GEO services: what they include and how to choose a provider

Search for "GEO services" and you'll find very different offers under the same name. Some are a serious audit of how AI assistants describe you. Others are the same old SEO with a new label, and a few promise ChatGPT will recommend you within thirty days. This article is for people about to hire GEO help, whether that's a small business, a local firm, or a B2B company, and who want to know what to ask for.

If GEO itself is still fuzzy, start with what GEO is. This piece assumes the concept.

What a GEO service is, in one sentence

A GEO service works on how generative systems (Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot) understand your brand, so they are more likely to cite you and describe you accurately when someone asks about what you do.

The key word is "likely." Nobody controls which sources a model picks for a given answer. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use "query fan-out", running several related searches before writing a response. The same question asked on two different days can cite different sources. A provider who guarantees mentions is selling something they can't deliver.

Which deliverables to ask for

A GEO service should leave you with concrete things. If all you have after the first month is a call and a feeling, something is missing. These are the four blocks worth asking for.

1. AI presence audit

This is the starting point. Someone asks several assistants about your industry, your service, and your brand, then documents what comes back: whether you appear, if they describe you correctly, what's missing, what's wrong, and who gets cited instead of you.

Ask for:

• The list of questions used, written the way your customers talk, not the way you do
• The saved answers, dated, with the assistant that gave each one
• Description errors found (services you no longer offer, wrong location, old prices)
• The sources those assistants cite when they don't cite you

Without the question list, there's no way to repeat the measurement in three months. It's the deliverable people forget most.

2. Content optimization for language models

This means rewriting and structuring existing pages so a person and a model can both pull a clear answer from them: direct definitions, verifiable facts, visible authorship, context. You don't need a new format invented for AI. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that SEO best practices still apply. What changes is how clear the page has to be.

The deliverable is a list of pages changed, with before and after, not "we optimized your content." How to write pages that get cited is covered in creating content LLMs want to cite. The technical side, with Schema.org and JSON-LD, is in structured data for SEO and GEO.

3. Entity consistency, mentions and citations

Models cross-check sources. If your website says one thing, your Google Business Profile another, and an industry directory a third, the answer comes out blurry. This block reviews how you appear outside your own site and works toward authoritative sources in your field mentioning you in context.

Ask for an inventory of where you appear and with what details, plus a plan for what to fix first. Be wary of any proposal that talks about "getting mentions" in bulk without saying where, or why those sites matter in your field. The entity approach is explained in making your brand a clear entity for AI.

4. Monitoring

Answers change when models, sources, or the questions people ask change. Monitoring repeats the audit with the same question list on a schedule and flags movement: a description getting worse, a competitor starting to show up, one of your pages no longer being cited.

Ask for a report with the same structure every time so you can compare. If each report measures different things, you can't tell if things are getting better.

How GEO differs from SEO

GEO doesn't replace SEO. It builds on it. A site Google can't crawl well, with no clear page per service and no prior authority, gives an assistant little to work with when it searches the web for sources. So if your SEO basics aren't in place yet, that's where to start.

The practical differences are in the goal and in how you measure:

If a GEO proposal never mentions your website, your business profile, or your structured data, it's probably missing the foundation. If it only talks about keywords and rankings, it's probably SEO under another name.

How results are measured

This is where the most smoke gets sold. The official tools give you part of the picture.

Google Search Console. Google says traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the Performance report, under the "Web" search type, alongside everything else. It isn't broken out, so Search Console can't tell you how often an AI Overview cited you.

Bing Webmaster Tools. In February 2026 Microsoft launched an AI Performance report in public preview. It shows how often your content is cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and some partner integrations, which URLs get cited, and the queries the AI used to find them. Bing's own help page warns that those trends can't be attributed to a specific change. A citation isn't a click, either.

ChatGPT and Perplexity. There's no equivalent official dashboard for publishers. What you can do is sample: the same question list, on the same dates, saving the answers. OpenAI does document that its search crawler is OAI-SearchBot, so a good provider should check that your robots.txt doesn't block it if you want to show up in ChatGPT search.

With that in place, reasonable indicators are:

• Share of questions in the set where you appear, per assistant
• Description quality: whether what they say about you is accurate and current
• Which competitors appear where you don't
• Citations and cited URLs in Bing, when there's data
• Visits and leads arriving from assistants, in your analytics

The full method, with a tracking template, is in how to measure AI visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity. If you want to understand why answers vary so much, read how LLMs choose which sources to cite.

How to choose a provider

These questions separate a serious proposal from a weak one quickly:

1. What will you hand me in the first month? They should name specific documents: question list, saved answers, errors found, pages to change.
2. What can't you promise? An honest answer includes that nobody can guarantee an assistant will cite you. If they say they can, keep looking.
3. How will we measure? Ask to see a sample report, with no other client's data, and check that it repeats the same questions every time.
4. Which part is SEO and which part is GEO? A good provider will tell you if your site needs foundational work first.
5. What do I need to provide? GEO needs information only your business has: real services, cases, service areas, who does what. If the provider asks you for nothing, they'll write generic copy.

A note for local businesses: a clinic, a law firm, or a consultancy with clients in one region faces different questions than a national brand, and usually more work on its Google Business Profile and directories. That's covered in GEO for local professional services in Spain.

What we do at Different Growth

We're a digital studio based in Spain. Our GEO service covers those four blocks: AI presence audit, content optimization for language models, mentions and citations strategy, and ongoing monitoring. We connect it with SEO when the foundation needs it, and we'll tell you if GEO isn't a priority for you yet.

If you'd rather start with a general review of your site and visibility, request a free audit.