If you’ve asked your agency about ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews and gotten a vague answer — “we’re keeping an eye on it,” “it’s still early” — you’re not imagining the dodge. Most marketing agencies genuinely aren’t ready to talk about Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), and it’s rarely because they’re hiding something malicious. It’s because GEO doesn’t fit neatly into how most agencies are built to operate — and that gap is quietly costing their clients visibility right now.
The real reason most agencies stay quiet
It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s structural.
Their reporting doesn’t have a column for it. Most agency dashboards are built around rank tracking — position #1 through #10 for a list of keywords. AI citation doesn’t work that way: there’s no fixed “position,” often no list at all, just a mention or an omission inside a generated answer. An agency whose entire client-reporting workflow is built on rank-tracking screenshots has no easy way to show GEO progress, so it’s easier to not bring it up.
It requires a different skill set. Content writers and paid media buyers — the bulk of most agency teams — don’t typically implement schema markup, audit entity clarity, or restructure content for machine extraction. That’s closer to technical SEO and structured-data engineering. Plenty of agencies simply don’t have anyone in-house who’s done this work.
It complicates the retainer conversation. GEO work — audits, schema, entity mapping, ongoing citation monitoring — doesn’t map cleanly onto “10 blog posts a month” or “20 hours of ad management.” Selling it means restructuring the retainer, which is friction most agencies would rather avoid until a client forces the issue.
None of this means GEO isn’t real or important. It means the businesses currently doing it are the ones who asked first, or who chose an agency that built the capability deliberately rather than reactively.
What it’s actually costing you to wait
This isn’t a hypothetical opportunity cost. The shift in where people start their research is already measurable: more than a third of consumers now say they start searches in an AI tool like ChatGPT instead of going straight to Google, and AI search tools collectively see hundreds of millions of weekly users. That’s not a future trend to prepare for — it’s a current, sizeable share of the research and buying journey that’s already happening without your input, if you’re not part of the answer.
The specific cost compounds quietly:
- Every AI answer that recommends a competitor instead of you is a lead that never reaches your website, your ads, or your sales team at all — it’s foreclosed before the funnel even starts.
- Every month without clear entity and schema signals is a month an AI system might be guessing at, or misdescribing, what your business actually does.
- Every competitor who starts GEO work before you gets a head start on the same compounding advantage traditional SEO rewarded early movers with in the 2000s and 2010s — except the field is far less crowded right now, which makes the first-mover advantage larger, not smaller.
None of this shows up on a traditional rank-tracking report. That’s exactly the problem.
What to ask your current agency
You don’t need to become a GEO expert to have this conversation. Ask directly:
- “What are you doing to get us cited in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers?” — A specific answer beats a reassuring one.
- “Have you implemented schema markup built for AI parsing, not just traditional SEO?” — Organization, Service, FAQPage and Article schema, specifically.
- “How do you measure AI citation, separately from search rankings?” — If the answer is “we don’t track that yet,” that’s an honest, useful data point.
- “Is our entity — what AI systems understand our business to be — clear and consistent everywhere you can check?”
A good agency will have real, specific answers, or will honestly say they’re building the capability. Vague reassurance is the signal to look elsewhere.
How we approach it differently
GEO at doubleBaRRiL isn’t a bolt-on service pitched after a client asks — it runs through the same technical SEO foundation, schema implementation, and content restructuring work as everything else we do, because that’s the only way it actually works. We don’t sell it as a magic fix, and we don’t promise guaranteed citations — nobody controls how ChatGPT or Perplexity weigh a source. What we do commit to is the audit, the implementation, and honest reporting on what’s actually changing.
If you want a concrete, free read on where your business currently stands — not a sales pitch, an actual test — run our GEO Readiness Quiz or the AI Visibility Checker. Either takes a few minutes and tells you exactly where the gap is.
If you’re ready to talk specifics, get in touch — and if your current agency ever gives you a straight answer to the four questions above, that’s a genuinely good sign to stay put.