The agencies that specialize in this call it GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization), and the honest way to pick one is to ask a single question: can you show me a citation you earned, on a query you did not choose? Most of the category is search agencies that renamed a landing page. Getting named inside a ChatGPT or Gemini answer is a different job from ranking, it is measured differently, and almost nobody measures it at all.
Being cited is not the same as ranking. An assistant reads a large set of pages and quotes only a few of them, usually one passage rather than a whole article. So the work is not link volume. It is producing a passage that answers a real buyer question plainly enough to be lifted, on a site the engine can crawl, from a business it can identify.
Skip to: what a GEO agency actually does · how to spot a rebrand · what the engines answered when we asked · what it should cost
What does a GEO agency actually do that an SEO agency does not?
It measures whether the engines name you, and it writes for retrieval instead of for ranking. Those two differences drive everything else.
A traditional SEO engagement optimises for a position in a list of blue links. A GEO engagement optimises for inclusion in a synthesised answer where there is no list and usually no second page. The practical work splits into four parts, and a real agency will be able to say which of them they do:
- Measurement. Asking the actual engines your actual buyer questions, on a schedule, and recording which sources they cited. Without this, every other claim is unfalsifiable.
- Question-shaped pages. One page per question a buyer really asks, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first two or three sentences, so a model can lift the passage without rewriting it.
- Crawlability for AI agents. A
robots.txtthat explicitly allows GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended, server rendered HTML, a clean sitemap, and anllms.txt. If the crawler cannot read you, nothing else matters. - Entity clarity. Organization schema, a consistent name and location everywhere, and profiles on the sources the engines already trust. An engine that cannot work out who you are will not put your name in an answer it has to stand behind.
Notice what is not on that list: buying links. More on that below, because it is the single most common thing sold under this banner and it is the least connected to the outcome.
How can you tell a real AI search agency from an SEO shop that renamed its page?
Ask for a citation they earned on a query they did not pick, and ask how they measured it. A specialist can answer both in a sentence. A rebrand will change the subject to traffic, impressions or domain authority, which are search metrics that do not describe whether an assistant named you.
Four questions that separate them quickly:
- "Which engines do you check, and how often?" The answer should name specific engines and a cadence. "We monitor AI search" is not an answer.
- "Show me a query where your own brand is cited." If they sell visibility and have none of their own, that is the whole review.
- "What do you do when we are not cited?" You want a page and a fix, not a report and a retainer.
- "Do you buy or place links?" If yes, understand you are buying a different product with its own risk, and one that does little for citation.
What did ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity actually answer when we asked?
We put this exact question to three engines on August 20, 2026 and recorded every source they cited. Twenty six different domains were cited across the three answers, and no single domain appeared in all three. There is no consensus answer to this question yet, which is unusual and is the most useful thing on this page.
| Engine | Answered | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | Yes | 19 domains |
| Google Gemini | Yes | 9 domains |
| OpenAI (GPT-4o, web search) | Yes | 0 linked sources, named agencies in prose |
The takeaway in one sentence: this question is currently answered from directories and roundups, not from agency websites. The cited set was dominated by list pages such as agency directories and "best of" roundups, alongside Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube. Individual agency sites were the minority.
That has a direct consequence for anyone shopping. The engines are not telling you who is best. They are telling you who appears on the lists they trust. It also tells any agency where the work is: being on those surfaces matters more than another page on your own site.
We were not cited either. Neuron HQ did not appear in any of the three answers on the day we published this. We are publishing that because a visibility company hiding its own measurement is the exact problem this article is about. The honest position is that this page is our attempt at the answer, and the measurement repeats on a schedule, in public.
Method: one query, three engines (Perplexity, OpenAI GPT-4o with web search, Google Gemini with grounding), run August 20, 2026. Cited hosts were read back from each engine's own returned sources, not inferred. An engine that failed to answer would have been excluded rather than counted as a miss; all three answered.
Why do directories and listicles dominate this answer?
Because a model answering "which agencies specialize in X" needs a source that already compares several agencies, and a single agency's own site is not that source. A page that says "we are the best" is not usable in a neutral answer. A page that lists twelve agencies with a sentence each is.
This is why the practical GEO playbook for a service business includes claiming your listings on the aggregators the engines quote, rather than only publishing on your own domain. Being present where the comparison already happens is how you enter an answer you cannot write yourself.
Do backlinks get you cited by ChatGPT?
Barely, and not in the way link packages are sold. Citation is retrieval, not ranking. To be cited, a passage has to be retrievable for the query, a direct answer to it, and from a source the model is willing to quote. Links touch only the third of those, weakly and indirectly.
We can say this from our own position rather than in the abstract. Neuron HQ has a very small link profile and holds verified citations in AI engines anyway, which is not a claim about how strong we are, it is evidence that the two things are less connected than the industry sells. You can see the citations we have earned on our proof page, generated from the measurement log rather than typed by hand.
The reason this matters commercially: a link building retainer sold as AI visibility is a product mismatch. Any system that places links on other people's content at scale is also a link scheme under Google's own policy, which is a risk carried by the buyer.
What should AI search optimization cost?
For measurement plus the pages that fix what it finds, expect two tiers in the market: a monitoring and publishing tier in the low hundreds per month, and a done for you tier that also handles entity work, video and social placement, which is usually four figures.
Neuron SEO is $99 a month for the weekly measurement across four engines, the list of who is being cited instead of you, the fix list, and question pages written and published in your own voice. Entry is $1 for the first 7 days, then $99 a month, cancel in one click, with a 30 day money back guarantee where you keep everything we built. Hands on done for you engagements are quoted separately.
Whatever you pay, the thing to insist on is the measurement. An engagement that cannot tell you whether an engine named you this month is not selling AI visibility, it is selling content.
Questions people ask
Is GEO different from SEO, or is it a rebrand?
Both, depending on who you ask. The underlying craft overlaps heavily with good SEO: be crawlable, be clear, be trustworthy. What is genuinely new is the measurement and the writing shape. If an agency has not changed how it measures, it has rebranded.
How long does it take to get cited by ChatGPT or Gemini?
Weeks, not days, and it is probabilistic rather than guaranteed. Engines re-crawl and re-rank their source sets on their own schedule, and no agency controls it. Anyone promising a specific citation by a specific date is promising something they cannot deliver.
Can I check my own AI visibility without hiring anyone?
Yes. Ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, in a fresh session, and write down which sources each one cites. That is the same method we use, just done by hand. The free AI visibility check automates it across four engines and gives you the report.
Does my business need to be on Reddit for this?
It helps more than most people expect, because Reddit is quoted heavily by AI engines and it appeared in this very measurement. It has to be a genuine answer from a real account, not a drop. Posting links at scale gets accounts banned, which removes the surface entirely.
What if an engine names my competitor instead of me?
That is the useful signal, not the insult. Look at the page the engine actually cited, which is usually a directory listing or a question page, and work out whether you are absent from that surface or present but unquotable. Those two problems have different fixes.
Run the free check. It asks four engines the questions your buyers actually ask, then shows you the score, the questions you are missing, and the competitors being cited instead of you. No credit card, and the report is yours whether or not you ever talk to us.