GEO and AEO Agencies: What They Sell, What They Charge, and When You Don't Need One

Search for a generative engine optimization agency and the results are agency sales pages and "top 10 agencies" lists, most of them published by an agency that ranks itself first. Thrad is not a GEO or AEO agency. We sell sponsored, paid placements inside AI conversations, which is a different product, so this is not another list. It is what GEO and AEO agencies actually sell, what the ones that publish prices charge, how to test their claims against what Google and OpenAI say, and when you do not need one.

What is a GEO or AEO agency?

A generative engine optimization (GEO) agency, also sold as an answer engine optimization (AEO) agency or AI search agency, works to get a business mentioned, cited and recommended when AI assistants and AI search features answer a buyer's question. Clutch, which lists 30 of them, puts it as getting businesses "cited and recommended when large language models answer a buyer's question." The labels are interchangeable; our GEO vs SEO and what is AEO guides cover the terms. Judge the agency on its work, not its acronym.

Organic or sponsored: which should you be doing?

A note on where we stand: Thrad sells sponsored placements inside AI conversations, not agency services. The case for starting with sponsored rests on what the platforms publish, not on our preference. OpenAI states that ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers and that advertisers cannot shape or rank them. Google says there are no special optimizations for AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. Nobody can buy a citation. That leaves two separate ways to be present in an AI conversation:

• Organic: earned and never guaranteed. The model decides, the data you get back is a sample, and movement is measured in months.
• Sponsored: present the moment the question is asked, in the conversations you choose, labeled as sponsored, with a budget, a schedule and a report you control.

Organic work is worth doing, and the rest of this guide covers it straight. But if the question is how to show up in AI conversations this quarter, the controllable answer is sponsored placement. Thrad lets you run one budget across the AI apps your customers already use. Launch a campaign from self-serve.

What does a GEO agency actually do?

Reading the service pages of agencies that rank for the term, the offer is consistent. Percepture, Directive and Go Fish Digital each describe some version of five deliverables:

• Audit: Percepture describes an audit of current AI visibility, entity presence and content structure. Most of this now comes free from Google Search Console's generative AI reports and Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report.
• Entity and topic mapping: Directive's process starts with entity and topic mapping; Go Fish says "we semantically map your entire site to identify how AI systems interpret your authority on key topics." This is keyword research with the question flipped from "what ranks" to "what gets cited."
• Content restructuring: restructured pages with schema, FAQ formatting and direct-answer blocks. Google's guidance is that content should be available in text form and that structured data should match the visible text; there is no AI-specific markup.
• Digital PR: earning mentions on the sources answer engines draw from. Go Fish states that "citation frequency is one of the strongest predictors of inclusion in AI Overviews." This is the part most in-house teams lack.
• Monitoring: tracking AI mentions, referral traffic and sentiment across a prompt set, usually through the same AEO tools you could subscribe to directly.

How much does a GEO agency cost?

Most agencies do not publish prices. Those that do, and the guides that survey them, cluster as follows, all as observed on October 12, 2026:

Digital Elevator's pricing guide says that "most credible AEO/GEO retainers for mid-market businesses land in the $2,000 to $10,000 per month range," with entry-level programs "around $1,000 to $2,500 for basic monitoring and foundational optimization." First Page Sage's agency list publishes its own $6,000 to $12,000 range alongside Focus Digital at $3,000 to $5,000 and Graphite from $10,000. On Clutch, minimum project sizes run from $1,000 to $50,000 or more, with hourly rates from under $25 to over $300.

Two numbers to hold against those: monitoring software costs $50 to $99 a month, and Google and Microsoft's AI reports are free. An agency retainer should be buying the work those tools cannot do, chiefly content and PR, not the dashboard. On timing, Digital Elevator puts citation improvements at three to six months and meaningful results on a six- to twelve-month horizon, so budget for at least two quarters.

How do you read an agency's claims?

GEO agency pages lean on numbers. Three tests separate the useful from the sales copy:

• Who ranked them? NoGood's list of the best AEO agencies places NoGood first; First Page Sage's list places First Page Sage first, scoring itself on a rubric that rewards publishing prices. A self-published ranking is a brochure.
• Is the client named? "A tech client saw a 3000% increase in AI mentions in 3 months" cannot be checked. Directive's claim that a named client, Case Status, "went from zero LLM presence to a dominant position across 39+ tracked prompts" within nine months at least tells you the prompt count and the timeframe. Ask for the prompt set.
• Does it contradict the platforms? Google says of AI Overviews and AI Mode that "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." OpenAI says placement in ChatGPT search is not guaranteed. An agency promising proprietary AI placement is selling something the platforms say does not exist.

The one controlled study, the 2023 GEO paper, found that adding citations, quotations and statistics lifted visibility in generative answers by 30 to 40 percent on its main metric, that keyword stuffing often made things worse, and that lower-ranked sites gained the most. Any agency's method should be recognizable in that list.

What should you ask before signing?

1. Which platforms do you optimize for, and which do you report on? Google AI features and Copilot have free first-party reports; ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity require sampling.
2. Who writes the prompt set, how many prompts, and can we see the raw answers rather than a score?
3. What will you do that our SEO team does not already do? If the answer is schema and FAQs, you may be paying GEO prices for SEO.
4. Which third-party sites will you pitch for mentions, and what have you placed for other clients?
5. How will results show up in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, not only in your dashboard?
6. What is the minimum term, and what happens to the content and prompt data if we leave?
7. What can you not promise? The right answer includes placement in any specific assistant.

When do you need an agency, and when don't you?

You probably do not need one if you already have an SEO owner, a writer and the free reports. Add a monitoring tool, apply the GEO study's findings to your top pages, and review quarterly. You probably do if nobody owns search, if your category depends on third-party reviews and forums you have no relationships with, or if you operate across several markets and languages. In between, a fixed-scope project, an audit plus a content plan, costs less than a retainer and tells you whether the retainer is worth it.

What no GEO agency can sell you

Every GEO deliverable earns organic presence over months. None of it can put you in a conversation this week, and none of it is guaranteed. That gap is what sponsored placement fills, and it is the only thing Thrad sells: we are not an AEO or GEO agency and we do not optimize your site. Launch a campaign from self-serve, or read our conversational advertising overview.

A GEO agency checklist

1. Open the free Google and Bing AI reports before taking any agency's audit.
2. Get three proposals and compare scope, not price: platforms, prompts, content volume, PR targets.
3. Discount any ranking the agency published about itself and any result without a named client.
4. Require reporting that lands in your Search Console and analytics, with raw answer text.
5. Start with a fixed-scope audit and content plan; move to a retainer only when it shows movement.
6. Budget sponsored placements inside AI conversations separately for the questions you must win now.