A generative engine optimization agency does three things: it structures your pages so an assistant can lift a complete answer out of them, it makes sure the assistants can reach those pages at all, and it works on the third party surfaces where the assistants actually find their evidence. The first two are mostly technical and can be finished. The third is the slow one, it is where the results come from, and it is the part missing from nearly every GEO pitch.
What is generative engine optimization?
Optimising to be cited inside a generated answer instead of ranked in a list of links. When somebody asks an assistant which brand to buy from or which supplier to use, the model composes an answer from sources it has decided are relevant and trustworthy, and names some of them. GEO is the work of being one of those sources. The vocabulary is unsettled: you will see the same discipline called answer engine optimization, AI search optimisation, or search everywhere optimisation. They describe the same job.
Is GEO different from SEO?
It shares most of its foundation and adds a layer. A site that is slow, blocked or badly structured fails in both, so nobody starts GEO on a broken site. What GEO adds is a different unit of success. SEO wins a position, GEO wins a sentence, and the two ask for different things from a page. A page written to rank can be a long build towards an answer. A page written to be quoted has to answer completely in its opening paragraph, because that paragraph is what gets lifted.
The other change is what counts as evidence. Search rewards your own domain. Generated answers lean far more heavily on what other people say about you, which is why a brand with a thin site and a lot of third party coverage frequently gets cited where a polished site with no outside footprint does not.
What does a GEO agency actually do?
- Check the assistants can reach you. The AI crawlers are separate user agents, and plenty of sites block them by accident in robots.txt. This is a five minute check that decides whether anything else is possible.
- Restructure pages to answer. Question shaped headings, a complete answer in the opening lines, and FAQ content that exists as visible text and as structured data from the same source, so the two can never disagree.
- Give the model something to be confident about. Specific, checkable claims with dates and numbers get quoted. Vague marketing language does not, because there is nothing in it to lift.
- Work the third party surfaces. Where your category is actually discussed: reviews, comparisons, forums, trade press, and the roundup pages the models read.
- Measure citations, not just rankings. Copilot cites from the Bing index, and Bing Webmaster Tools reports it for free, which makes it the one AI citation number a brand can check without buying a tool.
How do you tell a real GEO offer from a repackaged one?
Ask what they will do that is not SEO. A real answer names the third party work and the measurement, and is specific about which surfaces matter in your category. A repackaged offer will describe schema markup, page speed and content structure, all of which are genuinely useful and all of which were already SEO. The second tell is the promise. Anyone who guarantees your brand will be named by a specific assistant is describing something they cannot control, since no model exposes a lever for it.
Does my brand need a GEO agency?
Ask three questions. Do people research your category before buying, rather than buying on impulse? Is there an assistant answer for your main category question today, and who is named in it? And is your site technically sound, because if it is not, that comes first regardless. Two yes answers and a competitor already being named is the case for starting now. A brand people buy without researching has better places to put the money.
How long does GEO take to work?
The structural work lands as fast as the pages get recrawled, which is weeks. Being cited is slower and it is not on a schedule, because it depends on the third party footprint accumulating and on model updates you do not control. Anybody quoting you a date for a citation is quoting a date for something they cannot make happen. What can be committed to is the structure, the access, the third party work going out, and an honest citation count you can check yourself.
The part most GEO pitches leave out
A brand's own website is cited far less often than what other people publish about it. That is the central fact of the discipline and it has an uncomfortable consequence: the majority of the work that produces AI citations happens off your website, on surfaces you do not own, and it looks a lot more like digital PR than like SEO. An agency that sells you GEO as a series of page edits is selling the easy half. It is worth doing, it is genuinely necessary, and on its own it will not get you named.
This applies to us as well, which is why it is written down here. How we run the search side is on the SEO and GEO page, and if the store runs on Shopify the platform half of it is on the Shopify page.