What are the red flags when hiring a GEO agency?

A proposal puts an agency’s promises in writing alongside a price. That makes it the right place to check what you will be able to verify later. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is young, with no independent body auditing results, and buyers familiar with traditional SEO may struggle to assess the claims. The phrases below recur in proposals prospective clients send us. Each leaves something important uncheckable. Agency websites rarely close the gap: in our September 2026 check of the 60 GEO agencies that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode cited in our runs of 14–15 September, 8 (13%) promised a result or a refund, only 13 (22%) described their measurement method in full, and 8 (13%) showed a case with a baseline, numbers and a date.

None of these phrases proves that an agency is dishonest. They are warning signs because, without clarification, you may be unable to verify the promised result six months later.

Four terms used throughout. A prompt set is a fixed list of the questions your buyers ask an assistant; the baseline is the first measurement of that list, before any work starts. Citation rate is the share of the list where an assistant links to one of your pages. Share of voice is your share of brand mentions on the same prompts, measured against the competitors named beside you. An agency that cannot define the last two in one sentence each has already answered most of the questions below.

This guide is the companion to our list of questions to ask a GEO agency. That one is the checklist before a call; this one is how to read what arrives afterwards.

Wording varies; the pattern does not. The right-hand columns are what to ask and what an acceptable answer looks like, so you can run the test on any proposal, including ours.

Some features of a proposal can look worrying without being a problem. A small team or a single specialist using automated measurement can do this work well; what matters is whether the measurement method is published. A price below the other quotes on your desk is not a warning sign on its own if the scope is narrow and clearly defined. Our GEO pricing guide explains our own rates.

A new agency is not a flag if it can show its own citations on the prompts it sells: run three prompts about their category in a clean session (logged out, memory off) and see who is named. Drafts produced with AI are not a flag if a person with domain knowledge edits them and the facts carry sources; a page that quotes a study with a date and a sample size is worth more than a hand-written page that says “studies show”.

And a vendor that says “we don’t know yet” about brand-level results in a crowded category is telling you the truth. Generic prompts in a category with established names move on the slowest of the three layers described in our guide on how long GEO takes, and anyone who claims otherwise is back in the first row of the table.

Ask about even one warning sign. Several recurring ones deserve closer scrutiny. An agency should be able to answer the following questions in writing.

Three checks, no agency involved, fit in twenty minutes. Open a clean session in one assistant and ask it to recommend an agency in the vendor’s category, three phrasings, and note whether they appear; a fake GEO agency fails this first check, because it cannot get itself cited on its own prompts. Read the case study on their site and look for the disclosure, the dates and the limitations paragraph; if all three are present, the rest of the proposal is probably honest too. Then fetch one of their own pages with an AI crawler’s user-agent, or simply view the page source, and see whether the text is there without JavaScript.