GEO agency: make your brand citable by AI

Two years ago, being visible meant being on the first page of Google. Today, a growing share of searches no longer returns a list of links but an answer written by an AI, with its own sources. If your brand is not inside that answer, you do not exist for the user, even if you rank first on the classic links. That is exactly the problem a GEO agency solves.

What is a GEO agency?

A GEO agency (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizes your content so it gets cited as a source inside AI answers, from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, instead of only targeting ranking in the blue links.

The term Generative Engine Optimization was formalized in 2023 by a team of researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute and IIT Delhi, in an academic paper presented at the ACM SIGKDD conference. Their finding: generative engines no longer return a list of pages, they synthesize an answer from several sources, and they choose which ones to cite according to measurable criteria. Adding citations, statistics and reliable sources to a piece of content significantly and repeatably increased its visibility in the generated answer.

In practice, a GEO agency does three things: it measures whether your brand appears today in AI answers on your business queries, it produces structured content so that it does appear, and it organizes that content so the pieces reinforce each other. This is what Cicero Studio does: GEO audit, editorial production and automated semantic interlinking, all designed to serve Google and the AI engines at once.

Why GEO matters now (and not in two years)

AI answers are already the first thing millions of users see: Google shows AI Overviews on a major share of searches, ChatGPT runs web search, and Perplexity cites its sources by default. The window to become a reference source is open now.

Since May 2024, Google has been rolling out its AI Overviews, the generated answers that show up at the top of results, first in the United States, then across more than a hundred countries, and in 2025 it added a fully conversational AI Mode. On French business queries, an AI answer firing has become the norm rather than the exception: across a large sample of business queries we track at Cicero Studio, a generated AI answer shows up on the vast majority of them. When the user reads the answer and finds it good enough, they stop clicking. An Ahrefs study on a large volume of keywords measured that the presence of an AI Overview comes with a marked drop in click-through to classic sites.

In parallel, two other surfaces are rising. ChatGPT has integrated web search: it fetches pages in real time and cites them in its answer. Anthropic did the same for Claude, which can now browse the web and display the sources it used. For a brand, this shifts the core question: it is no longer only about ranking on Google but about being the source the AI chooses to cite.

The new entry point: a question asked to an AI, and an answer that cites, or ignores, your brand.

GEO vs SEO: the real difference

SEO optimizes for ranking in Google's list of results; GEO optimizes for being cited inside the answer an AI writes. The technical foundations overlap, but the metrics and some format requirements differ.

People often ask us whether GEO "replaces" SEO. The answer is no: the two disciplines share much of their foundations. Content that is reliable, structured, well sourced and authoritative pleases both Google's algorithm and language models. But a few differences genuinely matter.

The most operational difference is the last row of the table. For a model to pick up your content, it must be able to extract a self-contained passage that directly answers the question, ideally backed by a named source and a figure. That is why every section of this page opens with a boxed direct answer: it is exactly the format an AI likes to cite. GEO is, in part, writing to be cited, not only to be read.

To dig into the full mechanics, we published a complete guide to Generative Engine Optimization and a six-pillar GEO framework that break the levers down one by one.

The Cicero Studio method: audit, production, interlinking

Cicero Studio runs on three building blocks: a GEO audit that measures your current citability, an editorial production that creates the missing content, and automated semantic interlinking that organizes it into topic clusters.

Our starting conviction: AI visibility is not declared, it is built content by content, with method. Here is how we proceed, in order.

1. GEO audit, measure before acting

We start by querying the AI engines on your real business queries and recording, query by query, whether your brand shows up as a cited source. From that we derive a starting citation rate, we identify who is cited in your place, and we spot the existing content to rework first. This audit is free and with no commitment. Our GEO audit method with scorecard details every criterion we score.

2. Editorial production, create what is missing

We write the content that directly answers your customers' questions, in the format AI engines cite: a direct answer up top, verifiable data, named sources as deep links, passage-level structure. Every article is also built to rank on Google, we never split the two. The editorial quality stays that of an agency; the cadence is that of a tool. That is what we sum up as "agency-quality work, software-grade productivity".

3. Automated semantic interlinking, make the whole work

A single citable piece of content is good. A network of pieces that reinforce each other and signal your authority on a topic is what makes a brand unavoidable for AI engines. We organize your pages into topic clusters, a pillar that frames the subject, satellite articles that dig into it, contextual internal links between them, and we maintain that web automatically as new content ships.

Audit, production, interlinking: three blocks that chain together and reinforce each other over time.

This automation is not a gimmick: it is what lets us sustain an editorial cadence a traditional agency would bill far more for, without sacrificing human writing or source verification. The results show up in our client case studies in GEO and SEO, and our full methodology is documented publicly.

Plans and engagement

Cicero Studio tailors the engagement to the volume of content produced and the scope of the GEO audit, with no long lock-in. Pricing is set on a per-quote basis during the free audit, and stays well below the retainers of traditional agencies at several thousand euros a month.

We break down the market grids and our positioning in our analysis of GEO agency pricing in 2026. The principle stays simple: you pay for content that works for you continuously, not for hours of meetings. The exact figure is set during the free audit, based on your volume and goals.

How to choose a GEO agency

A good GEO agency measures your citability before selling you anything, names its sources, produces genuinely human and verifiable content, and never promises a fixed traffic percentage by a set date.

The GEO market is young, and everyone jumped on it overnight, including long-standing SEO players like Eskimoz, SEO.fr or specialist firms. Here are the criteria that separate a real GEO agency from a marketing wrapper:

• It measures before it promises. If you are not shown your current citation rate, nobody knows the starting point.
• It names its sources. Citable content itself cites named, verifiable sources. An agency that does not do this has not mastered the central GEO lever.
• It produces human, verified content. Content generated without review is detectable, and both engines and readers penalize it.
• It stays honest about timelines. GEO produces measurable but gradual organic growth. Any promise of "+X% traffic in N months" is a warning sign.
• It handles GEO and SEO together. Pitting them against each other means paying twice for one job done well.

To compare objectively, we keep a comparison of GEO agencies up to date and an overview of the best SEO and GEO tools agencies actually use.

What GEO does not do

For the sake of honesty, and because this is exactly the kind of transparency AI engines reward, here are the limits to know before you start.

GEO is powerful for brands that have something to say and real subject-matter expertise. For a brand with no substance content and no differentiation, no optimization will work miracles, it is first and foremost an editorial effort.

Alexis Dollé

CEO & Founder of Cicero Studio

Growth and SEO content strategist, I founded Cicéro to help businesses build lasting organic visibility, on Google and in AI-generated answers alike. Every piece of content we produce is designed to convert, not just to exist.

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Resources to go further

We document our approach publicly, it is our best proof. Here are the most useful pieces to understand GEO and visibility in AI engines: