GEO agency, AI visibility tool or in-house: how do you decide?

Staff and agencies carry out the work; tools help measure it. In-house means a named person checks crawler access, writes pages answering buyer questions, keeps company information consistent and repeats measurements. An agency takes on agreed tasks, potentially including other languages and independent-source outreach. An AI visibility tool runs a fixed question list through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Mode on a schedule, recording mentions, cited pages and competitors.

GEO works on a company’s presence in AI answers: access, content and company identity, then independent coverage. Planning horizons differ: days to weeks for access work, weeks to a quarter for content and identity, and quarters for independent coverage. These are not guaranteed citation deadlines. An entity is an identifiable company; corroboration is verifiable information on independent sites. Our in-house or agency guide estimates hours by task; this page adds the software option.

A fourth arrangement pairs agency work with a tracker you control. It has its own row below. The costs add up, but it provides another set of measurements to compare with the agency’s report without repeating every question manually.

Trackers cost tens to a few hundred dollars a month at the entry tiers, agencies cost thousands, and in-house costs hours. Tracker tiers we have checked, as listed in September 2026: Otterly at $29 a month for 15 prompts across four engines, with a $189 tier for 100 prompts; Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain for 25 prompts, with 50 more prompts at $60. Other trackers (Profound, Peec) publish their own price pages; check them on the day. For agencies, our own check gives a market reference: of the 60 GEO agencies that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode cited in our September 2026 runs, 28 (47%) publish GEO prices; the median entry monthly fee is $3,250 (26 agencies, middle half $1,950–4,681), and the median entry project or audit is $3,000 (15 agencies). The other half publish no price, so ask any agency for its price list in writing. Prices change; the table carries the date each figure was checked.

Our own figures are the public offer on our pricing page, as of September 2026: audit free, deep audit $750–1,500, 90-day pilot $2,500–6,000, retainer $1,500–3,000 a month with four to eight new articles and pages a month. The in-house cost comes from our in-house guide: roughly one working day for the first four checks, then four to six protected hours a week for one language. Multiply by your loaded hourly rate to compare it with the invoices.

Collecting data and making changes are different tasks. A tracker might, for example, report each week that you appear for 2 of 30 questions. Understanding that result and acting on it still requires a person to read the answers, examine the pages and implement changes. A subscription alone does not complete that work.

Access needs technical checks and fixes. Content needs writing and consistent company details across the site, LinkedIn, review profiles and structured data. Independent coverage involves working with authors and publishers. A tool’s list of cited domains can help choose outreach targets, but does not replace those relationships. Our measurement guide explains four metrics; our manual visibility check covers 10–20 questions every two to four weeks, roughly two hours per cycle, without a subscription.

Whoever measures owes you a protocol you can re-run. Ours is in our guide on how we measure: 30–50 prompts per language, several runs each in clean sessions (logged out, or a temporary chat with memory off), on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini at minimum. The two numbers compared at day 90 are citation rate (the share of prompts where an assistant cites one of your pages) and share of voice (your share of brand mentions on the same set). Ask a tool vendor and an agency for the same thing: the raw answers behind the report.

Read the six conditions in order, starting with access and baseline answers before choosing the next work. Our planning reference is up to 30 questions in one language and four to six hours a week. It is an estimate: actual time depends on repeats and the depth of analysis.

Seventeen different domains across seven answers, and only one of them in more than one assistant. On 14 September 2026 we ran the prompt “GEO agency vs AI visibility tool vs in-house: how do we decide?” three times in ChatGPT, logged out with web search on; on 15 September we ran it twice in Perplexity (signed in, personalisation off, so not a clean session by our protocol) and twice in Google AI Mode in an incognito window. The prompt was one of twelve in a run of 84 answers; the figures here are for this prompt only.

ChatGPT’s three answers cited developers.google.com and sitepoint.com every time, plus a tool vendor, a consultant’s blog and a magazine in two of three: five domains in total. Perplexity cited the same nine domains in both answers, a mix of GEO agencies, tool vendors and developer blogs, and none of them a platform. AI Mode cited three domains per answer, two of them in both. The only domain to appear in more than one assistant was one agency site, in 4 of the 7 answers. Seven answers over two days is a snapshot, and Perplexity was not logged out; we read it as a picture of who currently holds the question, not as a ranking.

Two things in that list bear on the decision. ChatGPT answered the whole “agency or in-house” family largely from platform documentation (developers.google.com in 12 of 12 answers across the four in-house prompts), so for the access and content layers the model points you to the official guides rather than to a vendor. And the pages the other two assistants took were built as a short verdict, a four-way table and a decision list, which is why this page follows that shape. Our guide on what happens if GEO does not work after 90 days was cited by all three assistants on a neighbouring prompt in the same run; we will re-run the twelve prompts on 26 October 2026.

Yes. Start with baseline answers collected manually or through the free audit, then identify the time-consuming tasks and missing skills. A tool helps collect answers when the question list becomes too large for manual checks. An agency can cover languages, technical work or independent-source outreach. Divide the work according to your team’s actual capacity.

The order also runs backwards. When a day-90 report shows movement from the baseline and the monthly work has become routine, remeasurement and page updates can return in-house, the tracker keeps counting, and the agency stays only for new languages or outreach. Our pricing guide lists what each tier hands over to make that transfer possible: the prompt set, the baseline with raw answers, the logs and the pages stay with you whichever way the engagement ends.

For a starting point, the free AI visibility audit checks ten buyer questions in one language where you do not currently appear, the existing answers and crawler access, then provides written recommendations. Email hello@get-geo.ai with your domain and your buyers’ language. You can use the findings in-house or with whichever provider you choose.