Generative Engine Optimisation — GEO — means getting your brand named when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot for a recommendation. It is a different job from SEO, it costs roughly what a paid media retainer costs, and almost no ecommerce agency offers it yet.
That last part is the reason to pay attention. The agencies competing for "best Shopify marketing agency" mostly don't sell this, which means the ground is still open.
What GEO actually is
SEO gets you a blue link on a results page. GEO gets your brand named inside the answer, before the user ever sees a list of links.
The mechanism people miss: an AI only looks something up when it doesn't already know. Ask it "what is ROAS" and it answers from memory — nobody gets cited. Ask it "best Shopify marketing agency for a $2M brand" and it has to search, because that changes over time and involves real companies.
So GEO work concentrates on the queries where retrieval actually fires:
| Query type | Does AI search? | Citation opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Definitions ("what is CAC") | Almost never | None |
| How-to ("how to lower CAC") | Sometimes | Low |
| Current data ("2026 CAC benchmarks") | Usually | Good |
| Buying ("best X for Y", "what does X cost") | Almost always | Highest |
Most brands publish into the first two rows and wonder why nothing gets cited.
What the work involves
Four parts, roughly in this order:
- Technical readiness. `llms.txt`, an AI-crawler policy in `robots.txt`, and structured data (Organization, Article, FAQPage, Product). This is the fast bit — usually a week — and it's necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
- Content aimed at retrieval-triggering queries. Buying-intent pages, comparisons, pricing transparency, "best X" lists. Written with a direct answer in the opening lines, because that's the passage an AI lifts.
- Entity clarity. Being consistently described the same way across your own properties, so a model can tell what you are and who you serve.
- Measurement. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report showing citations directly. GA4 can segment referrals from `chatgpt.com`, `perplexity.ai` and `copilot.microsoft.com`.
Step 1 is what most "GEO packages" sell. Steps 2 and 3 are where the results come from.
What it costs
| Provider type | Monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| SEO agency adding GEO as an upsell | $500 – $1,500 | Usually just the technical layer |
| Specialist GEO retainer | $2,000 – $5,000 | Technical + content aimed at buying queries |
| Enterprise "AI visibility" platform | $5,000+ | Tooling and monitoring, often without content |
Basic charges $2,000/month for GEO, or $3,000/month combined with performance marketing — published on our pricing page.
Be wary of the bottom row. Adding `llms.txt` and some schema is a one-week job, not a monthly retainer. If a proposal is mostly technical setup billed monthly, ask what happens in month two.
How to tell whether you need it
Three checks, all free, all doable this afternoon.
1. Ask the AI. Open ChatGPT with search on and ask the question your buyers ask — "best [your category] brand for [your customer]". See who gets named. If your competitors appear and you don't, that's the gap.
2. Check Bing's AI Performance report. Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance shows total citations from Microsoft's Copilots. It's the only direct citation number publicly available. Zero means exactly what it says.
3. Look at what you've published. If your blog is mostly how-to content, you're publishing into rows one and two of that table. Good content, wrong queries for citation.
The honest limitations
Worth saying, because this category attracts overclaiming:
- Nobody can guarantee a citation. There's no submission process and no ranking dial. You improve the odds; you don't buy the outcome.
- It's slower than paid ads. Realistically six to ten weeks before citations appear, and longer on a new domain.
- Volume is currently low. AI referral traffic is a small fraction of search traffic today. The argument is that it's growing and cheap to own now — not that it replaces paid media this quarter.
- Technical setup alone does almost nothing. We've audited sites with perfect `llms.txt`, correct schema and open crawler policies sitting at zero citations, because everything they published was content an AI already knows.
If someone promises guaranteed AI rankings, they're selling something that doesn't exist.
Why we bundle it with paid
Paid ads capture people searching today. GEO captures the ones who'll ask an assistant next year. They also share a foundation — both need a clear offer, a page that converts, and honest measurement.
The brands where this works best already have the fundamentals right. If your landing page converts at 1.4%, AI visibility just sends more people to a page that doesn't work. That's why we fix the funnel first — the same reason a home goods brand got a 2.1× conversion lift from one page rebuild before we touched anything else.
What to do today
Open ChatGPT, turn search on, and ask it to recommend brands or agencies in your category. Write down who it names.
That list is your real competitive set for the next few years, and if you're not on it, you now know the exact gap. Do the same in Perplexity — the answers differ more than you'd expect.
Then check Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance for your own citation count. If it's zero, book a 20-minute call and we'll tell you which queries are winnable for your brand — before you pay anything.