GEO is having a moment, and with the moment came the theatre. In a matter of months, half the SEO agencies out there have bolted three letters onto their site —G, E, O— and raised their rates. The problem isn’t that they charge for GEO; it’s that many sell exactly what they did before with a new label. SEO with prompts, dressed up as a different discipline. This piece is a smoke detector: four signals you’re being sold theatre, and what someone who actually ships it does in each case.
Let’s be clear up front: GEO is real and you need it. When your buyer stops typing into Google and asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini instead, showing up in the answer the AI writes matters as much as ranking. That’s not in question. What’s in question is who knows how to do it. Because the gap between “sounds like GEO” and “moves the needle” has filled with people who learned to say “generative engine” on a sales call and little else. The real difference between the two disciplines we lay out in the GEO vs SEO guide; here we’re after the other thing: how to smell the one who’s about to con you.
Signal 1: the GEO agency hands you the same rankings report
You ask for GEO and four weeks later a PDF lands with keyword positions, organic-traffic charts and a new section titled “AI” where they’ve pasted two ChatGPT screenshots. The core of the deliverable is identical to 2019: where you rank in the list of ten blue links. The problem is that GEO isn’t played there. It’s played inside the single answer the model writes, where there’s no list and no position: either it mentions you or you don’t exist.
How someone who actually ships it does it: the deliverable starts with what the AI says about you. It runs a battery of realistic prompts from your category against the models your buyer uses and measures three things that didn’t exist in SEO —whether you show up in the answer, whether it cites you as a source, and what share of your category’s mentions are yours—. How to build that diagnosis is in the GEO audit guide. If the report they hand you doesn’t contain a single measured AI answer, it isn’t GEO: it’s SEO with a new cover.
Signal 2: they optimize blind, without measuring a single real answer
The pitch sounds good: “we optimize your site so the AI understands you”. They add schema, rewrite metadata, drop in FAQs. All of that can help. But when you ask “against what baseline?”, silence. They optimize without ever having measured what the models say about you today. It’s decorating a house in the dark: maybe you get it right, but you don’t know, because there’s no before and after. Without measurement against real prompts, everything they tell you is opinion with an invoice attached.
How someone who actually ships it does it: measure first, then touch, then measure again. Set a baseline —what the models say today—, make the changes and check whether the answer moved. The indicators they watch aren’t position or CTR, but presence, citations and share of voice; the catalogue of GEO KPIs breaks them down one by one. Without a baseline there’s no provable improvement, just a well-told story.
Signal 3: they sell it to you as a project that closes
“We’ll do your GEO” —like commissioning a website: scope, delivery, invoice, goodbye—. That’s the reflex of classic SEO, where an audit and a handful of changes held up for months because Google’s algorithm moved slowly. In generative that model doesn’t apply. The models change behavior every few weeks: a new version ships, it changes which sources it prioritizes, and your position inside the answers moves without you touching a thing. Whoever sells you GEO as a one-off deliverable is selling you a photo of a river.
How someone who actually ships it does it: they treat it as a running operation, not a project. They monitor every week how the models name you and react when the answer degrades, because it will degrade. That’s exactly what a GEO monitoring service does: not a final report, but a system that watches and alerts. If the contract has a “done” date, be suspicious: GEO doesn’t finish, it gets maintained.
Signal 4: their whole vocabulary is keywords, none of it citability
Listen to them talk for five minutes. If it’s all keyword density, meta descriptions, backlinks and “domain authority”, and not once do the words “citability”, “the source the AI cites”, “entity” or “share of voice” come up, you have your answer. It’s not that those SEO concepts don’t count —GEO sits on top of SEO and reuses a lot of its signals—. It’s that if they’re the only ones they handle, they’re playing the old game with a new name. The vocabulary gives away the mental model.
How someone who actually ships it does it: they talk about how the AI doesn’t rank, it synthesizes; about how the goal isn’t a spot in a list but being the source the model cites inside its answer. They know you can win the buyer without a click, because your brand goes inside the paragraph. That shift in metric —from position to mention— is the heart of the discipline, and building it well is what a GEO optimization service does. Whoever hasn’t made that mental click isn’t doing GEO, no matter how much the proposal says so.
| Axis | Selling smoke | Shipping it |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverable | Rankings report with an “AI” cover | AI answers measured against real prompts |
| Measurement | Optimizes with no baseline | Measures first, touches, measures again |
| Working model | A project that closes | A running operation, week by week |
| Metrics | Position, CTR, traffic | Presence, citations, share of voice |
| Vocabulary | Keywords, meta, backlinks | Citability, sources, entity |
The questions that dismantle the pitch
You don’t need to be technical to see through a smoke vendor. Four questions asked to their face are enough, then listen for whether they answer with mechanics or with marketing:
- Against what prompts will you measure, and where do I stand today? If they have no method to set the baseline, they can’t prove any improvement. Full stop.
- Show me a before and after from another client: the AI’s answer, not the traffic. Whoever ships it has screenshots of answers that changed. Whoever sells smoke shows you a sessions chart.
- How often do you review this when a new model ships? If the answer is “we deliver and that’s it”, it’s SEO in disguise. The right answer talks about cadence, not an end date.
- What do you measure that isn’t position or traffic? If they don’t name presence, citations or share of voice, they never left Google’s board.
None of these questions is a trap. They’re simply the ones whoever did the real work knows how to answer, and the ones that make whoever just changed the label sweat.
GEO isn’t SEO with prompts, the same way an operation isn’t a demo. They share foundations —authority, relevance, content worth citing—, but they’re played on different boards, with different metrics, at a different pace. Whoever doesn’t tell the two apart isn’t ready for the first. Before you sign, run this article’s smoke detector over your vendor: if their deliverables, their measurement, their cadence and their vocabulary are still the ones from 2019, you’re not buying GEO. You’re buying theatre with new lighting.