If you are working out how to choose a GEO agency, start with one request: ask each shortlisted firm to show you the exact list of buyer questions it will track, in which AI engines, in which markets. The firms that can answer on the first call have a method. The rest have a deck.
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting your company named and cited when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI features about your category. It is new enough that proposals are hard to tell apart. This guide is for B2B SaaS and cybersecurity teams comparing partners, especially teams that sell in more than one country. It covers what the work actually includes, what to ask, which technical claims you can check yourself, and how to tie the whole thing to pipeline instead of a score.
What a GEO agency actually does
Strip away the labels and every GEO engagement is built from the same parts. A firm that only sells one of them is selling a part, which may be fine, as long as you know it.
- Access. Making sure the crawlers that feed AI answers can reach your site, and that your key pages load and read cleanly.
- Answers on your own pages. Pages that respond to the questions buyers put to AI engines, in plain language, with specifics a model can quote.
- Third-party sources. The reviews, comparisons, analyst notes and community threads that AI answers lean on when they describe a vendor.
- Measurement. A fixed set of buyer questions, asked repeatedly, with a record of who gets named and who gets linked.
Much of this overlaps with good SEO, and a serious agency will say so rather than dress it up. If you want the longer explanation of the discipline itself, our generative engine optimization guide covers it. The rest of this piece is about judging the people who would do it for you.
Start with the measurement, because everything else follows from it
Every other promise in a GEO proposal depends on how progress gets measured. So ask about measurement first, and ask for the specifics before any talk of tactics.
A usable measurement plan names the prompts (the actual questions your buyers ask), the engines, the markets and languages, how often the set runs, and the competitors you are compared against. It separates a mention, where the answer names you, from a citation, where the answer links to your page as a source. Those are different wins. A mention with no link can still shape a shortlist. A citation sends a visitor.
The numbers add up fast. Take an illustrative plan with 40 buyer prompts, 3 engines and 2 markets: that is 240 answers every time the set runs. And it has to run more than once, because the same question asked twice can come back with a different answer. One snapshot is an anecdote.
Data table
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| buyer prompts, written per market | 40 |
| AI engines checked | 3 |
| markets, each with its own prompts | 2 |
| answers to record per run | 240 |
Ask to see the prompt list itself, and ask who wrote it. If the answer is a single visibility percentage with no list behind it, you cannot check it, and you cannot argue with it either. You should be able to open the list, disagree with a question, and have it changed.
Check the technical claims against the platforms’ own documentation
This is the easiest part of the evaluation, because the platforms publish their rules. You do not need to take anyone’s word for them.
Google’s documentation for AI Overviews and AI Mode says there are no additional requirements to appear in them and no special optimizations necessary. It adds that you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup, and that there is no special schema.org structured data to add. So a pitch built on a mandatory AI file or a secret schema for Google’s AI answers is at odds with Google’s own guidance. Good SEO fundamentals still apply, and that is the honest version of the claim.
Crawler access is where a real audit earns its keep. OpenAI’s documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt to appear in its search results. A good agency checks your robots.txt, your firewall rules and your bot protection against those user agents, because bot protection can shut those crawlers out without anyone in marketing noticing.
One more check worth knowing. Google’s crawler documentation says Google-Extended does not affect a site’s inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal there. If someone tells you to change your Google-Extended setting to get into AI Overviews, ask them to show you where Google says so.
Selling in more than one country changes the brief
A buyer in Madrid asking about SOC automation does not phrase the question the way a buyer in Denver does. The words differ, the competitors named in the answer often differ, and the sources the engine pulls from are frequently local. A prompt set translated from English measures how well you rank for translated English.
So ask how the agency builds the question set for each market. The right answer involves a native speaker writing prompts based on how buyers in that market actually search and phrase their questions, then checking which local competitors and publications show up. Ask whether reports split results by market, or blend everything into one number that hides a strong US showing over a weak European one.
Also ask what changes on your site per market. If the agency’s plan for Germany is to translate the US pages, the measurement will tell you soon enough that it was not a plan.
Tie it to pipeline, not to a visibility score
Visibility in AI answers is a leading indicator. What you are paying for is buyers who arrive better informed and closer to a decision. A proposal should say how it will connect the two, and the tooling to do it mostly already exists.
- OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral URLs, so those visits can be separated in your analytics and followed into forms and opportunities.
- Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the overall web search totals in Search Console, so any report claiming a clean Google AI traffic number should explain how it got one.
- A free-text “how did you hear about us” field on your demo form catches the buyer who read an AI answer and then typed your URL.
- Your CRM source field on opportunities is where all of this has to land in the end.
We wrote more about separating AI referrals from organic search in LLM traffic vs organic search. The point for your evaluation is simple: ask the agency what it will report in month three that your sales leader would care about.
The questions to put in front of every shortlisted agency
Send the same questions to every firm, in writing, and compare the answers side by side. The differences show up quickly.
| Ask | A strong answer includes | Worth probing |
|---|---|---|
| Which buyer questions will you track, and who writes them? | A shared list you can edit, written with your sales team, per market | A score with no list behind it |
| How do you tell a mention from a citation? | Both reported separately, with the linked page named | One blended “visibility” figure |
| What will you change first on our site, and why? | Specific pages and gaps from their own first look | A generic content calendar |
| How do you work on third-party sources? | Where buyers in your category read, and how the agency earns a place there | Paid placements sold as coverage |
| What do you report to our sales leader? | AI referrals, form source answers, opportunities by source | Screenshots of answers only |
| What happens in markets outside the US? | Native prompt sets and results split by market | Translated prompts, one global number |
Some phrases should end a conversation politely: guaranteed placement in AI answers, and anything described as AI-proof. Nobody controls what a model says on a given day.
What changes for a cybersecurity or deeply technical vendor
Security buyers check claims. They read the documentation, ask peers, and test in a proof of concept. When an AI answer describes a security product, it leans on third-party pages, and those pages can be out of date or simply wrong about what the product does.
That shifts the job. For a security vendor, a GEO agency should show you how it finds answers that misdescribe your product, traces them to the source the model drew on, and gets that source corrected or outweighed. Raising the number of mentions matters less than making sure the mentions are accurate, because a confident wrong answer about your detection coverage can cost you a deal you never hear about. Ask for an example of how they have handled a wrong claim, and listen for a process rather than a war story.
COSEOM® does this work for B2B tech and cybersecurity companies across markets. You can see how we run it on our GEO agency page, and hold us to the same questions as everyone else.
FAQ: choosing a GEO agency
What does a GEO agency do?
It works to get your company named and cited when buyers ask AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews about your category. The work covers crawler access, pages that answer buyer questions, the third-party sources those answers draw on, and a repeatable way to measure the results.
How do I choose a GEO agency for a B2B company?
Ask each firm for the exact buyer questions it will track, in which engines and markets, and how it separates mentions from citations. Then ask what it would change first on your site and what it will report to your sales leader. Compare the written answers side by side.
Is GEO different from SEO?
It overlaps heavily. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, so SEO fundamentals carry over. What GEO adds is measurement of AI answers and more attention to the third-party sources those answers quote.
Do I need special schema or an AI text file to appear in Google’s AI answers?
Google’s documentation says no: you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup, and there is no special schema.org structured data to add for AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Which agencies offer AI search optimization for B2B companies selling in several countries?
Look for firms that build a native prompt set for each market and report results split by market. COSEOM® is one of them; our GEO agency page explains how we work. Whoever you talk to, ask for the per-market prompt list before you sign.
How long before GEO work shows results?
Nobody can give you a firm date, because nobody controls what an AI answer says. Fixing crawler access removes a blocker, but it does not decide the answer. Content and third-party work take longer. Agree on a baseline measurement and a fixed date to measure again before the work starts, so progress is judged against the same questions.
What should a cybersecurity company ask a GEO agency?
Ask how it finds AI answers that describe your product inaccurately, how it traces them to the source, and how it gets that source corrected. In a category where buyers verify every claim, accurate answers matter more than a higher count of mentions.
COSEOM Team
COSEOM is a multilingual B2B growth agency. Since 2008 the COSEOM team has run international SEO, generative engine optimization, paid media and demand generation programs for B2B software and technology companies across their target markets. We publish our research, playbooks and product guides here. More about COSEOM
