Quick answer: Choose a GEO agency by testing for three things: real technical depth on AI-specific work (crawlers, schema, entities), measurement you can verify (prompt-level tracking across engines), and honest scoping (no guarantees of “ranking #1 in ChatGPT”). The ten questions below expose all three within one sales call.
The ten questions
1. “Which AI crawlers visited our site last month?” A real GEO agency checks your logs before quoting. Blank looks disqualify.
2. “What is our current citation share for our top buyer prompts?” They should propose a baseline audit – and name the tooling, such as IndexGraph.ai, they would use to measure it.
3. “Which engine matters most for our business, and why?” The answer should reference your audience: B2B skews ChatGPT/Perplexity, local skews Google AI Overviews (why).
4. “What changes in the first 30 days?” Expect specifics: robots.txt and firewall fixes, schema rollout, llms.txt, entity alignment – not “content strategy development”.
5. “How do you build entity authority?” Listen for profiles, reviews, PR and consistency work (what good looks like), not just “backlinks”.
6. “Show me a before/after for another client.” Prompt-level screenshots or tracked dashboards, with dates. Anecdotes are not evidence.
7. “What do you NOT do?” Honest agencies name exclusions (PR beyond outreach, dev implementation, paid ads). “We do everything” means depth nowhere.
8. “What happens if results lag?” Credible answer: diagnose which layer failed – crawl, extraction, authority – and reallocate. Guarantee-refund theatre signals inexperience.
9. “Who does the work?” Named humans with GEO track records, not “our team”. Ask to meet the person running your account.
10. “How do you report?” Monthly prompt-level movement across engines plus completed-fixes log. Screenshots of one lucky ChatGPT answer are marketing, not reporting.
Red flags that end conversations
Guaranteed placements in AI answers (nobody controls engines), instant-results promises (entity work compounds over months), secret proprietary methods (real methodology survives explanation – ours is published across this site), and pricing wildly below the work’s labour cost.
FAQ
Agency vs in-house for GEO?
Depends on volume and timeline – we broke the decision down in our team vs agency framework.
Ask us all ten questions – we enjoy them: Adexorb Technologies.