Do You Need a GEO Agency, or Your SEO Team?

We sell GEO. Read what follows with that in mind, because the honest answer to the question in the title is mostly no — and the parts where it is yes are narrower and cheaper than the market implies.

The reason is not scepticism about AI search. It is that Google has published what it requires, and the answer is ordinary SEO.

What Google says the requirement is

From the AI features documentation:

"There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."

Eligibility is that "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements."

And from the generative AI optimization guide, under a heading called "Mythbusting generative AI search: what you don't need to do":

"You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them."

"Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add."

If a proposal contains a line item for AI-specific files or markup, it is billing for something the largest engine has published a page saying it ignores. We went through that case in full in the llms.txt guide.

What is genuinely different

Three things, and they are worth naming precisely because the rest is not.

Crawler policy across assistants. Each company documents its own bots and the rules are not the same. OpenAI states that "sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", and that ChatGPT-User "is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion. Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply." Perplexity documents the same shape — a search bot that respects robots.txt and a user-initiated fetcher that "generally ignores robots.txt rules." That is a policy decision with commercial consequences, and it is genuinely not classic SEO. We laid out the options in allow or block.

Measurement. It works differently and is more limited than it is sold as. Search Console's generative AI report is impressions only. GA4 now has an AI Assistant channel that Google says "excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode", while those clicks land in Organic Search. So assistant traffic is attributable and AI Overviews traffic is not — the full picture is in measuring AI search traffic.

Writing for extraction. Putting the claim in the first sentence, keeping a figure and its source in the same paragraph, making a passage true without its heading. This is an editing standard rather than a technical skill, and it is the part that most reliably changes outcomes — covered in writing content AI can quote.

That is the whole list. It is a checkable configuration, a reporting setup and an editing habit.

What that means for staffing

For most organisations, those three are a project and a standard, not a retainer.

The crawler policy is a decision made once and revisited when something changes. The measurement is a setup task that takes an afternoon and then runs. The writing standard is something your existing writers can apply once someone has written it down and shown them what failing looks like.

If your SEO team is competent, they can do all three. If they are already producing indexable, well-structured pages that answer questions, they have been doing most of the work for years without the acronym.

A specialist is worth it when: you have multiple surfaces and a real crawler decision with revenue attached; something is technically wrong and nobody has found it; or you need one person to own an editing standard across many writers. The first two are usually a check rather than a headcount.

The claim to walk away from

Nobody can guarantee AI citations, and the measurement is what makes that clear rather than an opinion.

Search Console reports impressions in generative AI features. It does not report clicks, click-through rate or position from them. So no provider can attribute revenue to an AI Overview appearance, because the product that would prove it does not expose the number. Assistant sessions are attributable in GA4, and for most sites they are a small figure — which is the correct result rather than a failure, and which should be reported as what it is.

Any guarantee in this area is a promise about something the tooling cannot verify. That is not a reason to avoid the work. It is a reason to buy it as work rather than as an outcome.

Why we sell it anyway

Because the checking is real, and because most sites we look at have at least one thing quietly wrong. A max-snippet value set years ago that now caps what any AI feature can use. A robots rule that blocks a search bot somebody meant to allow. Analytics that cannot separate assistant sessions because nobody has looked at the channel. Pages that do not render without JavaScript.

None of those are exotic. All of them are invisible until checked, and none of them appear in a rankings report. That is a job worth paying for, and it is a different job from what "GEO retainer" usually describes.

Our GEO service page says what we actually do, and our GEO guide goes through what the published research does and does not support — including how little of the popular tactical advice replicates.

Where we say no

We do not sell AI-specific markup or files. Google has published a page saying Search ignores them.

We do not guarantee citations or quote a target number of them. The measurement does not exist to verify it either way.

And we do not recommend a GEO retainer to a client whose SEO team is competent and whose site is technically fine. In that case the honest sale is a one-off check and a written standard — which is what we will propose, and it is smaller than what we could have proposed.

Five questions for any GEO proposal

1. Which line items are not already SEO? Ask for the list, then compare it to Google's own "what you don't need to do" section.
2. Does it include AI-specific files or markup? If so, ask which engine documents reading them.
3. What exactly will be reported, and from which product? Impressions and assistant sessions are real; "AI traffic" as a single number is constructed.
4. What is guaranteed? Anything beyond doing the work cannot be verified.
5. Is this a retainer or a project? For most sites the honest answer is a project plus a standard, and a provider who says so is telling you something useful about how they sell.

If you want that assessment applied to your own site before you commit to anything, send us the domain — including when the answer is that your current team has it covered. Where the two disciplines actually diverge is set out in GEO vs SEO.