How to write a GEO RFP
A GEO RFP template: what to ask vendors about engines, current baseline, deliverables, third-party outreach, pricing and reporting before you compare proposals.
A GEO RFP is a one-page document that asks every agency you're considering the same fixed questions — which engines it covers, your current baseline, deliverables, pricing and how it measures citations — so their answers arrive comparable instead of three unrelated pitches.
Send it before, not instead of, applying the criteria in how to choose a GEO agency; the RFP is how you get each agency to answer those criteria in writing rather than in a call you half-remember afterward.
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What is a GEO RFP, and do you actually need one?
A short brief, not a procurement contract. Its job is narrow: describe your situation in one place and ask a fixed set of questions, so every agency answers the same prompt instead of pitching whatever it wants to lead with. You need one the moment you are talking to more than one agency, because without a shared brief you end up comparing a strategy deck from one vendor against a price sheet from another — not a real comparison at all.
If you are only talking to a single agency, or already know exactly who you want to hire, a formal RFP adds little. It earns its keep specifically when you are choosing between options and want the choice to rest on the same information for each one.
A GEO RFP is also newer territory than an SEO one, which is exactly why it is worth writing down rather than improvising over a call. Most companies asking for this work have never bought it before, so there is no shared, well-worn template everyone already knows to expect. Writing the questions down first protects you from the pitch shaping the request instead of the other way around — a good salesperson can make almost any scope sound like the right one if you let the conversation set the terms.
A short RFP also travels well internally. If more than one person on your side needs to sign off — a marketing lead, someone in finance, sometimes a founder — a one-page document with the same six questions for every agency is something they can all read in five minutes and compare, rather than sitting through three separate sales calls on three different weeks and trying to remember what each one promised.
What should a GEO RFP actually ask for?
Six things, no more. A longer document does not get you better answers; it gets you a rushed one, because a vendor skims a five-page brief the same way you would skim a five-page email.
Your current baseline
Ask whether the agency will run a diagnostic before proposing anything — checking crawler access for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, and testing a first set of buyer questions across engines. A proposal built without this is a guess dressed as a plan.
Which engines are in scope, by name
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity behave differently and are reached through different work. "AI search" as a category is not a scope; naming the engines is.
The deliverables, month by month
Page rewrites, crawler and technical fixes, and third-party outreach volume — specific enough that you could check it against an invoice later. See our guide to what a normal GEO retainer includes for the shape this list should take.
Named third-party targets
Which review platforms, directories and comparison posts in your category the agency already has relationships with, or plans to pitch. A response with no names here is guessing at outreach the same way an unbriefed proposal guesses at strategy.
How citations get measured and reported
The prompt set size, how often it runs, and what a monthly report actually contains — a sample report attached to the response is a good sign; a promise to "send one later" is not.
Pricing structure and minimum term
Whether it is a flat retainer, an add-on to existing SEO work, or a project fee, and how many months you are committing to before either side can exit.
Six is not an arbitrary number. Each of the six maps to a real part of the engagement you will later be paying for, and leaving one out tends to show up as a gap in the actual work eight months in — usually the third-party targets section, which is the one agencies most often gloss over because naming a real prospect list takes more effort than describing a general "outreach strategy."
How specific should the questions be?
Specific enough that a vague answer is visibly vague. "How will you measure success?" invites a paragraph of reassurance. "What is the size of the fixed prompt set you will track weekly, and will we get the raw results or only a summary?" invites a number or an evasion, and both are useful to see. Write every question in the RFP so the honest answer is either a fact or a clear "we don't do that."
This matters more here than in a standard SEO RFP because the category is newer and less standardized. Google itself documents concretely what a site needs for its AI-driven search features to work at all — server-rendered content a crawler can actually read, for one [1] — so a fair question is simply whether the agency checks for that before it proposes anything else.
Write each question so it can be answered in one line, then leave room underneath for the agency to explain. A question that already reads like three questions stacked together — "how will you measure and report and improve our visibility" — tends to get one blended paragraph back instead of three clear answers, and you lose the ability to compare that section against a second agency's response line by line.
What should you ask about pricing and reporting?
Ask for the number, not a range with no floor, and ask what happens to the price if you already run SEO with another vendor and only want the GEO-specific parts added. Adding GEO to an existing SEO retainer covers that specific scoping question if it applies to you, and it is worth reading before you finalize this section of the RFP.
Ask, too, whether the number is a flat monthly retainer or scales with the number of pages, engines or third-party pitches involved. A price with no stated basis is hard to compare against a second proposal even if the two numbers look close on the page, because you cannot tell whether they buy the same amount of work. If your business already spends on search or content marketing, ask the agency to place its number in that context — is this priced like a small SEO retainer, like a full one, or like a specialist project — so the figure means something before you have seen a second quote to compare it against.
| RFP question | Vague answer (ask again) | Specific answer (worth pursuing) |
|---|---|---|
| Which engines are in scope? | "All major AI platforms" | "ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, named individually" |
| How do you measure results? | "We track AI visibility" | "20–40 fixed buyer questions, run weekly, raw results shared" |
| What third parties will you pitch? | "Relevant industry sites" | Three to five named sites in your category, with examples |
| What does month one deliver? | "A strategic audit" | A written baseline, crawler status and a prioritized fix list |
| What is included in the price? | A single number, no breakdown | A number tied line by line to the deliverables above |
What answers should disqualify a response before you even get to price?
Any promise of guaranteed citations or guaranteed rankings in an assistant's answers. Nobody controls what a third-party model retrieves at answer time, and a response that promises an outcome instead of a process is either misunderstanding the mechanics or selling past them — both are worth walking away from immediately. The FTC's own guidance on endorsements treats unsubstantiated performance claims as the kind of statement that invites scrutiny, not the kind that should reassure a buyer [3], and a citation guarantee is exactly that kind of claim.
How long should the RFP process take, start to finish?
About two to three weeks is normal: a week to draft and send it, a week or two for responses, and a few days to compare them against each other and your own notes. Longer than a month usually means the brief itself was too open-ended, which is a sign to tighten the questions rather than wait longer for better answers.
Do not compress it much further than that either. A response written in two days is a response reusing another client's answers with your company name swapped in, and it is worth noticing when the specifics in a proposal could apply to almost any business in your category.
Give every agency the same deadline rather than a rolling one, and say so in the RFP itself. A shared deadline stops the process from dragging on for weeks while you wait for one slow responder, and it also gives you an early read on how the agency handles a stated timeline — a team that misses its own RFP deadline by a week is telling you something about how it will handle a reporting deadline once you are a client.
What should the cover note actually say?
Two or three sentences, not a page. State who you are, roughly what you sell, the deadline for responses, and that you are sending the same document to more than one agency. Naming that you are comparing multiple responses is not impolite — it sets the expectation that the answer should be specific to your six questions rather than a generic pitch deck attached as a PDF, and it is a fair thing for every agency involved to know upfront.
What happens after you send it?
Responses come back, you score them against the same six sections, and you move the strongest one or two into a real conversation. How to evaluate a GEO proposal is the next step once responses land — it walks through scoring what comes back against the RFP you sent, section by section, rather than by gut feel. Once you pick someone, what GEO agency onboarding actually looks like sets expectations for the first 30 days, so you can check the engagement against what the RFP promised.
The RFP is not really for the agency. It's a document you write for yourself, so that three weeks from now you're judging a proposal against what you actually asked for, not against how good the pitch deck made you feel that day.
A good RFP is short enough to write in an afternoon and specific enough that a vague response is obvious the moment it lands. That is the whole point of writing one down instead of just taking calls.
Questions people also ask
What is a GEO RFP?
A short written document you send to a few agencies at once, describing your current AI-search situation and asking each one to respond with the same scope, engines, deliverables and price. It exists so you can compare answers side by side instead of comparing three different, unrelated sales calls.
Do I need a formal RFP, or can I just ask a few agencies directly?
A one-page RFP is not bureaucracy; it is what makes the answers comparable. Asking three agencies the same fixed questions in writing takes less time than three separate calls and gives you something to hold each response against later.
How many agencies should I send it to?
Three is usually enough. Fewer than that and you cannot tell whether a number or a claim is normal for the category; more than four or five mostly adds review time without adding much new information.
What should I do if a response ignores half the RFP?
Treat it as your answer. An agency that skips the questions it finds inconvenient before you have even signed anything is telling you how it will handle awkward questions once you are a client.
Sources
- AI features and your website — Google Search Central (checked 23 September 2026)
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers — OpenAI (checked 23 September 2026)
- FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking — Federal Trade Commission (checked 23 September 2026)
Want a second pair of eyes on your RFP before you send it?
Book a free 30-minute consultation with Ibrahem and Jeremy. We look at your site while we talk, and you leave with a prioritised plan.
Who wrote this
Ibrahem HelalCo-founder
Leads strategy and delivery.
Works on: SEO, GEO
Reviewed before publishing by Jeremy Zava, Co-founder.
- How to choose a GEO agency in 2026A buyer's guide to hiring a GEO agency: what the work is, what it should cost, how AI citations are measured, and the questions that separate two proposals.
- What's Actually in a GEO Retainer Each MonthA month-by-month breakdown of GEO retainer deliverables: crawler checks, page rewrites, citation tracking and outreach, and what a report should contain.
- What GEO agency onboarding actually looks likeThe first 30 days with a GEO agency, phase by phase: the baseline audit, the access you'll need to grant, and what your first report should contain.
- How to evaluate a GEO proposalScore a GEO proposal on five things before you compare price: baseline, engines named, deliverables, third-party targets and how citations get measured.