By Kunal Guha, CEO, Rich Webs — 11 years in SEO, web development, and digital marketing
Over the past year, "rank on Google" stopped being the only question clients asked us. Increasingly it's "how do I show up when someone asks ChatGPT" or "why doesn't Gemini ever mention us." That question has a name now — Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO — and a growing number of agencies claim to do it. Most of them are repackaging the same SEO retainer with a new label. This article is about how to tell the difference, based on what has actually worked running GEO campaigns for clients over the past several months, not on theory.
Why "Ranking on AI Tools" Is a Different Problem Than SEO
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity don't return a ranked list of ten links. They synthesize an answer and, depending on the tool, cite a handful of sources they judged credible enough to pull from. That changes what "ranking" even means:
- There's no fixed set of ten spots to compete for — an AI answer might cite one source or none.
- The models draw from a mix of their training data and live retrieval, so a page can influence an answer without ever being "clicked."
- Citation depends heavily on how clearly a page states facts, how consistent a brand's information is across the web, and how credible the source looks — which is exactly the E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) Google's own quality raters use, just applied automatically by a model instead of a human rater.
That last point is the one most "AI SEO agencies" skip. Getting mentioned by an AI model isn't a trick you apply to a page — it's the output of a site that already reads as expert, authoritative, and trustworthy.
What I've Seen Actually Move the Needle
Running GEO work firsthand rather than reading about it, three things have consistently mattered more than anything else:
1. Structured, fact-dense content that answers the question directly. Pages that lead with a clear, direct answer in the first two or three sentences — then back it up with specifics — get pulled into AI summaries far more often than pages that build up to the point. This is a rewrite of how most agencies were taught to write blog content for keyword density, and a lot of them haven't made the switch.
2. Technical foundations that AI crawlers can actually parse. Schema markup, consistent business information (name, address, description) across the site and every directory it's listed on, and clean site architecture. If an AI model can't confidently identify who you are and what you do, it won't cite you — no matter how good the content is.
3. A real presence across the sources models retrieve from, not just your own website. This is digital PR and citation-building done deliberately: getting a brand mentioned accurately on the blogs, directories, and publications that LLMs draw context from, rather than relying on the company's own site to carry the entire authority signal.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Hire Anyone
Before signing a retainer with an "AI SEO" or "GEO" agency, I'd ask for:
- Actual, verifiable citations. Can they show a live example of a client being named inside a ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity answer — not a screenshot from a demo, an actual result?
- A technical SEO baseline, not just content promises. GEO layered on top of a slow, poorly structured site rarely holds up, because the same signals that block Google also block AI retrieval.
- A measurement plan. Brand-mention tracking across AI tools should be something they report on, not a vague promise. If nobody's measuring it, nobody's accountable for it.
- Transparency about what they're actually doing. Vague language like "AI optimization magic" is a red flag. A credible team can explain, specifically, what changes on your site and why.
Where We Fit In
I'm not neutral here, so I'll say it directly: this is the exact framework my team at Rich Webs built our GEO Optimization Services around — entity and structured-data cleanup, answer-first content writing, and digital PR/citation building, run alongside classic SEO rather than as a separate line item, so clients aren't trading Google visibility for AI visibility. I'd rather you judge any agency, including Rich Webs, against the checklist above than take a claim at face value.
The Honest Takeaway
There is no single "best" agency for ranking on AI tools, because the discipline is new enough that nobody has a five-year track record in it yet. What you can check is whether an agency's own content and site hold up to the same E-E-A-T standard they're promising to build for you — real authorship, demonstrated expertise, technical rigor, and evidence you can verify. If a team can't demonstrate that on their own site, it's a reasonable bet they can't build it on yours either.