Should marketing agencies start offering GEO services to clients?

Q: Should marketing agencies start offering GEO services to clients?

Yes for most agencies serving B2B SaaS, professional services, or considered-purchase e-comm clients. AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek are deflecting research traffic that used to land on Google. Agencies that add GEO now own the brief; agencies that wait get pulled in reactively when clients ask why a competitor was named in an AI answer.

Q: Which agencies benefit most from adding GEO first?

B2B SaaS and tech agencies, professional-services agencies (legal, accounting, consulting), and e-comm agencies handling considered purchases. Local-services agencies benefit too but the work overlaps heavily with local SEO and Google Business Profile optimisation.

Q: Which agencies should hold off on GEO?

Pure paid-media agencies with no organic remit, and agencies whose client base is mostly impulse-purchase DTC with sub-$50 items. In those cases AI-search demand-capture is currently weak. Revisit in 12 months.

Q: What does it cost an agency to add a GEO offering?

Realistically one senior strategist learning the category for 60-90 days, plus tooling. Agencies that try to spin up GEO with a junior and a checklist tend to ship thin work. Agencies that put a senior on it for a quarter ship retainers worth $3-10k per client per month.

Question

Should marketing agencies start offering GEO services to clients?

Maciej Grabek · Accepted Answer

Yes, for most agencies serving B2B SaaS, professional services, or considered-purchase e-comm clients. AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek are already deflecting research traffic that used to land on Google. Agencies that add Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) now will own the brief; agencies that wait will get pulled into it reactively when a client asks why a competitor was named in an AI answer and they were not. The signal that this is not optional The buying journey for considered purchases starts in an AI engine more often each quarter. A prospect researching a marketing-automation tool, a B2B legal service, or a 5-figure SaaS contract is increasingly likely to open ChatGPT or Perplexity before they open Google. If the answer they get does not include your client, the rest of the funnel does not fire. This shows up in client behavior before it shows up in your reporting. The first sign is usually a client forwarding a screenshot of a ChatGPT answer where a competitor was named and asking, "Why are we not in this?" By the time three clients have done that, the agency that already has a GEO offering wins the work. The agency that has to learn the category from scratch loses ground. Which agencies should add GEO first B2B SaaS and tech agencies. Highest-intent AI search behavior. Buyers run prompts like "best CRM for a 20-person sales team" and treat the AI answer as a shortlist. Professional services agencies (legal, accounting, consulting). Researched purchases with high deal sizes. "Best M&A law firm in Chicago" is a real prompt running thousands of times a month. E-comm agencies handling considered purchases. Mattresses, kitchen appliances, hobbyist gear. Less critical for impulse-buy categories. Local-services agencies. Still worth doing, but the engines lean heavily on Google Business Profile data, so the work overlaps more with local SEO. Which agencies should hold off If you run a pure paid-media agency with no organic remit and no plans to add one, GEO is a stretch. The technical work (schema, content, citation building) sits closer to SEO and content teams. A paid shop adding GEO as a bolt-on without the underlying discipline tends to produce thin deliverables that clients churn out of. If your client base is overwhelmingly impulse-purchase DTC (single-product Shopify stores, sub-$50 items), demand-capture from AI search is currently weak. Revisit in 12 months. What it costs the agency to add The realistic build is one senior strategist learning the category for 60-90 days, plus tooling. The strategist needs to run real prompts, read real engine outputs, and develop opinions about what moves the needle for which engine. From what we have seen, agencies that try to spin up GEO with a junior and a checklist ship bad work; agencies that put a senior on it for a quarter ship retainers worth $3-10k a month per client. Tooling is the smaller cost. You can trigger a free baseline scan in a couple of minutes to see what an AI engine currently says about any client, before you ever propose the service. Counter-argument: "It is too early" It is too early to claim GEO replaces SEO. It is not too early to offer it. Three things are already true: (1) prompts run in volume, (2) engines cite a finite set of sources per answer, (3) which sources they cite is influenceable. That is enough to build a retainer on. Agencies that wait until the category is settled will be selling against incumbents who already have case studies.