AI visibility audit
We put the questions your buyers ask to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, then record who gets named, what each engine says about you and which pages it cites.
GEO agency for AI search
Generative Engine Optimization Agency Get named in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity answers
MarketingPulse checks what AI search tools say about your business today, fixes what they can't read, and builds the pages and mentions they quote. GEO is included in our SEO plans, which start at ₹14,000 a month (about $146).
200+ businesses · clients in 6 countries · every figure on this page is sourced
AI answerIllustration
Who's the best company for this near me?
Three options stand out, based on reviews and recent coverage:
- Competitor A★ 4.6
- Your business★ 4.9Cited
- Competitor B★ 4.5
Sourcesyourbusiness.comGoogle reviewsIndustry list
The short answer
What does a generative engine optimization agency do?
A GEO agency works to get your business mentioned and cited in the answers AI tools write, which people now read before they click any link. Most of the work is good SEO. The rest is making sure AI crawlers can read your site, writing pages that are easy to quote, and earning mentions on the other websites AI engines trust.
Definition: Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting a business, product or page mentioned and cited in the answers that AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity write for their users. Also called AI search optimization. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Princeton and IIT Delhi.
At a glance
- AI engines
- ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude
- First step
- A free audit of what AI tools say about you today
- Price
- From ₹14,000 a month (about $146)
- Contract
- Month to month, no lock-in
- Reporting
- Monthly share of AI answers, citations and AI referral traffic
People now read the answer before they click
AI-written answers sit above the links in Google, and they are the whole result in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Buyers who read one see a handful of names, and they click far less.
45%
of US consumers use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier
BrightLocal, 2026+120%
more organic clicks per impression for brands cited in an AI Overview than for uncited brands on the same page
Seer Interactive, April 2026Then: ten links to compare
Now: one answer, a few names
Name 1Your business?Name 3
Sources123
Fewer clicks when an AI summary appears
Share of Google searches where people clicked a regular result, from the browsing data of 900 US adults.
- Without an AI summary15%
- With an AI summary8%
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025. Only 1% of visits included a click on a link inside the summary itself.
Which list is your business on?
A real test from September 26, 2026: we put the same question to ChatGPT and Perplexity and compared the answers.
What we saw
- 1ChatGPT answered with a map and business cards, and quoted each company's star rating and review count.
- 2Perplexity picked a different set. It cited the companies' own websites and two directory pages that list plumbers.
- 3Only one company, Roto-Rooter, made both lists.
Each AI engine builds its answer from different sources, so GEO has to cover all of them: your website, your business listings and reviews, and the pages that recommend companies like yours.
Find out which list you are onWhat our GEO service includes
Six parts that run together every month, built on the same foundation as our SEO services.
Crawler access and technical fixes
We check that OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot and Bingbot can reach your pages, that your text loads without JavaScript, and that your site is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Pages AI tools can quote
We move the answer to the top of each section and add specific figures, named sources and comparison tables. In the research that named GEO, those changes raised visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.
Consistent business facts
Your name, address, services, prices and founder details should read the same on your website, Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles, so AI tools don't mix you up with someone else or repeat old details.
Mentions and reviews
In a 75,000-brand study by Ahrefs, mentions on other websites had the strongest link to AI Overview visibility. We work on the lists, directories and review sites AI engines already cite in your category.
Tracking and reporting
Every month we rerun the same buyer questions and report your share of AI answers, citations won and lost, visits from AI tools in GA4 and inquiries that mention AI.
What you see every month
We rerun the same buyer questions every month, so the numbers compare like with like. Each report covers:
- Share of AI answers. How often you are named across the same set of buyer questions, for each engine.
- Citations. Which of your pages get linked, and which competitor pages get linked instead.
- Accuracy. Anything an AI tool gets wrong about your prices, services or location, with the fix.
- Business results. Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com in GA4, plus inquiries that mention AI.
Monthly GEO report
Sample data30%of tracked
answers
answers
- Perplexity40%
- ChatGPT35%
- AI Overviews30%
- Gemini25%
- Copilot20%
- Questions tracked
- 40
- Citations won
- +4
- Visits from AI
- 212
GEO pricing
GEO is included in our SEO plans because most of the work is shared. Prices are per month, exclude GST where it applies, and every plan runs month to month.
Starter
₹14,000/month
about $146 a month
Local businesses and single-location services
- AI visibility audit of your main buyer questions
- Up to 15 target keywords
- Crawler access and technical fixes
- Google Business Profile and local listings, the data AI tools quote in local answers
- On-page GEO for 10 pages
- 2 answer-first articles a month
- Monthly AI visibility and ranking report
Growth
₹22,500/month
about $235 a month
Brands in crowded categories, multi-location businesses and online stores
- Everything in Starter
- Up to 50 target keywords
- Advanced schema and entity markup
- 4 articles a month plus refreshes of older pages
- 8 authority links a month, favoring sites AI engines already cite
- Core Web Vitals work
- A dedicated strategist and calls every two weeks
Enterprise
₹52,500/month
about $547 a month
Brands selling in several countries, and large sites
- Everything in Growth
- Unlimited keywords
- Digital PR and premium mentions
- International and hreflang setup
- Custom dashboards and revenue attribution
- Team training and quarterly strategy reviews
Why our prices are lower
Most GEO agencies charge between $1,000 and $10,000 a month, according to Minuttia's roundup of GEO agencies.
Our team works from New Delhi, where running an agency costs far less than in the US, and we publish one price list for every client.
- Typical GEO agency retainer$1,000 to $10,000
- MarketingPulse Starterabout $146
- MarketingPulse Growthabout $235
- MarketingPulse Enterpriseabout $547
Dollar amounts are approximate, converted at ₹95.92 to $1 on September 26, 2026 (ExchangeRate-API). Full plan details are on our SEO packages section.
How we run GEO
Four stages, with the same buyer questions tracked from the first week to the last report.
- Week 1
1. Baseline audit
We agree on the questions your buyers ask, run them through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and record who gets named and which sources get cited.
- Weeks 2 to 4
2. Access and facts
We fix crawler blocks and rendering problems, verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, add schema and make your business details match everywhere they appear.
- Months 2 and 3
3. Quotable pages and mentions
We rewrite your most important pages so the answer comes first, add the figures and sources AI tools quote, and work on listings, reviews and "best of" pages in your category.
- Every month
4. Track and adjust
We rerun the same questions, show you what changed and move effort toward whatever is growing your share of answers and your inquiries.
ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews search the web when they answer, so a technical fix can show up within weeks. New pages and mentions usually take two to three months to appear consistently. Nobody can guarantee a citation, and Google itself warns site owners about tools that promise ranking success.
Why businesses choose MarketingPulse for GEO
Prices you can see
Many GEO agencies want a call before they share a price. Ours are on this page, and every client pays the same rates whether they are in India or abroad.
Clients you can check
Every business we work with is named on our results page with a link to its website. SS Movers holds Google's top two spots for all five Raipur locality searches we track, and iLED Solution has 8 of its 10 tracked product keywords in Google's top five.
SEO underneath
In a March 2026 Ahrefs study of 863,000 keywords, about 7 in 10 pages cited in AI Overviews ranked somewhere in Google's top 100. Our GEO work sits on SEO that already moves rankings.
No shortcuts
We follow Google's own guidance on AI features. We don't sell llms.txt files as a strategy, promise ChatGPT placements or post fake reviews.
Written and reviewed by Heeresh Varshney, founder and managing director of MarketingPulse, with 10 years in digital marketing. Last updated September 26, 2026.
How to choose a GEO agency: audit and pricing checklist
Use it with any agency you talk to, including us.
Ask for this
- A baseline before any work starts: which AI answers name you today, for questions you both agree on.
- The exact list of questions they will track, so each month can be compared with the last.
- Coverage of every engine your buyers use, with a plain explanation of where each one gets its sources.
- Reports tied to business results, such as AI referral visits and inquiries, beyond a tool's visibility score.
- Written pricing that says what is included, and a contract you can leave.
- Client work you can check yourself, with names and live websites.
Walk away if you see
- A guaranteed spot in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. No agency controls those answers.
- A plan built around llms.txt or special "AI files". Google says you don't need them.
- Mass-produced AI articles, fake reviews or planted Reddit posts.
- A 12-month contract before you have seen a baseline.
- Reluctance to show you what AI tools say about your business right now.
- No clear answer when you ask which search index ChatGPT or Copilot relies on.
What a proper GEO audit covers
- 1.Whether AI crawlers can reach your main pages (robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules, JavaScript rendering)
- 2.Indexing in both Google and Bing
- 3.What each engine says about you today, and whether it is accurate
- 4.Which competitors get named instead of you, and the sources behind them
- 5.The pages AI engines cite most in your category
- 6.Gaps between your pages and the passages AI tools quote
- 7.Whether your name, address, services and prices match across the web
- 8.Your reviews on the platforms AI tools read
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Boost your organic traffic and rank higher on search engines.
How AI search engines pick their sources
Most AI answers are built in five steps, and GEO work targets each one.
- 1Interpret
Works out what the person actually wants
Where GEO helps
Pages that answer the need behind the question
- 2Fan out
Splits the question into several smaller searches
Where GEO helps
Coverage of the sub-questions buyers ask
- 3Retrieve
Pulls candidate pages from a search index
Where GEO helps
Crawler access and indexing in Google and Bing
- 4Select
Picks the passages that answer each part
Where GEO helps
Short sections that lead with the answer
- 5Write and cite
Writes one answer and links a few sources
Where GEO helps
Specific facts, figures and sources worth quoting
What the research says
The paper that named GEO (Aggarwal et al., Princeton and IIT Delhi, KDD 2024) tested nine content changes. Adding citations, quotations and statistics raised visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.
Read the paperIn a 75,000-brand study, Ahrefs found that brand mentions on other websites had the strongest correlation with AI Overview visibility (0.664), well ahead of total backlinks (0.218).
See the studyIn March 2026, Ahrefs found that 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in Google's top 10 for the query, down from 76% the July before.
See the coverageAcross 15,000 queries, only 8% to 9% of the pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google's top 10 for the same question. For Perplexity it was 28.6%.
See the study
Where each AI engine gets its answers
You can't appear in an engine whose index you are missing from, so we check each one separately.
| AI engine | Where it finds sources | What we do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Google's search index, with query fan-out on top | Strong SEO, a complete Google Business Profile and pages Googlebot can read |
| Gemini | Google's index and Google's own data | The same work as AI Overviews |
| ChatGPT | OpenAI's crawler (OAI-SearchBot) plus third-party search providers | Allow OAI-SearchBot and keep the site well indexed in Bing |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing's index | Bing Webmaster Tools, a submitted sitemap and no Bingbot blocks |
| Perplexity | Its own index, built by PerplexityBot | Allow PerplexityBot and earn mentions on the sites it cites |
| Claude | Its own search crawler, Claude-SearchBot | Allow Claude-SearchBot |
Crawler names come from each company's documentation: OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Google.
What Google says about optimizing for AI
Google publishes a guide to AI features and your website. It is blunt about several things GEO agencies sell.
- You don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
- There is no special schema.org markup for generative AI search.
- Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success.
- To appear as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet.
Our take
We still add schema, because it earns rich results in regular search and other AI engines may use it to understand your business. We just don't sell it as a switch that turns on AI visibility.
Source: Google's AI optimization guide and AI features and your website.
GEO vs SEO vs AEO
The three overlap, and most businesses need all of them. Here is how they differ.
| Compare | SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in the list of results | Be the direct answer | Be named and cited in AI-written answers |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results pages | Featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants | ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot |
| What moves it | Relevance, links and technical health | Clear questions and answers, structured data | Mentions on other sites, quotable pages, crawler access |
| How you measure it | Rankings, clicks and traffic | Snippets and answer boxes won | Share of AI answers, citations, AI referral traffic |
The full comparison, with a 30-day plan, is in our guide: AEO vs SEO vs GEO.
More real AI answers
Chat tools and search engines both write answers now. Two more we captured on September 26, 2026.
Generative engine optimization FAQs
What businesses ask us before they start.
What is a generative engine optimization agency?
A GEO agency helps your business get mentioned and cited in answers written by AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity. The work covers crawler access, content that is easy to quote, consistent business facts across the web, mentions on other sites and monthly tracking of how often AI tools name you.
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO works to rank your pages in a list of results. GEO works to get your business named inside the answer an AI tool writes. The two overlap heavily, since most pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google's top 100, but GEO adds work SEO rarely covered: tracking AI answers, earning mentions on third-party lists and letting AI crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in. Our AEO vs SEO vs GEO guide covers the differences in depth.
How much do GEO services cost?
Most GEO agencies charge between $1,000 and $10,000 a month, and some enterprise projects run $10,000 to $50,000. Our plans are ₹14,000, ₹22,500 and ₹52,500 a month, about $146, $235 and $547 at September 2026 exchange rates. GEO comes inside our SEO plans because most of the work overlaps, and every plan runs month to month.
How long does GEO take to work?
ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews search the web when they answer, so a technical fix can show up within weeks. New content and mentions usually take two to three months to appear consistently, and longer in crowded categories. We track the same questions every month, so you can see the trend for yourself.
Can you guarantee my business will appear in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?
No. AI answers change from one session to the next, and no agency controls them. Google's own guidance tells site owners to be wary of tools that promise ranking success, and the same caution applies to agencies. What we can promise is honest tracking of the questions that matter to you, and work aimed at the sources those answers draw on.
Which AI engines do you optimize for?
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Claude. Each one finds its sources in a different place, as the table on this page shows, so we check access and visibility for each engine separately.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Not for Google. Its guide to AI features says you don't need new machine-readable files or AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. An llms.txt file is cheap to add, and this site has one, but we treat it as a small extra and never as the strategy.
How do you measure AI visibility?
We agree on a fixed set of buyer questions, run them through each engine every month, and record whether you are named, which pages get cited and what is said about you. Alongside that we report visits from AI tools in GA4, Google Search Console data (which counts AI Overview clicks inside regular search traffic) and inquiries where the customer says an AI tool sent them.
Do you work with businesses in the United States?
Yes. We work with clients in six countries, and everything runs online: audits, reports and video calls. Our plans are priced in Indian rupees, so the dollar amounts on this page are approximate conversions.
Does GEO work for local businesses?
Yes, and local answers lean heavily on listings and reviews. When we asked ChatGPT for emergency plumbers in Austin, it showed a map and quoted each company's star rating and review count. In a separate test about self-drive car rentals in Delhi, it credited one company's 4.7-star rating to "1,400+ reviews in the current business listing." A complete Google Business Profile and a steady flow of reviews matter as much as your website.
Is GEO worth it if AI tools send so little traffic?
For most sites, AI tools still send around 1% of visits or less. Two things make GEO worth doing anyway. In Google, brands cited in an AI Overview get about 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands on the same results page, according to Seer Interactive. And when people research a purchase for weeks, the few names an assistant recommends shape the shortlist before anyone visits a website.
Will GEO affect my Google rankings?
It should help them. The groundwork is the same: pages that load fast, answer questions clearly and earn mentions on reputable sites. Shortcuts such as mass-produced AI content or fake reviews can hurt both rankings and trust, and we don't use them.
What does a GEO audit include?
Crawler access, indexing in Google and Bing, what each AI engine says about you today, the competitors named instead of you, the sources cited in your category, and gaps in your content and listings. The full list is in the GEO agency checklist on this page. We run your first audit for free.
Sources
Every figure on this page links to where it came from. Checked on September 26, 2026.
- OpenAI hits 900 million weekly ChatGPT usersNewsweek, February 2026
- Google I/O 2026 keynote: AI Overviews and AI Mode usersGoogle, May 2026
- Local Consumer Review Survey 2026BrightLocal
- AIO impact on Google CTR: 2026 updateSeer Interactive, April 2026
- Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appearsPew Research Center, July 2025
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al.)arXiv, presented at KDD 2024
- AI Overview brand correlation study (75,000 brands)Ahrefs
- Google AI Overview citations from top-ranking pages drop sharplySearch Engine Journal, March 2026
- AI search overlap study (15,000 queries)Ahrefs
- AI features and your websiteGoogle Search Central
- Guide to optimizing for AI featuresGoogle Search Central
- Best GEO agencies, with pricing rangesMinuttia
- OpenAI crawlersOpenAI
- Perplexity crawlersPerplexity
- Anthropic crawlersAnthropic
- Google common crawlersGoogle Search Central
- Rupee to dollar rate (₹95.92 = $1)ExchangeRate-API, September 26, 2026
Services that feed your AI visibility
AI tools quote your website, your listings and the content around you, so GEO works best alongside these.
All SEO Services
Local, ecommerce, international and enterprise SEO, the ranking work GEO sits on.
See the serviceGoogle Business Profile
The listing, ratings and reviews AI tools quote when someone asks for a business nearby.
See the serviceContent Marketing
Articles and guides built around the questions your buyers put to AI tools.
See the serviceGoogle Ads Management
Leads within days while your AI visibility builds up.
See the servicePrefer to talk it through? +91 9540789284
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