GEO agency red flags: nine signs you're paying for a dashboard

GEO is new, budgets are moving into it quickly, and that attracts some agencies that change their label more than their work. You'll see the frustration in marketing forums, where buyers describe paying for months and seeing nothing change in ChatGPT. These are the signs we would watch for.

The nine red flags

1. 1They guarantee a specific position in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews. Nobody controls those answers.
2. 2Their report is one visibility score with no prompts, answers or sources behind it.
3. 3They can't tell you which sources ChatGPT cites for your category.
4. 4Their plan is mostly "publish more blog posts".
5. 5They mention "secret prompts" or tricks that make models favour you.
6. 6They never talk about reviews, directories or third-party articles.
7. 7They don't check whether AI crawlers can reach your site.
8. 8They insist on a 12-month contract before showing any baseline.
9. 9They can't name who will actually do the work.

Dashboards are not the problem on their own

AI visibility tools are useful. They track prompts and mentions at scale. The issue is paying an agency for the dashboard and nothing else. If the monthly invoice covers reporting while the sources that decide AI answers stay the same, your visibility won't move.

What real GEO work looks like

• A list of the buyer questions that matter, agreed with you.
• A record of which sources each assistant cites for those questions.
• Concrete changes on your site: clear answers, accurate facts, crawler access, schema.
• Concrete changes off your site: reviews collected, profiles completed, articles pitched.
• The same questions re-run every week, with the raw answers shown.

If you're already with an agency

Ask for three things: the list of prompts they track, last month's raw answers, and the list of third-party sources they worked on. If they can't produce all three within a day, you have your answer.

A quick test you can run on a proposal

1. 1Highlight every sentence in the proposal that describes work on your website.
2. 2Highlight in a second colour every sentence about work on other sites: reviews, directories, articles, communities.
3. 3Highlight in a third colour every sentence about measurement.

If the second colour is almost missing, the proposal won't change what assistants say about you much, whatever the price. If the third colour only mentions a score, you won't be able to check the work.

What a fair guarantee looks like

No one controls AI answers, so a promise of a specific spot is a red flag. A fair commitment looks different: agreed targets against a measured baseline, a clear list of work, and continued effort until the targets are met. That's a performance commitment, and it's reasonable to ask for one.

We publish how we work on our GEO agency page, including what happens month by month.