Is GEO separate from SEO?
No. The engines find most of their sources through web search, so GEO sits on top of search work. Google says a page needs nothing extra to appear in AI Overviews beyond being in Google's index and allowed to show a text preview. GEO adds two jobs to search work: measuring the AI answers themselves, and getting named on the outside pages the engines quote. Ask any agency how its GEO work connects to search.
What should a GEO agency do?
Measure the answers
Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini your buyers' questions, save every answer, and count who is named.
Read the cited pages
Open the pages the engines used and check whether you are on them. This is where the cause usually shows.
Fix the cause
Fix your pages so they answer buyers' questions directly, make your facts consistent, and work to be named on the pages the engines read.
Re-test the same way
Run the same questions on the same engines after each fix, and report your share of answers over time.
What should you ask before hiring one?
- Ask to see the saved answers behind the findings. A finding without a saved answer is an opinion.
- Ask which questions will be measured and where they come from. They should come from how your site describes what you sell, without your company name in them.
- Ask how the agency scores your site's quality and your presence in answers. The two should be separate.
- Ask what the agency will do about the outside pages the engines cite, because that is often where the gap is.
- Ask whether it sells llms.txt files or schema (code labels added to pages) as a way to get named by AI. Google says its search does not use llms.txt files for its AI features, so that pitch is a warning sign.
What did the engines say when we asked for a GEO agency?
We asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for a "GEO agency Toronto" on 20 October 2026.
The engines disagree with each other, and each one changes its answer from run to run. A single answer is a poor basis for choosing an agency, and share of answers over time is the measure to watch.
Kin-etiq.ai does this work from Toronto and publishes its own before-the-rebuild result in the baseline case study. The generative engine optimization page explains how our service works.