the profiles AI tools read, and earning real mentions in places your buyers already trust. The founder from the top of this guide found out the hard way. Here's their full post:

Revenue, reviews and logos weren't enough. The assistant needed to find them named, in context, on pages that answered the question it had been asked.

They can only use what they can read

This is the dull part, and the one most often missed. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." Blocking GPTBot is a separate choice, and it only covers model training.

Your hosting can make this call for you without asking. In July 2025 Cloudflare started blocking AI bots by default on sites it hosts. A publisher might want exactly that. A B2B company that wants to be recommended might have just vanished from the answer. Any agency worth hiring checks robots.txt, firewall rules and JavaScript rendering in the first week.

They repeat what's consistent

Say your website says you serve "SMEs", your LinkedIn page says "enterprise", and an old directory listing shows a service you stopped selling in 2023. An AI tool will either hedge or pick the wrong one. Making your basic facts match everywhere (what you sell, who for, where, at what price) is the cheapest GEO win there is. It's the same discipline as getting proof claims on B2B websites right, because AI tools love to quote claims that are specific and sourced.

What a GEO Engagement Should Include

Whatever the agency calls it, a complete piece of work has three parts. If one of them is missing, you're paying for half a service.

1. An audit. A fixed list of buyer questions, asked repeatedly in named AI tools, scored for mentions, recommendations and accuracy. You should see which sources each tool cited, and which competitors got named instead of you. Plus a technical check that AI crawlers can actually read your key pages.
2. Fixes. Rewriting your most important pages so the answer comes first. Stating your key facts plainly and the same way everywhere. Adding structured data where it helps. Cleaning up third-party profiles. And planning the new pages your buyers' questions call for, like honest comparison pages and "who this is for" pages.
3. A re-test. Asking the same questions again once the fixes have had time to be picked up, and reporting the change against the baseline. That includes the things that didn't move.

Ask to see what each part looks like before you buy. Our sample AI visibility report shows the level of detail I think is reasonable: results per AI tool, share of voice, a map of which questions you show up for, and a ranked list of fixes.

It's also worth asking how the work ties back to sales. Being mentioned more in answers nobody asks for is worth nothing. The question list should come from real sales calls, search data and the problems your buyers describe in their own words. A generic template won't cut it.

The Measurement Problem: AI Answers Change Every Time

Ask an AI tool the same question twice and you'll often get a different list of companies. A GEO report that ignores this is measuring noise.

The best public evidence comes from a January 2026 study by SparkToro and Gumshoe. Six hundred volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI, 2,961 times in total. The chance of getting the same list of brands in any two answers was under 1 in 100. The chance of the same list in the same order was closer to 1 in 1,000.

The same study had some good news. A few brands still showed up in most answers for a given type of question, even while the order kept shuffling. That's the thing worth tracking: how often you appear across many runs. Where you sat in one answer means very little. Rand walks through what to track instead in this interview:

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So ask every agency three things. How many times do you run each question? Do you report a rate, like "named in 7 of 10 runs", or a rank? And will the re-test be run in exactly the same way as the baseline? I cover the maths of measuring AI share of voice in a separate guide, and our methodology page shows how we handle repeat runs and grade evidence.

10 Questions to Ask a GEO Agency

Take these into any first call. A good agency will answer them directly, and won't mind putting the answers in writing. Vague answers to the first four usually mean vague reports later on.

1. Which buyer questions will you track, and can I see the list? You want a fixed list agreed before any work starts: category questions ("best X for a company like mine"), comparisons ("X vs Y"), problem questions and questions about you by name. The best answer is a spreadsheet you can open on day one. If the list is secret, or changes every month, you'll never be able to compare one report with the next.
2. Which AI tools do you test, and how? Expect them to name the tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode) and explain the setup: app or API, logged in or out, which country and language. Answers in the UK can differ from the US, so ask for UK settings.
3. How many times do you run each question? AI answers shift from run to run. If they ask each question once, they're showing you a screenshot. Ask for a number, and ask why that number is enough.
4. What does the baseline look like, and when is the re-test? The only fair test is the same questions, in the same tools, run the same number of times, before and after. Get the re-test date in writing.
5. What exactly will you change, and who does the work? Pages rewritten, facts corrected, structured data, third-party profiles, new content. Find out if they do it or hand you a to-do list. Either can be fine. The price should match which one you're buying.
6. How do you check that AI crawlers can read our site? If bots are blocked by robots.txt, your firewall or pages that only render with JavaScript, nothing else they do will matter. This belongs in week one.
7. How do you find and fix wrong facts about us? Things like what you sell, who for, where you're based, your prices and your founding date. Ask how they spot the inconsistencies across your site and the profiles AI tools read, and how they get them corrected.
8. Which metrics will you report, and how are they worked out? Mention rate, recommendation share, accuracy and cited sources. Each should be defined clearly enough that you could recalculate it from the raw answers yourself.
9. Can I see a sample report? A real report, or a clearly labelled anonymised one, tells you far more about the depth of the work than any sales deck.
10. What is excluded, and how do I get out? Ask about link buying, paid placements, caps on content, minimum terms and notice periods before you sign.

If you want to see how three common options answer them, read ThriveFinity vs Exposure Ninja vs a fractional CMO. It lays out services, measurement, published prices and terms side by side, including where we're not the best fit.

Red Flags

Most weak GEO pitches trip over the same few things. Google is unusually direct about this. Its guide tells site owners thinking about "AEO" or "GEO" services to check that advice against Google's own guidance, and to "be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics."

That llms.txt point deserves a source. When SE Ranking looked at roughly 300,000 domains, it found no relationship between having an llms.txt file and how often a site was cited in major AI answers. Only about one in ten of those domains had one. (We publish one ourselves. It's a small job. It just isn't the thing that moves the needle.)

People who do this for a living are noticing the same patterns. This post in r/bigseo was blunt about thin GEO tools:

That's one person's opinion, and lots of tools do useful tracking. Still, it's a fair test. Ask what the agency's platform does that you couldn't do with a spreadsheet and a few hours of prompting. "Scale and consistency" is a perfectly good answer. "Proprietary AI" is a cue to keep asking.

If you'd like a longer take on separating fact from fiction, Lily Ray's MozCon 2025 talk is worth 37 minutes. Her central point is that GEO, AEO and LLMO are mostly evolutions of SEO, and she's specific about what really has changed.

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Typical Deliverables, Timelines and KPIs

Ask for deliverables by name and KPIs by definition. Every scope is a bit different, but these are the ones worth getting into the contract.

Timing is where expectations go wrong most often. AI tools only reflect your changes after they recrawl your pages and refresh their sources, and nobody controls when that happens. Sometimes it's quick. Lily Ray shared one example of an article showing up across the major AI tools within a week:

Notice her point in the full post, though. It was a genuinely useful article on a blog that had done solid SEO for years. Fixing a crawler block or a wrong fact can show up in weeks. Building up third-party mentions takes months. So be wary of anyone who promises a date for results. A fair contract fixes the date of the re-test, and leaves the outcome to the evidence.

Measurement got easier this year. By June 2026 Google had launched generative AI performance reporting inside Search Console, along with a new control over how your content is used to ground answers in AI Overviews and AI Mode. John Mueller covers both in the quarterly Search Central update:

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Agree up front how you'll track the commercial side as well. GEO numbers are early signals. The ones that pay the bills come later: AI referral visits in your analytics, growth in branded searches in Search Console, and how often new leads say "I found you through ChatGPT". Add that question to your enquiry form now, so you've got a before and after.

How GEO Is Priced, and How to Compare Quotes

There isn't a reliable published market rate for GEO in the UK yet. So compare what you get, rather than the number at the bottom. You'll usually see one of three models.

• A one-off audit. A baseline and a list of fixes. The cheapest option, and the right first step if you're not sure you even have a problem. Check whether the fixes are included or just listed.
• A fixed-scope project. Audit, an agreed set of fixes and a dated re-test. Easier to judge, because you know exactly what you'll get.
• A monthly retainer. Ongoing tracking, content and authority work. Sensible once you know the work moves your numbers. Risky as a starting point, because there's nothing to judge it against.

To compare two quotes fairly, line them up on the same five things: how many buyer questions, how many AI tools, how many runs per question, how many pages fixed or written, and when the re-test happens. Then look at the price against what's actually being fixed. Our published prices are there for exactly this, whether you end up hiring us or not.

Try It Yourself Before You Hire Anyone

You can run a rough baseline in an afternoon, and I'd recommend it. It'll tell you whether you have a problem worth paying to fix, and it'll make you a much sharper buyer. One small business owner on Reddit did exactly this, and didn't like what they found:

Here's the simple version:

1. Write down 10 to 15 questions your buyers really ask. Use your sales team's notes, not your marketing copy.
2. Ask each one three times in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google (AI Overviews or AI Mode). Start a fresh chat each time.
3. Note who gets named, whether you're recommended or just mentioned, what's said about you, and which sources are cited.
4. Fix anything that's plainly wrong on your own site first. Then look at which outside pages keep getting cited.

My step-by-step guide to running an AI visibility check goes into more detail. If you'd rather not spend the afternoon on it, the free AI visibility checker runs 12 buyer questions for you and scores the result.

Where ThriveFinity Fits

We sell AI search optimisation (GEO) as fixed-scope work with a measured before and after. You're welcome to hold us to every question above.

• AI Visibility Signal (free, under an hour): 12 buyer questions across GPT (OpenAI), Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, scored 0 to 100 and graded A to E. It's AI-only and unsigned, and the full question list is published.
• AI Search Readiness Retrofit (£1,950, 10 working days): 100 to 150 buyer questions across five AI tools, your 10 most valuable pages fixed, 5 briefs for new pages, and a re-test at day 30. Signed off by a person, with an accuracy guarantee.
• AI Visibility Retainer (£1,950 a month, by proposal after the re-test): the same questions tracked monthly, 4 priority pages, 2 content pieces and 2 authority actions each month, with a re-audit every quarter. 3-month minimum, then 30 days' notice.

This isn't new territory for us. We ran a 16-month search programme for PayRam, a crypto payments company that started with no content at all. Sixty-plus articles later it reached page one for its main buyer term, and built AI search presence alongside its normal rankings. The PayRam case study has the numbers, and is upfront about what we can and can't claim from it.

We're not the right choice if you want a big monthly content team, paid media, or a guaranteed placement (and I'd be sceptical of anyone offering that last one). If you're still working out who you sell to, a fractional CMO or a strategy consultant might be a better first hire.

We don't buy links or placements, and we won't promise that any AI tool will cite or recommend you. Whoever you hire, start with a baseline. It's the only way you'll know whether the work moved anything.

Pranav Unni

Founder · ThriveFinity Connect on LinkedIn →

Pranav Unni is the founder and lead verifier of ThriveFinity. He reads and signs every paid deliverable personally, and writes about go-to-market decisions for established B2B companies.