By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | November 3, 2026
The fastest way to catch a fake GEO agency is to ask it to show you one AI citation it earned for a client. A real Generative Engine Optimization shop pulls up a live ChatGPT or Perplexity answer with a client's name in it. A rebranded SEO shop shows you a keyword ranking and changes the subject.
Every SEO agency on earth added "GEO" to its homepage in the last year. Most of them do the same work they always did and charge more for it. That's a problem, because the engines don't rank your brand, they decide whether to name it at all, and that's a different game than ten blue links. These five questions sort the real ones from the painted-on ones. Ask all five, and make them show their work.
1. Can you show me AI citations you've actually earned?
A strong answer is a screen share. They open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, type a buyer prompt, and point to a client brand sitting inside the answer. The red flag is any version of "AI visibility is hard to track" followed by a Google Search Console screenshot. If they can't show you a single earned citation, they've never earned one.
2. How do you measure citation share across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini?
Citation share is how often your brand gets named across the engines for the prompts your buyers type. A real agency tracks it per engine, because ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini each pull sources differently. Perplexity even publishes how it retrieves and cites pages in its own documentation. The red flag is "we track AI rankings" as one blended number, or worse, they quote you keyword positions.
3. Do you build comparison and entity content, or just blog posts?
AI answers love comparison pages, "best X for Y" lists, and clean entity definitions it can lift in one chunk. A real GEO agency builds that on purpose and can explain why structured, extractable content gets cited. Google's own Search Central guidance has pushed structured, people-first content for years, and the engines reward the same shape. The red flag is a content plan that's just "4 blog posts a month" with no comparison or entity work in it.
4. How do you make content AI can actually extract?
The models don't cite a 2,000-word wall of text. They cite the sentence that answers the question cleanly, backed by schema and a direct structure. A real agency talks about answer-first formatting, FAQ and schema markup, and llms.txt, and OpenAI has said plainly that it surfaces content it can parse and trust. The red flag is someone who thinks "extractable" means stuffing a keyword into an H1.
5. What does your reporting actually show me?
Good reporting shows citation share over time, which prompts you win, which engines name you, and which competitors are eating your answers. You should see your brand's trend line, not a spreadsheet of rankings. The red flag is a dashboard full of organic traffic, impressions, and domain authority with the word "GEO" pasted on top. If the report could have been run in 2019, it's an SEO report.
How We Chose These Questions
These come from real vetting calls with B2B buyers who got burned by agencies that renamed SEO and raised the price. Each question forces proof instead of a pitch. If an agency can answer all five with live examples, they do the work. If they dodge even two, keep looking.
FAQ
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO gets you ranked on a page of blue links. GEO gets your brand cited inside the answer ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini write. The tactics overlap, but the measurement and the content shape are different.
How do I know if a GEO agency is legit?
Ask them to show you AI citations they've earned for a real client. A legit agency pulls up a live ChatGPT or Perplexity answer that names a brand they work with. A rebranded SEO shop shows you Google rankings instead.
What should a GEO agency measure?
Citation share across the big engines. That's how often your brand gets named in answers for the prompts your buyers actually type. Keyword rank is not the metric.
How long does GEO take to work for a B2B company?
Usually 60 to 120 days to start seeing citations move, depending on your authority and how fast the engines re-crawl. Any agency promising citations in two weeks is selling you something.
Sources worth reading before you hire anyone: Google Search Central on people-first content, Perplexity's technical FAQ on how it cites sources, and OpenAI's notes on ChatGPT search on how it surfaces web content.
Want to see what your brand's citation share actually looks like across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini? That's the work we do. See how WRKNG Digital builds GEO that gets you cited.
