Generative engine optimization — GEO, if you've seen the acronym — is the work of getting your business named inside AI-generated answers. When someone asks ChatGPT "who makes the best X" or Google's AI "which company should I use for Y," GEO is everything you do so the answer says your name.

That's the promise. But "services" is where it gets fuzzy. Retainers in this category run anywhere from a few thousand a month to five figures, and the proposals often read like poetry. Here is what should actually be in the box.

Month one: the baseline nobody can fake

Real engagements start by measuring where you stand. Not your rankings — your presence in answers. The agency writes out 30 to 100 questions your buyers genuinely ask, runs them through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Copilot, and logs who gets named for each. You, your competitors, nobody.

You should see this document. It's the before photo. If an engagement skips it, you'll never know whether anything worked.

The four workstreams that follow

1. Answer-shaped content. AI systems quote sources that make clean, specific, checkable statements. So the content work isn't "publish more blog posts" — it's building pages that state a claim, a number, or a definition plainly enough to lift. Comparison pages, spec answers, honest FAQ pages that say the quiet part ("this product is wrong for you if…"). The blunt pages get quoted. The brochure pages don't.

2. Machine readability. If your prices hide behind a quote form and your product data lives in PDFs, retrieval systems can't see what you sell. Part of the service is technical: structured, crawlable pages that state what you sell, where, and for whom in a form software can parse. Boring work. Big lever.

3. Third-party corroboration. AI answers cross-check. A claim on your own site carries less weight than the same claim confirmed by an industry publication, a directory, a review platform, or a trade forum. So a real GEO retainer includes earning mentions on sites the models already trust. If a proposal is 100% "content on your domain," half the mechanism is missing.

4. Monthly re-measurement. Same prompt list, every month, same method. The report you want has one headline number: how many of the tracked questions name you now versus at baseline. In one of my engagements, an industrial client went from 4 named answers to 34 across a 24-week retainer. That's what progress looks like in this work — a citation count, not a traffic chart.

What it costs and how long it takes

Most credible retainers land in the low four figures to low five figures per month, scaled to how big the prompt battlefield is. One-time "GEO audits" exist and are fine as a first step, but the mechanism is cumulative — content earns corroboration earns citations — so most of the value shows up between months three and nine.

If your revenue depends on being found — distributors, manufacturers, service businesses in competitive markets — that timeline is worth planning around now, while most of your competitors still haven't started. I've written up how I structure a generative engine optimization service for industrial companies if you want to see a concrete version of the shape described here.

When you shouldn't buy it

Skip GEO services if your buyers don't research before purchasing, if you can't name the questions they'd ask an AI, or if your website has deeper problems (it's slow, it's thin, it doesn't say what you do). GEO builds on a functioning site the way a roof builds on framing. And walk away from anyone guaranteeing placement in AI answers. Nobody controls the model. The honest version of this service raises your odds and proves it with a count. That's the whole product.

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Artur Shepel runs Sale Solution, a one-operator firm doing AI search and GEO for industrial and local-service businesses.