Do GEO agencies offer a guarantee, and what should one look like?

No agency can guarantee a citation because the answer is generated by a system the agency does not control, and the platform says so itself. OpenAI's help article on searching the web with ChatGPT, checked on 16 September 2026, states that results are ranked on multiple factors and that placement is not guaranteed. It also says ChatGPT can turn a question into targeted search queries. Those search queries may differ from the wording your buyer used; that does not mean the assistant answers a different question.

The second reason is variation between runs. Ask the same question three times in clean sessions (logged out, or in a temporary chat with memory off) and the list of cited domains changes. In our August 2026 runs of one prompt family in ChatGPT, we were named in five of five clean sessions, and twelve different competitors appeared beside us. A single screenshot can neither prove a guarantee was met nor that it was broken.

Different layers also have different timescales. OpenAI's crawler documentation says robots.txt changes are picked up within about 24 hours. This concerns access rules, not a promised crawler visit or citation. Brand mass, meaning how often independent sources name your company, can take quarters to change. Our results timeline guide explains these horizons.

What an agency can guarantee is its own conduct: what it measures, how often, against what, and what it does when the numbers do not move. The client can observe and check these actions; the contract should state the obligations and consequences clearly. Two terms carry the structure. Citation rate is the share of prompts in a fixed set where an assistant cites one of your pages. Share of voice is your share of all brand mentions in the answers to that same set, against the competitor list recorded on day one. Both are counted per assistant and per language; our measurement guide defines them in full. A process guarantee has five parts, each of which can be written into a contract and checked on a calendar.

Our 90-day policy commits to a measurement, a threshold, a trigger and three outcomes, and it fits in one formula. It is part of the 90-day pilot; the pricing guide lists what the pilot includes and what it costs.

The threshold is the baseline's own spread. The day-one measurement is repeated several times, and those repeats disagree because generated answers vary. If the day-90 rates fall inside that spread, nothing has moved that we can distinguish from noise; if at least one rate, in at least one assistant, moves beyond it, we discuss what the change means. Our guide on what happens if GEO doesn't work after 90 days walks through the day-90 conversation itself.

What the formula leaves out matters as much: no promised position, no promised assistant, no promised date for a first citation, and no refund clause: our policy instead provides the three options above.

You read a guarantee clause by asking four questions of it, and a clause that cannot answer all four is not a guarantee, whatever the heading says. The questions are the same for a refund clause, a "results in 30 days" line and our own policy. Our guide to questions to ask a GEO agency covers the whole engagement; these four apply to the promise itself.

Measured on what? A guarantee needs a prompt set with a count, a language, a list of assistants and a session protocol. "Mentions in ChatGPT" without those four can be satisfied by one screenshot from one logged-in account.

Compared with what? A guarantee needs a day-one baseline and a rule for the baseline's own variation. A rise from one citation to four is a 300% increase, but the absolute counts alone do not establish a lasting change.

Checked when, and by whom? A guarantee needs a cadence and a named reader. If you can re-run any prompt yourself, logged out, and compare it with the logs, you are not relying on a narrative; our guide on how to check your AI visibility for free is the protocol.

What happens if the check fails, and who keeps the data? A guarantee needs named consequences and a data clause: a refund, a free month, a scope change or a stop, written down, with the prompt set, the baseline and the pages yours whichever applies.

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 on their websites, 3 (5%) described what happens if the work does not pay off without promising citations, 19 (32%) stated that results are not guaranteed, and 30 (50%) said nothing about it. Half of this sample did not address the issue publicly, leaving it to be clarified in the proposal; this is not an estimate for the whole market.

Most guarantee wordings fall into seven patterns, and each gets a verdict once you apply the four questions. The verdicts are structural: they depend on what the clause fixes in writing, not on who wrote it. Our red-flags guide covers nine proposal phrases in the same spirit, and our guide on what happens if GEO doesn't work has a companion table with three kinds of GEO promise. This one goes down to the wording, so you can mark up a proposal line by line.

Our September 2026 run showed that the guarantee question is answered from agency websites, that the set of agencies changes from one answer to the next, and that a published policy is what gets cited. On 14 September 2026 we ran twelve prompts in ChatGPT, signed out, web search on, three repeats each: 36 answers. Two prompts were about promises: what happens if GEO does not work after 90 days, and whether GEO agencies offer any guarantee and what one should look like.

Across the six answers to those two prompts, ChatGPT cited 18 different agency domains. On the guarantee prompt alone, three answers produced 11 different domains; one domain appeared in all three repeats. get-geo.ai was cited on both prompts, through our agency page and our measurement guide: the pages that state the 90-day policy. We do not name the other domains and draw no conclusion about them: a domain seen once has been sampled once.

On 15 September 2026 we ran the same prompts twice each in Perplexity (logged in, personalisation off) and Google AI Mode (private window). On the day-90 prompt both cited the what-if guide published the day before, AI Mode in both repeats. Across three assistants, every citation of get-geo.ai came on the two prompts about the 90-day policy and guarantees. That is first reproducible data, not a stable position, as our case study also says. The next remeasurement is scheduled for 26 October 2026.

A guarantee should never contain a promised position, a promised assistant, a promised date for a first citation, or a metric you cannot recompute from data you hold. Each of those turns the clause into something that can only be argued about, and an argument at day 90 is the outcome a guarantee exists to prevent. Three further items look like guarantees and are not.

The first is a paid placement presented as a guaranteed mention. A slot in a list article that assistants already cite can produce a citation, and our guide on whether to buy listicle placements covers when that is worth paying for; it guarantees nothing, because the list can be re-crawled, re-ranked or dropped. The second is a guarantee that covers only the cheapest layer: crawler access can be fixed in days, so a clause that guarantees access and calls it results has guaranteed the part that was never in doubt. The third is a lock-in dressed as a guarantee: a refund or free extension conditional on renewing, or one that keeps the prompt set and the baseline if you leave.

If you are comparing proposals now, the fastest test is the one we recommend for any vendor, including us: ask for ten prompts where you are invisible today, the current answers, and the specific changes that would put you in them. That is our free AI visibility audit, one language, in writing. Email hello@get-geo.ai with your site and the language you sell in, and read our answer against the four questions above.