What Does a GEO Agency Actually Do?
What a GEO agency delivers each month: crawler checks, page rewrites for AI citation, tracking against real questions, and third-party outreach.
A GEO agency makes sure AI crawlers can reach your site, rewrites your highest-intent pages so their answers can be quoted directly, tracks whether assistants actually cite you against a fixed set of real questions, and works the third-party pages — reviews, comparisons, directories — that assistants lean on most. That's the work, in four parts.
This is the deliverables-level view; how to choose a GEO agency covers the fuller buying process around it.
Checking whether AI crawlers can actually reach your site
This is usually step one, and it's more consequential than it sounds. OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google each publish their own crawlers with their own names, and a hosting provider's default bot-protection rules frequently block them with no visible error anywhere in your normal analytics [1]. A GEO agency fetches your pages using each crawler's real user agent and confirms a full, working response before touching anything else, because every later deliverable depends on this one being true.
Rewriting pages so they can actually be quoted
Once a page is reachable, the next question is whether it's written to be lifted. That means opening each section with two or three sentences that stand alone as a complete answer, putting real numbers next to a named source, and cutting the throat-clearing that AI systems tend to skip past when choosing what to quote. A marketing page written to persuade over several paragraphs is a weaker source than a help article that answers one question directly, even when the marketing page ranks better in a traditional search result [2].
This part of the work usually starts with pricing, specification and FAQ pages, because those are the pages a buyer's exact question maps to most directly. A page that routes "what does this cost" to a contact form has disqualified itself from being the source of that answer, and a competitor's page with a plain number on it wins the citation by default.
Tracking whether it's actually working
A GEO agency builds a fixed set of twenty to forty real buyer questions — sourced from sales calls or support tickets, not a keyword tool — and runs them on a repeating schedule across the AI engines in scope. What gets logged each run is which URL was cited, for which question, on which engine, because a single conversation tells you almost nothing on its own: the same prompt run two days apart can return a different set of sources from the same assistant [3]. The report that comes out of this is a trend across weeks, not a snapshot from one lucky query.
| What's logged | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The exact prompt asked | So the same question can be re-run and compared over time |
| Whether the brand was named | Being mentioned and being linked are different outcomes worth tracking separately |
| Which URL was cited | Often not your own site — this tells you where the next hour of work belongs |
| The date and engine | Citations shift between engines and over time, so both need a timestamp |
Working the pages you don't own
A meaningful share of what gets cited when someone asks an assistant "who should I use for this" is not your own website at all — it's review platforms, comparison posts and professional directories that already discuss your category [3]. A GEO agency claims and completes the profiles you control, asks to be included on the merits in comparison posts that already rank, and treats this as ongoing work rather than a one-time setup, because those third-party pages change and get re-crawled just like your own.
How does this differ from doing it yourself or in-house?
The deliverables above are the same whether a specialist agency, an in-house hire or a freelancer does them — what differs is speed, coverage across every engine, and whether the crawler and tracking work gets done consistently every month rather than when someone remembers. In-house GEO versus an agency and GEO tools versus a GEO agency both cover that trade-off directly, if you're weighing whether to buy this work at all rather than which vendor to buy it from.
One thing worth saying plainly: none of the four deliverables above amounts to a guarantee that any specific assistant will mention you on any specific day. Can you guarantee ChatGPT mentions explains why that promise isn't one an honest agency makes, and what a realistic commitment looks like instead.
Questions people also ask
Does a GEO agency write content, or only fix technical issues?
Both, usually. Technical fixes make a page reachable; rewriting it so its opening sentences answer a question completely is what makes it quotable once an AI crawler can reach it.
Is checking robots.txt really part of a GEO agency's job?
Yes, and it's usually one of the first things a competent one does, since a blocked crawler makes every other deliverable pointless until it's fixed.
Does the work happen only on my own website?
No. A meaningful share of it is outreach to third-party pages — review platforms, comparison posts, directories — since assistants cite those pages heavily when answering buying questions.
How is the work actually reported?
Against a fixed set of real buyer questions, run on a schedule across the AI engines in scope, with the specific URLs cited logged over time rather than a single screenshot.
Sources
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers — OpenAI (checked 23 September 2026)
- AI features and your website — Google Search Central (checked 23 September 2026)
- I tracked 13,184 AI citations across 4 LLMs: here's what I learned — Orbit Media Studios (checked 23 September 2026)
Want to see this work applied to your own site?
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Who wrote this
Jeremy ZavaCo-founder
Leads growth and client partnerships.
Works on: CRO, SEO
Reviewed before publishing by Ibrahem Helal, Co-founder.
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