Question 2 of 13 · Reporting & Transparency

Can I See a Redacted or Anonymised Monthly Report From a Client in My Industry?

Reporting is one of the clearest ways to understand how an agency thinks.

Before appointing an SEO or GEO agency, ask to see how it would communicate performance once the engagement begins. That does not mean the agency should hand over confidential information belonging to another client.

A responsible agency may refuse to distribute an existing client’s report even after names and obvious identifiers have been removed. Commercial performance, competitor information, strategic priorities and recommendations can still be sensitive.

It should, however, be capable of showing an anonymised, representative or demonstration version of the reporting structure you would receive.

Why This Question Matters

Reports reveal what an agency considers important.

If a monthly report consists mainly of keyword movements, impression charts and a list of completed tasks, that tells you something about how the programme is likely to be managed.

A useful report should provide context. It should explain what changed, why the change matters, what appears to be driving performance and what should happen next.

Where reliable tracking is available, reporting should also move beyond visibility into enquiries, qualified leads, conversions, revenue or other outcomes relevant to the organisation.

If GEO or AI Search is part of the engagement, the report should make that work visible too.

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

A strong agency should be able to demonstrate the structure of its reporting without compromising another client’s confidentiality.

Red Flags to Watch For

• The agency cannot show any example of how it reports before you sign.
• Reports consist largely of automated charts with little interpretation.
• Only positive ranking movements are highlighted.
• Completed activities are presented as if they were business outcomes.
• AI performance is represented mainly through screenshots.
• There is no competitor context.
• Commercial outcomes are ignored even where reliable conversion data is available.
• The agency appears too willing to share another client’s sensitive information.

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media does not believe that another client’s confidential reporting should be circulated simply to help win a new account.

Client reports can contain commercially sensitive performance data, strategic priorities, competitive intelligence, technical findings and recommendations even when the company name has been removed.

Instead, we can demonstrate a representative or anonymised reporting structure showing the type of measurement, interpretation and strategic analysis that would be used.

Depending on the programme, reporting can combine organic search performance, technical SEO, content and authority development, competitor movement, conversion data and AI Search visibility.

Where GEO forms part of the engagement, this can include defined prompt coverage, brand visibility, citations, source analysis, competitor share of voice, comparison presence and recommendation visibility.

The objective is not to produce the largest possible report. It is to give decision-makers enough evidence to understand what changed, why it matters and what CGO Media recommends doing next.

Question 3 of 13 · Commercial Measurement

Which Metrics Do You Treat as Success — Rankings and Impressions, or Enquiries and Revenue?

Rankings and impressions matter. They can show whether an organisation is becoming more visible for relevant searches and whether search engines are increasingly surfacing its content.

But visibility is not automatically commercial success.

A website can gain rankings, impressions and traffic while generating very little additional business. Equally, a smaller increase in highly relevant search visibility can sometimes produce substantially greater commercial value.

The same principle applies to AI Search. Being mentioned by an AI platform may be interesting, but the importance of that visibility depends on the context, the query, the type of appearance and whether it contributes to the organisation’s wider objectives.

Why This Question Matters

SEO reporting can become misleading when activity and visibility metrics are treated as final outcomes.

An agency may report that hundreds of keywords improved, impressions increased substantially or organic sessions reached a new high. Those developments can be positive, but they do not answer the most important commercial question:

For a lead-generation business, that may mean enquiries and qualified opportunities. For ecommerce, it may mean transactions, revenue and customer acquisition. For another organisation, the objective could involve registrations, applications, appointments, downloads, subscriptions or another defined conversion.

The appropriate commercial metric will differ between organisations. The important point is that the agency understands the difference between search visibility and business performance.

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

A strong answer does not dismiss rankings or impressions. It explains where they sit within a broader measurement framework.

Red Flags to Watch For

• Success is defined mainly by the number of keywords ranking.
• Large impression increases are celebrated without examining whether the searches are relevant.
• Traffic growth is reported without conversion or lead-quality analysis where that data is available.
• Branded and non-branded search performance are combined in ways that obscure what actually changed.
• AI mentions are reported as success without distinguishing between a mention, citation, comparison or recommendation.
• The agency makes no attempt to connect search activity with CRM, ecommerce, call or revenue data where appropriate access exists.
• The definition of success appears to change according to whichever metric improved that month.

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media treats rankings, impressions, organic visibility and AI visibility as important indicators, but not automatically as the final measure of success.

Where reliable tracking allows it, commercial performance should be evaluated through enquiries, qualified leads, conversions, revenue or the equivalent outcome relevant to the organisation.

The objective is to understand the complete relationship between visibility and value:

Visibility → Engagement → Enquiries → Qualified Leads → Conversions → Revenue

AI-mediated discovery adds another layer to that analysis. A user may encounter an organisation inside an AI-generated answer without producing an immediately attributable organic click.

For that reason, GEO measurement can also examine whether the organisation is being retrieved, cited, compared and recommended across relevant AI Search environments.

The purpose of the measurement framework is not to undervalue visibility metrics. It is to understand where those metrics sit within the wider objective of generating sustainable business growth and measurable organisational value.

Question 4 of 13 · Guarantees & Accountability

Do You Guarantee Rankings or AI Placements?

The strongest answer to this question is usually no.

An SEO agency does not control Google’s organic search results. A GEO agency does not control which organisations, sources or citations an independent AI platform chooses when constructing an answer.

Agencies can influence the conditions that contribute to visibility. They can improve technical accessibility, information architecture, content quality, entity clarity, external evidence, authority, structured information and citation eligibility.

What they cannot responsibly do is promise a final position or AI recommendation that is ultimately determined by another company’s search or AI system.

Why This Question Matters

Guarantees are attractive because they appear to remove uncertainty from the buying decision.

Search does not work that way.

Organic rankings can change because of algorithm updates, competitor activity, technical changes, content developments, authority signals, search intent and many other factors outside an agency’s direct control.

AI-mediated search introduces additional uncertainty. Different systems may use different retrieval methods, sources, models and answer-construction processes. Outputs may also change as underlying information, platforms and models evolve.

The relevant distinction is therefore between what an agency can control, what it can influence and what remains under platform control.

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

A strong agency should reject artificial certainty while still being clear about what it is prepared to commit to.

• It does not guarantee a number-one organic ranking.
• It does not guarantee first-page visibility for a commercially important query.
• It does not guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity or another AI system will cite or recommend the organisation.
• It explains which factors it can directly control.
• It identifies the areas it can reasonably influence.
• It establishes measurable objectives and baselines.
• It reports transparently when performance does not develop as expected.
• It changes priorities when evidence supports a different approach.

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media does not guarantee first-page rankings, number-one Google positions, AI citations or AI recommendations.

Instead, the starting point is to establish the organisation’s current search and AI visibility and identify the factors that appear to be limiting performance.

Depending on the programme, work may involve technical foundations, information architecture, content quality, entity clarity, structured information, external evidence, source authority, citation eligibility and competitive visibility.

Those areas can be researched, improved and measured.

For GEO, the objective is to improve the information environment surrounding the organisation and increase the probability that it can be discovered, understood, retrieved, cited, compared and recommended across relevant AI-mediated search environments.

What CGO Media can commit to is an evidence-led process, transparent measurement, accountable execution and a willingness to change direction when the data shows that a different approach is required.

Question 5 of 13 · AI Visibility & Competitive Intelligence

Can I See a Live AI Visibility Dashboard — Not a Screenshot — and a Competitor Share-of-Voice View?

A screenshot can prove that an organisation appeared in one AI-generated answer at one moment in time.

It cannot demonstrate sustained AI visibility.

It also tells you very little about competitors. A brand may appear occasionally while several competing organisations are being surfaced far more consistently across the questions that matter commercially.

An agency selling GEO should therefore be able to demonstrate how AI visibility is measured systematically and how your performance is compared with other organisations competing for the same discovery opportunities.

Why This Question Matters

AI-generated answers are dynamic. Results can vary according to the platform, wording of the prompt, location, available sources, model changes and the time at which the question is asked.

That makes isolated appearances difficult to interpret.

The more useful question is whether an organisation appears consistently across a representative set of commercially relevant prompts and how frequently that happens relative to competitors.

Competitive measurement is particularly important because an organisation’s absence is itself incomplete information. You also need to know who appeared instead.

What a Strong AI Visibility Dashboard Should Help You Understand

The exact interface will vary according to the technology being used. The important issue is not the appearance of the dashboard but the quality and consistency of the underlying measurement.

Red Flags to Watch For

• The agency relies mainly on screenshots of favourable AI answers.
• There is no defined competitor set.
• AI visibility is reduced to one score without a clear explanation of how it is calculated.
• Brand mentions and source citations are treated as the same measurement.
• There is no historical or repeat measurement.
• Prompts appear to have been selected after the agency found favourable results.
• The agency can display a dashboard but cannot explain how the data should influence strategy.

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media can demonstrate AI visibility and competitor share-of-voice reporting within a live reporting environment without exposing confidential client information.

Depending on the programme and available measurement technology, the analysis can include AI visibility, brand mentions, citations, source visibility, prompt coverage, competitor visibility, platform-level performance and changes over time.

Competitor analysis is central to that process.

If a competitor is consistently appearing where the organisation is absent, the next question is why. That can lead to investigation of differences in entity clarity, content evidence, external authority, source coverage, citation eligibility and the wider information environment surrounding each organisation.

This changes AI monitoring from a reporting exercise into a research and prioritisation tool.

AI visibility should also remain separate from commercial performance measurement. It can be interpreted alongside analytics, Google Search Console, conversion information and CRM data where available, rather than being treated as a replacement for them.

Question 6 of 13 · Technical SEO

Walk Me Through a Recent Technical Audit — What Did You Find, What Did You Fix, and What Changed?

Almost any SEO platform can crawl a website and produce a long list of warnings.

That does not make the output a useful technical SEO audit.

The real skill lies in determining which findings genuinely affect crawling, indexation, rendering, internal authority, page performance or search visibility — and which are low-priority technical noise.

Asking an agency to walk through a recent audit forces the conversation beyond software and into diagnosis, prioritisation, implementation and validation.

Why This Question Matters

Technical SEO audits can easily create the appearance of complexity.

A crawler may identify hundreds or thousands of URLs with warnings, but the number of reported issues tells you very little about their actual importance.

Ten structural problems affecting important templates can matter far more than thousands of low-value warnings affecting URLs that have little or no search significance.

A technical specialist therefore needs to interpret the website as a system: how search engines discover URLs, how internal authority moves through the site, which pages can be indexed, how canonicalisation is handled, how content is rendered and whether search engines are spending resources on the right areas.

The audit should ultimately lead to decisions, not simply a larger spreadsheet.

What a Strong Technical Audit Process Looks Like

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

The agency should be able to discuss a technical problem in specific terms without revealing confidential information about another client.

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media treats a technical audit as the beginning of an improvement process rather than the delivery of a static document.

Depending on the website and available access, analysis can combine crawl data, Google Search Console, server logs, XML sitemaps, robots directives, canonicalisation, redirects, structured data, internal linking, page performance and Core Web Vitals.

Findings can include inefficient crawling of low-value URLs, weak internal authority distribution, canonical inconsistencies, redirect chains, outdated sitemaps, duplicate or overlapping content, rendering issues and incomplete structured information.

Those findings are then prioritised according to factors such as likely search impact, number and importance of affected pages, dependencies, implementation complexity and technical risk.

Where CGO Media is not implementing a change directly, the recommendation should be sufficiently clear for a developer to understand what needs to change, where it needs to change and what the intended outcome is.

After implementation, important fixes should be re-tested. That may involve another crawl, URL inspection, log analysis, performance testing or another appropriate validation method.

The objective is not to produce the longest possible technical audit. It is to establish a reliable technical baseline and then remove the constraints that are most likely to interfere with search discovery, interpretation and performance.

Question 7 of 13 · Page Experience & Performance

How Do You Measure Core Web Vitals, and What Scores Do You Consider Acceptable for My Platform?

Core Web Vitals are frequently reduced to a PageSpeed Insights screenshot or a Lighthouse performance score.

That is not enough.

A serious technical SEO agency should understand the difference between field data collected from real users and lab data generated within a controlled testing environment.

It should also understand that performance needs to be evaluated across relevant page types, templates and devices rather than judging an entire website from a single homepage test.

The Core Web Vitals Thresholds

Google’s current Core Web Vitals assessment focuses on three principal metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.

How Core Web Vitals Should Be Measured

What Scores Should Be Considered Acceptable?

The published “good” thresholds provide a useful baseline, but they should not automatically become the maximum ambition for every website.

Where practical, important templates should operate with enough performance margin that normal fluctuations do not continually push them between good and poor classifications.

At the same time, performance work has to be proportionate to the platform.

An ecommerce platform, publishing environment, SaaS application and relatively simple lead-generation website may have very different technical constraints and functionality requirements. The objective should be strong real-world performance without damaging functionality that genuinely matters to users or the business.

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media prioritises real-user field data where sufficient data is available and uses laboratory testing to investigate the causes of performance problems.

Analysis can combine Google Search Console Core Web Vitals reporting, Chrome UX Report data, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse diagnostics.

Performance should also be considered by device, page type and template rather than treating the website as one uniform page.

Depending on the platform, priority templates might include the homepage, service pages, category pages, product pages, editorial content and key conversion pages.

Diagnosis may involve server response times, caching, rendering behaviour, JavaScript execution, third-party scripts, images, fonts, layout stability and other resources that affect loading or interaction.

Changes should then be tested to confirm that the intended improvement has actually occurred and that important functionality has not been damaged in the process.

The objective is not a decorative 100/100 screenshot. It is a website that performs strongly for real users and, where technically achievable, operates safely within Google’s “good” Core Web Vitals thresholds.

Question 8 of 13 · Entity Authority & Knowledge Graphs

How Would You Build Entity Authority and Knowledge Graph Presence for a Business Like Mine?

Modern search systems increasingly need to understand more than webpages and keywords. They need to determine which organisation an information source refers to, what that organisation does, which subjects it is associated with and what evidence supports those associations.

That makes entity clarity an increasingly important part of both traditional search optimisation and AI-mediated discovery.

A serious SEO and GEO agency should therefore be able to explain how it would strengthen the information environment surrounding your organisation — not simply tell you that it will add Organization schema to the website.

Structured data can help machines interpret information, but entity authority develops through a much wider combination of identity, relationships, topical association, evidence, consistency and independent corroboration.

Why This Question Matters

Search engines and AI systems operate across a distributed information environment.

Information about a business may exist on its own website, professional profiles, directories, research repositories, review platforms, media publications, industry associations, databases and many other external sources.

Those references are useful only if systems can determine that they describe the same underlying organisation and can understand the relationships between the organisation, its people, products, services, locations and areas of expertise.

Inconsistency can weaken that environment. Company descriptions may differ significantly between sources. Important people may not be clearly connected with the organisation. Research may not be associated with its authors. Services may be described inconsistently. Locations, names or profile information may conflict.

Entity optimisation aims to make those relationships clearer, more consistent and easier to verify.

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

Red Flags to Watch For

• The agency describes entity optimisation as simply adding Organization schema.
• Knowledge Graph presence is treated as synonymous with obtaining a Knowledge Panel.
• The agency guarantees that it can obtain a Google Knowledge Panel.
• There is no assessment of independent third-party evidence.
• Conflicting company names, descriptions, people, locations or services across external sources are ignored.
• The strategy consists mainly of publishing more webpages without defining the relationships between them.
• The agency cannot explain how entity clarity could influence AI retrieval, citation, comparison or recommendation.

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media begins by defining the organisation as an entity rather than immediately reaching for structured data.

That means establishing what the business is, what it does, which people represent it, where it operates, which products or services it provides and which subjects it can legitimately demonstrate expertise in.

The next stage is to examine the organisation’s first-party entity architecture. This can include relationships between the organisation, services, products, people, authors, locations, research, publications and topics.

About pages, expert profiles, research assets, internal linking, structured data, consistent naming and genuine sameAs relationships can all contribute to making that architecture easier to interpret.

The external evidence layer is then assessed. Depending on the organisation, that may include industry publications, professional profiles, research repositories, recognised directories, associations, media coverage, reviews, citations and other authoritative third-party sources.

Material inconsistencies should be identified. If the organisation is described differently across important sources, its people are weakly connected with it or its services and expertise are difficult to reconcile, those gaps can become part of the optimisation programme.

CGO Media also examines topical and relationship authority: whether the wider evidence environment repeatedly and credibly associates the organisation with the subjects for which it wants to be discovered.

For AI Search and GEO, the objective is to determine whether those signals provide stronger support for the organisation to be discovered, understood, retrieved, cited, compared and recommended.

Question 9 of 13 · AI Citations & Evidence

Show Me a Brand You Helped Get Cited in AI Answers. What Specifically Changed?

This is one of the most important questions to ask an agency selling GEO or AI Search services because AI citation claims are particularly easy to overstate.

A screenshot showing a brand cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI system does not, by itself, prove that the agency caused the citation.

The brand may already have been appearing. The answer may have changed independently. Other sources may have strengthened. The model or retrieval system may have changed. The query may have been selected because it produced a favourable result.

A stronger GEO case therefore needs to show the baseline, the evidence gaps, the work undertaken and the pattern of visibility measured afterwards.

Why This Question Matters

GEO is still a developing discipline, and the market contains a mixture of genuine experimentation, useful measurement and unsupported claims.

It is relatively easy to ask an AI system enough questions until a favourable brand appearance is found. It is much harder to establish whether visibility improved consistently across a predetermined set of relevant questions.

There is also an important distinction between mention, citation, comparison and recommendation.

A brand name appearing somewhere in an answer is not equivalent to its website being used as a source, and neither automatically means that the system recommended the organisation.

What a Strong GEO Case Should Demonstrate

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media does not believe a named client should be used as proof of AI citation success without appropriate permission, nor should a single favourable AI answer be presented as evidence of direct causation.

Where confidentiality applies, the more responsible approach is to demonstrate the methodology through an anonymised case structure.

A representative scenario might begin with an organisation that performs reasonably well in traditional search but appears inconsistently across AI-mediated discovery. Analysis may identify fragmented evidence, weak entity relationships, unclear authorship, limited independent corroboration or content that is difficult to extract and support as a source.

Work can then be organised around areas such as entity architecture, citation eligibility and the external evidence layer.

Specific interventions might include strengthening organisational and author relationships, improving evidence-rich content, clarifying source attribution, creating research or reference assets, resolving inconsistent entity information and developing stronger independent corroboration.

The original prompt groups can then be re-measured to determine whether the organisation’s visibility changed and whether improvements extend across mentions, citations, comparisons or recommendations.

The evidence chain CGO Media looks for is therefore straightforward: baseline → identified evidence gaps → defined changes → repeated measurement → improved visibility across relevant query groups.

Question 10 of 13 · GEO Scope & Value

How Is GEO Work Different From Your Standard SEO — What Would I Actually Be Paying Extra For?

GEO overlaps significantly with good SEO. Technical accessibility, useful content, structured information, authority and a clearly understood organisation can contribute to visibility across both traditional and AI-mediated search.

That overlap is precisely why this question matters.

If an agency charges an additional fee for GEO, AI SEO, AEO or LLM optimisation, the client should be able to identify the additional research, measurement, analysis and implementation included in that service.

You should not be paying a premium simply because existing SEO work has been relabelled with AI terminology.

Why This Question Matters

The agency market now uses terms including GEO, AI SEO, AEO, LLM optimisation and AI Search optimisation.

Some of the work represented by those terms is genuinely additional. Some of it is established SEO practice presented under a new label.

There is nothing wrong with overlap. In fact, separating SEO and GEO into completely independent disciplines can create unnecessary duplication.

The important question is whether the GEO component introduces capabilities that would not otherwise be present in the standard SEO programme.

What Genuine GEO Work Can Add

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media does not treat GEO as a replacement for SEO.

Traditional search visibility still depends on strong technical foundations, information architecture, useful content, internal linking, authority and reliable measurement. Those foundations can also support AI-mediated discovery.

The additional GEO layer expands the programme into questions that conventional SEO reporting may not answer.

CGO Media can monitor representative prompt and query sets to assess whether an organisation is being retrieved, cited, compared or recommended across relevant AI Search environments.

That analysis can investigate which sources are being used, which competitors are appearing instead, what external evidence supports them and where the organisation’s own evidence environment appears weaker.

Depending on the programme, GEO work may include entity architecture, citation eligibility, evidence development, external corroboration, research assets, structured information, source authority and recommendation readiness.

The additional GEO component should also be visible in reporting through AI visibility measurement, citation analysis, source analysis, competitor comparisons and changes across defined prompt groups.

The integrated objective is straightforward: SEO supports discoverability and organic search performance; GEO extends that work into AI-mediated retrieval, citation, comparison and recommendation.

Question 11 of 13 · Pricing & Scope

What Are Your Monthly Retainer Ranges, and Exactly What Is Included at Each Level?

The headline monthly fee tells you very little about the value of an SEO or GEO programme unless you understand what is actually included.

Two agencies can both describe a proposal as an “SEO and GEO retainer” while providing substantially different levels of technical work, research, content production, authority development, AI Search measurement and senior strategic involvement.

The better question is therefore not simply “How much does it cost?”

It is “What capability, work and expertise does that investment actually buy?”

Why This Question Matters

SEO pricing is difficult to compare because the same terminology can describe very different services.

“Technical SEO” might mean a monthly automated crawl or ongoing technical investigation and implementation support. “Content” might mean one generic article or substantial research and evidence development. “GEO” might mean occasional AI screenshots or structured AI visibility, citation and competitor measurement.

This becomes particularly important when comparing agencies with significantly different monthly retainers.

The client needs sufficient detail to understand whether the difference reflects more execution, broader scope, deeper expertise, better measurement, greater senior involvement — or simply a different price.

What Should Be Defined in the Retainer?

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media does not believe a useful retainer should be selected solely from a generic price table without understanding the organisation’s actual search environment.

Appropriate scope depends on factors including website complexity, competitive intensity, target markets, technical condition, content requirements, existing authority, the scale of the evidence gap and the level of AI Search measurement required.

The starting point should therefore be to understand the current environment and the gap between the organisation and the competitors or sources already winning visibility.

A CGO Media proposal should make clear which areas are included. Depending on the agreed programme, those may include technical SEO, content and research, entity development, authority work, AI visibility monitoring, citation analysis, competitor measurement, reporting and strategic oversight.

Equally important, significant exclusions should be clear. A client should not discover several months into a programme that an important area they reasonably believed was included requires an entirely separate budget.

The objective is that the client understands what the monthly investment buys, why that work has been prioritised and how its impact will be evaluated.

Question 12 of 13 · Contracts, Access & Ownership

What Is the Minimum Term, the Notice Period, and Who Owns the Content and Assets if We Part Ways?

The quality of an SEO or GEO relationship should not be judged only by how it begins.

You should also understand exactly what happens when it ends.

Before signing an agreement, the minimum term, notice period, account access, ownership of commissioned content and treatment of data should all be clear.

These details may seem less exciting than rankings, AI visibility or growth projections, but they determine whether the organisation retains control of the assets, accounts and historical information created during the engagement.

Why This Question Matters

SEO and GEO programmes can create a substantial digital asset base over time.

That may include website content, research, technical documentation, structured data, dashboards, keyword and prompt research, reporting history, digital PR assets, creative materials and datasets.

The agency may also work inside business-critical systems such as analytics platforms, Google Search Console, CMS environments, tag management systems, advertising accounts, CRM systems and specialist SEO or AI visibility technology.

If ownership and access are not defined from the beginning, ending the relationship can create unnecessary operational risk.

What Should Be Clear Before You Sign?

Business-Critical Accounts Should Not Become Hostages

Wherever practical, core business accounts should be created and controlled by the client, with the agency receiving the access required to perform its work.

This can include analytics, Google Search Console, the website CMS, tag management, business profiles and other systems that remain important regardless of which agency is appointed.

An agency should not need to control ownership of essential business infrastructure simply to maintain the commercial relationship.

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media believes the commercial terms of an engagement should be understood before the programme begins.

The agreed proposal and contract should define the scope, applicable term, notice requirements, fees and relevant ownership arrangements.

Wherever practical, business-critical accounts should remain client-owned or client-controlled, with CGO Media receiving the permissions required to perform the agreed work.

Ownership of commissioned deliverables should follow the terms of the agreement. Third-party platforms, licensed datasets, specialist software and proprietary agency systems may have separate usage or licensing conditions and should not be confused with client-owned deliverables.

If an engagement ends, the objective should be an orderly transition. Depending on the agreed scope, that can include completed deliverables, relevant data exports, implementation documentation, outstanding recommendations and appropriate account access.

Question 13 of 13 · Team, Expertise & Accountability

Who Will Actually Work on My Account Week to Week, and What Is Their Experience?

The people presenting an agency during the sales process are not necessarily the people who will work on your account after the contract is signed.

That distinction matters.

SEO and GEO now span technical SEO, content, research, entity development, structured data, digital PR, analytics, AI visibility measurement, citation analysis and commercial reporting.

You do not necessarily need a large team. You do need to know who is responsible for the work, what experience they have and how specialist expertise is brought into the account when required.

Why This Question Matters

Agency pitches often involve senior people because those individuals are best placed to explain strategy, answer difficult questions and establish confidence.

The problem begins when that expertise disappears immediately after appointment.

A client may believe they are buying access to experienced technical, strategic and AI Search specialists but subsequently discover that most decisions are routed through an account manager with limited specialist involvement.

Account management itself is valuable. Good communication, organisation and coordination matter. But account management should not become a substitute for the expertise the programme requires.

The agency should therefore be able to explain both the day-to-day delivery structure and the senior specialist oversight supporting it.

What a Strong Answer Looks Like

Ask About Experience Relevant to the Work

Years in marketing alone do not necessarily demonstrate expertise in the work your programme requires.

If technical SEO is important, ask what technical problems the relevant specialist has actually diagnosed and resolved.

If GEO is a major part of the proposal, ask what the person responsible has actually done in AI Search measurement, citation analysis, source research, entity authority and competitor visibility.

Relevant experience should connect directly with the capabilities being sold.

Red Flags to Watch For

The CGO Media Approach

CGO Media believes clients should understand who is responsible for their programme and where specialist expertise enters the work.

Different stages of a programme may require different capabilities. Technical investigation, content and research, entity development, AI Search measurement, digital PR and commercial analysis do not always require the same specialist.

Those disciplines should nevertheless operate within one connected strategy rather than as unrelated agency departments producing independent activity.

Senior involvement is particularly important when priorities need to change, technical risk is significant, performance moves unexpectedly or developments in search and AI platforms require the strategy to be reassessed.

CGO Media’s wider research into areas including AI answer construction, citation behaviour, entity authority, source selection and recommendation visibility should also remain connected to client delivery rather than existing only as separate published research.

The objective is straightforward: the expertise presented during the appointment process should remain connected to the thinking, measurement and decisions that shape the programme after the contract is signed.

Agency Evaluation Framework · SEO · GEO · AI Search

The 100-Point SEO & GEO Agency Evaluation Scorecard

The thirteen questions above are designed to expose the difference between a convincing sales presentation and a credible search capability.

This scorecard provides a simple way to turn those answers into a more structured agency evaluation.

It assesses eight areas covering AI Search and GEO capability, measurement, technical SEO, entity authority, commercial accountability, evidence, contractual transparency and the people actually responsible for delivery.

The maximum score is 100 points.

The Scorecard

How to Score Each Area

You do not need to turn the evaluation into a complicated mathematical exercise. A simple three-level assessment can make different agency proposals much easier to compare.

How to Interpret the Final Score

Final Evaluation · SEO · GEO · AI Search

Choosing an SEO, AI & GEO Agency Should Be an Evidence-Based Decision

SEO still matters. Technical accessibility, indexation, content quality, authority, internal architecture and commercial measurement remain fundamental to search performance.

What has changed is the environment in which organisations are now being discovered.

Businesses can increasingly be surfaced through AI-generated answers, summaries, comparisons and recommendations as well as conventional search results.

That creates additional questions for any agency claiming expertise in GEO or AI Search.

Which platforms are being measured? Which competitors are appearing? Which sources are being selected? Is the organisation clearly understood as an entity? Is there sufficient independent evidence? Is the business being cited, compared or recommended — and can any change be measured consistently over time?

Before You Appoint an Agency, You Should Be Able to Answer:

The Strongest Agency May Not Make the Biggest Promise

Search marketing has always contained promises that responsible agencies cannot completely control.

AI Search creates another opportunity for those promises to become exaggerated.

No agency controls Google’s rankings. No agency controls which sources an independent AI system will retrieve for every query. No agency can guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or another platform will consistently cite or recommend a particular organisation.

What an agency can control is the quality of its research, technical work, evidence development, measurement, strategic decisions and implementation.

That is where accountability should begin.

Frequently Asked Questions · SEO · GEO · AI Search

Questions About Choosing an SEO & GEO Agency

These questions summarise some of the most important issues businesses and organisations should consider when evaluating an SEO, GEO or AI Search agency.