GEO agency vs SEO agency: Why Not Both?

A good SEO agency covers five things:

• Technical SEO, so search engines can crawl, render and index your site
• Content that answers what your customers are searching for
• Links and digital PR that build authority
• Migrations that protect your rankings when platforms or URLs change
• Reporting on rankings, clicks and conversions

Where SEO-only agencies fall short is everything that happens after Google. Your rankings can look great while ChatGPT recommends three of your competitors, and nothing in a standard SEO report will tell you.

Plenty of SEO agencies have put "GEO" on their website without changing how they write content, prioritise technical work or report. Same work, new label.

The only line that genuinely doesn't overlap is reporting. That's an argument for one team with better reporting, not two teams with two strategies.

I platforms don't have a secret list of sources. They retrieve from search indexes.

Even OpenAI does it. In August 2025, The Information reported that OpenAI had been using SerpApi, a service that scrapes Google results, to help ChatGPT answer real-time questions on news, sport and finance. Meta, Apple and Perplexity were reportedly SerpApi customers too.

That came after Google knocked back OpenAI's request for direct access to its index in 2024, according to documents from the US antitrust case. Search Engine Land summed it up: "Google's search index remains the foundation of online discovery."

And as I covered in SEO vs GEO, 94% of Google's AI Overviews still cite at least one page from the top 20 organic results.

So a GEO agency without real SEO capability is working on the last step with nothing underneath it. An SEO agency that ignores AI is building the foundation and never checking whether anyone's using it.

Ahrefs is careful to say this is correlation, not causation. But look at the top of that list. Mentions, branded anchors and branded search are all brand signals, and authority metrics like Domain Rating and referring domains still make the cut.

In practice, most of that comes from digital PR. The same campaign that earns a link for SEO earns a mention for GEO. Run it as one program and every placement works twice.

Split it across two agencies and you've got two teams pitching the same journalists with different angles. That's a fast way to burn a good media relationship.

This is where a lot of GEO-only offers fall over.

In January, SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai published research where 600 volunteers ran 12 brand recommendation prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI nearly 3,000 times. The odds of getting the same list of brands twice were less than 1 in 100. The odds of getting them in the same order were closer to 1 in 1,000.

As Rand Fishkin put it, "any tool that gives a 'ranking position in AI' is full of baloney."

What did hold up was how often a brand appeared. For some intents, the same brands showed up in 60% to 90% of responses. Visibility across lots of runs is measurable. A single position isn't.

We see this a lot, usually after a business brings in a GEO specialist alongside its existing SEO agency.

• You pay twice for the same work. Technical fixes, content and digital PR sit in both scopes. We break down what that duplication costs in How Much Does GEO Cost?
• Strategies pull against each other. One agency rewrites a page so AI can extract it, the other rewrites it to target a keyword. Who owns the page?
• Technical work gets stuck. The GEO agency wants AI crawler access and schema changes, the SEO agency has its own priorities, and your developers get two sets of tickets. We've had clients block AI crawlers to save server load, then realise later they'd taken themselves out of AI answers. That's a call one team should own.
• Nobody owns revenue. The SEO report says rankings are up, the GEO report says citations are up, and nobody can tell you whether either made you money.

The answer isn't a GEO agency or an SEO agency. It's one team running both as a single campaign, where every technical fix, piece of content and PR placement is planned to help you rank and get cited at the same time.

Questions worth asking any agency you're talking to:

• Can you show me where my brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Mode today, and how it's moved over the last quarter?
• How does your technical SEO work feed AI citations?
• Is your digital PR planned to earn links and mentions at the same time?
• Do you report AI visibility, rankings, branded search and conversions in one place?
• Is GEO a separate line item? If so, which parts of it don't overlap with my SEO scope?
• Who's doing the work: your team, or a white-label partner?

If they answer with data, you're in good hands. If they answer with a second proposal, you've got your answer.