What GEO services actually cover
GEO services are the ongoing work of making a business more likely to be named, quoted or recommended inside AI-generated answers. Where traditional SEO earns a position in a list, GEO earns a mention in the answer itself — the difference is worth understanding before you buy either.
The scope varies more than it should between providers, so it is worth being specific about what is and is not usually included.
In scope, out of scope
| Usually included | Usually not | |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | AI crawler access checks, schema markup, site structure, indexing in Google and Bing | Rebuilding your website |
| Entity work | Name, address and phone consistency across directories and profiles; duplicate cleanup | Registering your company or changing legal details |
| Google Business Profile | Completion, categories, services, service areas, posts, monitoring for suspension | Responding to every review on your behalf, unless agreed |
| Reviews | A process for asking, and monitoring across the platforms that matter to your trade | Writing or buying reviews — never |
| Content | Restructuring key pages so answers come first; question-led pages that can be quoted | A high-volume blog for its own sake |
| Third-party presence | Getting listed and mentioned on the sources AI tools actually retrieve from | Guaranteed press coverage |
| Measurement | A monthly baseline of what the assistants say about you and which sources they cite | A precise 'AI ranking position' — no such number exists |
If a proposal is missing the entity and review lines, it is not really a GEO service. Those are the two inputs that most reliably change whether an AI names you.
What you need in place before it is worth starting
GEO work has a natural order, and starting in the wrong place wastes money:
- A website AI crawlers can actually reach. Everything else is academic if they cannot. This needs testing rather than assuming.
- A claimed and verified Google Business Profile. For a local business this is the anchor, and it feeds Gemini and AI Overviews directly.
- Consistent basic facts. One version of your business name, one address, one phone number, used everywhere.
- Some genuine reviews. Not hundreds. Enough that there is something to synthesise.
A decent provider will check these first and tell you if the answer is “fix this before you pay us for anything else”.
One-off project or ongoing?
Both exist, and they suit different situations. A one-off audit and cleanup makes sense if your foundations are a mess and you have someone in-house to maintain them afterwards. Ongoing work makes sense if you want the review flow, third-party presence and measurement kept up, which is where most of the compounding happens.
The honest version: the technical and entity work is largely a fixed job that then needs light maintenance. The reputation and presence work is genuinely continuous. Anyone selling a large permanent retainer that is mostly the first kind of work is overcharging you.
What it costs and what to expect
Pricing for GEO tracks local SEO closely, because most of the underlying work is shared — we set out what GEO costs separately, and UK local SEO figures in our local SEO cost guide, and publish our own on the GEO service page rather than making you ask.
On timelines, be realistic. Structured-data and consistency fixes can register within weeks. Shifting how an assistant describes you takes months, because it depends on other sites and real customers, not on anything that can be switched on. Anyone offering a date is guessing.