Do you need a GEO agency and an SEO agency, or one that does both?

Most businesses need one partner that covers both. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) builds on the same foundations as SEO, so splitting the work between two agencies usually creates gaps and duplicated effort. A separate GEO agency only makes sense in a few specific situations.

The question comes up because AI tools now answer a large share of the questions people used to type into Google. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode all summarise sources and name brands. Businesses want to be in those answers, and a new type of agency has appeared to sell that.

The work is real. The split is mostly artificial.

What a GEO agency does

A GEO agency works on how AI tools find, understand and cite your business. In practice that means:

• Tracking which prompts mention your brand and which mention competitors.
• Writing pages that answer questions clearly enough to be quoted.
• Building mentions on the sites AI tools rely on, such as review platforms, trade press and forums.
• Making sure your brand facts are consistent everywhere they appear.

We cover the basics in our guide to what GEO is. The short version: it’s about being the source an AI tool trusts when it builds an answer.

Where GEO and SEO overlap

Most of the work overlaps. Google’s own guidance on AI features and your website says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal search. The same SEO basics apply.

That covers a lot of ground:

• A site search engines can crawl and index.
• Content that answers the question directly, near the top of the page.
• Clear signs of experience and expertise.
• Links and mentions from sites people trust.

Other AI tools work differently from Google, and many pull from Bing or their own crawlers. But the pages they cite tend to share the same traits. Our piece on what makes a page worth citing for ChatGPT goes through them.

Where they differ

GEO adds three things that classic SEO reporting doesn’t cover.

Area	SEO	GEO
What you measure	Rankings, clicks, enquiries	Brand mentions and citations in AI answers
Where you need to appear	Google and Bing results pages	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews
Off-site focus	Links that pass authority	Mentions on the sources AI tools quote, linked or not
Content shape	Pages that rank for a keyword	Passages that answer a question on their own

None of these replaces SEO. They sit on top of it. The comparison in traditional SEO vs AI SEO covers the same ground from the other side.

Problems with using two agencies

Splitting the work causes three problems we see often.

1. Conflicting content. One agency rewrites a page for a keyword, the other rewrites it to be quotable. The page ends up doing neither well.
2. Duplicated outreach. Both agencies contact the same trade publications, and editors stop replying.
3. Nobody owns the result. When AI visibility drops, the GEO agency blames the site and the SEO agency blames the prompts.

There’s also cost. You pay two teams to learn your business, sit in two sets of meetings and produce two reports that partly describe the same thing.

When a separate GEO agency makes sense

A specialist GEO agency can be the right choice when:

• You already have a strong in-house SEO team and only need help with AI tracking and mentions.
• Your current agency won’t touch AI search and you’re tied into a contract.
• You’re a large brand with separate budgets and the internal teams to coordinate two suppliers.

For most small and mid-sized businesses, none of those apply.

What to look for in one partner

If you want one agency to cover both, check that it can show you:

1. A baseline of how AI tools describe your business today, with real prompts.
2. Which competitors get cited instead of you, and why.
3. Technical SEO capability, because AI tools can’t cite pages they can’t read.
4. A plan for off-site mentions, not just on-site content.
5. Reporting that puts search and AI visibility side by side.

How to tell if it’s working

Whoever does the work, judge it on outcomes you can check yourself. Run the same set of prompts each month in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and note whether your brand appears, how it’s described and which sources are cited. Look at referral traffic from AI tools in your analytics. And keep an eye on branded search in Search Console, because people who hear about you in an AI answer often search for your name next.

If an agency can’t show progress on at least one of those within a few months, ask why. AI answers change often, so a single good or bad week means little. A steady trend over a quarter is what counts.

It’s also worth checking how AI tools describe your prices, locations and services. Wrong facts in AI answers are common, and they’re usually fixed by correcting the sources those tools rely on, not by editing your own site alone.

Our generative engine optimisation service sits inside our wider AI SEO agency work for exactly this reason. One team, one plan, one report.

If you want to see where you stand first, try our free AI visibility check, or book a free strategy session and we’ll walk through your search and AI visibility together. Book a free strategy session.

Related reading: our guides to how to track AI Overviews and what AI search is.

Common questions