GeoHere is a fair question to ask the people you pay to market your business: when a customer asks ChatGPT or Google's AI for a recommendation in your category, what are you doing to make sure it names us? If the answer is a blank look, you have found a problem worth fixing.
Why this matters right now
The way people find businesses is shifting under everyone's feet. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a click, because an AI answer at the top handles the question. Google's AI Overviews show up on close to half of searches. And the overlap between ranking well on Google and being cited by AI has collapsed: by early 2026, only about 38% of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in Google's top 10, down from roughly 76% a year earlier.
Translated: the thing most agencies have sold for years, a good ranking, no longer reliably gets you into the answer your customers actually read. Getting cited by AI is a different job, and it has a name. You will hear it called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), AIEO (AI Engine Optimization), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Same goal, different acronyms.
This isn't an anti-agency post
Plenty of good agencies are already on this. A whole category of AEO specialists sprang up starting in 2023, and the strong generalist shops are folding it into what they do. The point is not that agencies are bad. The point is that this discipline is new enough that some are quietly billing you for ranking work while the ground moves, and you deserve to know which kind you are paying.
You do not necessarily need to fire anyone. You need to make sure someone owns your AI-search readiness, and that they can talk about it with specifics rather than buzzwords.
Six questions to ask your agency
- Can you explain AEO, and how it differs from SEO? A confident, plain answer is the baseline. Vagueness or "it's basically the same thing" is a flag.
- Does our robots.txt allow the AI crawlers? GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended. If they do not know, they have not checked the one thing that can make you invisible.
- What structured data do our key pages have? They should be able to name your schema types, not just say "we have some."
- Are our pages answerable? Do we give clean, quotable answers to the real questions customers ask, in text an engine can read without running JavaScript?
- How are we cited across AI engines today, and how would we track a change? If there is no measurement, there is no plan.
- What would you do in the next 30 days to improve it? A real answer is concrete. "We'll keep an eye on it" is not.
The red flags
A few responses should give you pause. "AI search is just a fad" ignores that a majority of searches already end in an answer, not a click. "It's the same as SEO, we've got it covered" is contradicted by the citation data. And "we'll figure it out" is a polite way of saying you are funding their education. You are allowed to expect the people you pay to already know this, or to bring in help that does.
What a good answer sounds like
You are not looking for jargon. You are looking for specifics. A good partner can tell you whether your site lets the AI crawlers in, whether your pages are readable and quotable, what your business schema says, and how they would measure a change month to month. If SEO is still bringing you customers, a good partner keeps it. They just do not pretend it is the whole game anymore.
A neutral way to check the work
You do not have to take anyone's word for it, including ours. GeoRoar runs a free audit that scores your site against a fixed 100-point rubric across the exact signals above: crawler access, structured data, answerability, entity clarity, trust, and off-site presence. Run it before your next agency call and you will know what to ask, and whether their answers hold up. The audit is free and takes about 30 seconds. If you want the fixes generated, that is the $99 Fix Pack, and staying cited over time is Monitor at $19 a month.
Think your site can hit an A?
Here's a sample GeoRoar scorecard. Yours takes about 30 seconds.
This is a sample. Your real scorecard is free, no sign-up.
Run your free GEO audit