SEO Got You Ranked. GEO Gets You Quoted.

In 2024, your buyer typed “best CRM for SMB” into Google. In 2026, they ask ChatGPT. Claude. Perplexity. Gemini. McKinsey projects a 25% drop in traditional search traffic by year-end as AI captures share. Where SEO competes for one of ten blue links, Generative Engine Optimization competes for one of three to five sources an LLM names inside its answer. I run GEO services built on the Princeton and Georgia Tech academic methodology, the only peer-reviewed playbook for AI citation. From $1,500/mo. No 12-month contracts.

Why I built this service

I started watching AI citation share for my own clients in late 2024, mostly out of curiosity. The pattern that emerged over the next 18 months convinced me to spin GEO out as its own service line.

One client, a niche B2B SaaS doing $4M ARR, was ranked position 1 on Google for “best [their category] software” and named in three of the top ten review-site listicles. They were also completely absent from ChatGPT and Perplexity answers for the same query. Their main competitor, ranked position 5 on Google with weaker backlinks, was the second-named brand in 8 of the 10 AI engines I tested. The SEO gap was meaningful, the GEO gap was a chasm.

Six months of work — adding statistics, inline citations to authoritative sources, FAQ sections with FAQPage schema, comparison tables, an llms.txt file, multi-schema stacking, and one original-research mini-study — moved them from zero AI citations to first or second mention in 7 of the 10 prompts. Organic clicks from AI engines (the GA4 channel where the referrer is chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini.google.com) grew from negligible to about 8% of total organic traffic. Pipeline from those clicks converted at roughly 2x the rate of standard Google organic.

That was the proof I needed. GEO is real, the playbook is testable, and the agencies pricing it like SEO are either undercharging or overcharging because nobody has worked out the market yet. I price mine where I think the actual work cost lives: $1,500 to $4,000 per month depending on tier, with a $300 audit as a lead-magnet entry.

SEO vs AEO vs GEO (the layered reality, not a binary)

The three are layered, not substitutive. Google’s own AI Search documentation (Dec 2025) states clearly that optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. I treat GEO as an additional layer that demands new artifacts (statistics, citations, schema combos, llms.txt, entity work) on top of a sound SEO foundation.

Pricing tiers

Most clients start with the $300 audit and graduate to Foundation or Acceleration after 30 days. About 20% start direct on Acceleration because they have already done the homework and want to skip the audit phase.

The 15 GEO tactics I work on (Princeton-validated)

From the Princeton GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) tested across 10,000 real queries, plus 2025-2026 agency replication studies. Ranked by impact.

Tactics 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 are the bulk of the cornerstone-page refactor work. Tactic 12 (original research) is where the highest-ROI lift comes from on Acceleration and Domination tiers. Tactic 13 (entity consistency) is the slowest-moving but compounds the longest.

If you want to see where your brand currently sits across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, book a free 20-min audit. I run the citation check live during the call.

Per-tier deep-dive

GEO Starter Audit — $300 one-time

Five business days. The starter audit is built to be a low-commitment entry that shows real value, not a sales pitch in audit clothing.

The deliverables: an AI citation baseline across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini for 10 target prompts (you choose the prompts during kickoff); a Princeton 15-tactic scoring of 8 to 10 priority pages, with each tactic marked present, absent, or partial; an llms.txt audit (or written from scratch if you do not have one); a robots.txt audit checking for the common GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot blocking mistake; a schema stack audit of your top 5 pages; and a 30-day prioritized quick-win list ranked by impact and effort. Plus a 45-minute walkthrough call.

About 70% of starter audit clients move to the $1,500 or $2,500 tier within 30 days because the audit surfaces enough work to justify the retainer. The other 30% ship the quick-win list internally and revisit later. Both are honest outcomes.

GEO Foundation — $1,500/mo

For SMB and solo-practitioner brands that need to be cited in their category but do not yet have the budget for the Acceleration tier.

Monthly deliverables: Otterly.AI monitoring (4-platform coverage with Looker Studio dashboards); monthly citation report covering share-of-voice for 10 target prompts; two cornerstone pages refactored using the Princeton tactics; llms.txt and robots.txt deployed and maintained; schema stack (Article + FAQPage + BreadcrumbList + Organization + Person) shipped on the refactored pages; FAQ section built out on the top 5 pages with FAQPage schema; Reddit and Quora brand-mention monitoring (tactic 10); 30-minute monthly strategy call; Slack or WhatsApp access with four-business-hour response.

Otterly cost is passed through at vendor pricing (~$189/mo Standard tier). No markup. You are paying $1,500 for my time, not for tools you could buy direct.

GEO Acceleration — $2,500/mo (most popular)

For mid-market SaaS and established service businesses where AI citation share is a real revenue lever, not a brand-awareness experiment.

Everything in Foundation plus: AthenaHQ monitoring (action-oriented, surfaces specific fix recommendations); four pages per month refactored or net-new; one original-research mini-study per quarter (custom survey, proprietary dataset, or internal benchmark study — published with schema and citation-bait packaging); monthly competitor share-of-voice report tracking three named competitors across 20 prompts; full schema stack deployed across all key pages (not just the refactored ones); author-entity build-out (LinkedIn profile optimization, Crunchbase setup, knowsAbout schema, sameAs link audit); 60-minute monthly strategy call.

The original-research piece is the single highest-ROI deliverable in this tier. Original research is statistically the most-cited content type across all AI engines, and it gets re-quoted across LLMs for months. One report on Acceleration tier often pays for the engagement on its own.

GEO Domination — $4,000/mo

For funded SaaS, multi-location healthcare or legal, and brands where category leadership inside AI is a CEO-level priority.

Everything in Acceleration plus: Profound monitoring (enterprise tool, largest dataset, 10+ AI platforms including emerging engines); eight pages per month refactored or net-new; two proprietary research reports per year (PR-grade, longer-form, often pitched to relevant industry outlets); Wikipedia entity work where the brand qualifies (notable mentions exist, third-party coverage available); weekly check-ins replacing monthly calls; dedicated Slack channel; ad-hoc query support; quarterly executive-readout report formatted for board or leadership review.

Domination tier is for clients investing $50k+ per year in GEO. That investment level only makes sense if your category has high AI search volume and your average customer value justifies the spend.

The Sprout Sage GEO method (5-step process)

1. Audit (week 1). Citation baseline across the four AI engines for 10 to 20 prompts. Princeton 15-tactic scoring on top 10 pages. Schema, llms.txt, robots.txt review. Competitor share-of-voice benchmark.
2. Schema + crawler setup (week 2). llms.txt deployed. robots.txt corrected (the GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot mistake is the most common one I find). Multi-schema stack rolled out across cornerstone pages. JSON-LD only, no microdata.
3. Content refactor (weeks 3 onwards). 2 to 8 pages per month depending on tier. Apply Princeton tactics: statistics, citations, answer-first formatting, comparison tables, FAQ sections, quotation marks on expert statements.
4. Authority + citation build (parallel). Entity consistency work (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, G2, Wikipedia where applicable). Original research production on Acceleration and Domination tiers. Reddit and Quora brand-mention monitoring.
5. Monitor + iterate (continuous). Monthly citation report. Share-of-voice tracking. Refresh signals on pages that lose share. Quarterly strategy reset.

Tools I use and what they cost

I pass tooling through at cost and bundle it into the retainer line item. No markup. If you can run the tool yourself, I tell you and we use a different one.

Industries where GEO works right now

Ranked by GEO-readiness, buyer AI usage, and margin available for a GEO retainer.

1. B2B SaaS. Buyers ask LLMs “best [category] software for [use case]” multiple times per evaluation. 12 to 24 month sales cycles. Lifetime value justifies $2,500 to $4,000/mo retainers.
2. Healthcare / medical practices. Patients ask LLMs symptom and provider questions before booking. Regulated category means authoritativeness signals matter more, which is a perfect GEO fit.
3. Legal services. Specific high-intent questions map cleanly to GEO answer patterns. Per-client values are high enough to justify Foundation or Acceleration tier.
4. Financial services and fintech. YMYL category where E-E-A-T and citation discipline are mandatory. Brands that already invest in compliance content win easily.
5. Local services (home services, HVAC, medspa, wedding). “Best [service] near me” is the second-most-asked LLM query type. Maps directly to existing medspa marketing positioning.
6. Higher education and certifications. Students ask LLMs for program recommendations. Entity authority is decisive.
7. Considered-purchase ecommerce (mattresses, strollers, espresso, supplements). AI-influenced shopping is ~18% of considered purchases (eMarketer 2026).
8. Professional services (agencies, consulting, accounting). Buyers ask LLMs for shortlists. Exactly the agency’s own category.

I do not lead with GEO for transactional retail with no brand premium, AI-restricted verticals, or pre-product startups with no entity footprint.

How I work with adjacent services

• If your robots.txt or llms.txt is blocking AI crawlers (~15-20% of mid-market sites do this unintentionally), the right starting point is the AI accessibility audit at $300 before any GEO retainer.
• If your underlying SEO is weak (ranked beyond position 30 for target keywords, no organic traffic), GEO will not work on top of it. Pair with SEO from $1,500/mo for at least 90 days to build the SEO foundation first.
• For the conceptual primer to share with stakeholders, the What is GEO guide is the cleanest plain-English explanation I have written.
• For proof that the methodology produces citation share, the GEO citation share Perplexity case study walks through a six-month engagement.

Real case studies (drawn from public industry data, anonymized where my own clients)

B2B SaaS — 0 → 7/10 prompt citations across ChatGPT and Perplexity in 6 months

Niche B2B SaaS, $4M ARR, position 1 on Google for “best [category] software” but zero citation share in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini for the same query. Pre-engagement, AI referral traffic was less than 0.3% of total organic. Their main competitor was named in 8 of 10 AI engines for the same prompt.

Six months of work shipped Acceleration-tier deliverables: 24 pages refactored using the Princeton 15-tactic framework, two original research reports (one industry survey, one proprietary benchmark study), full schema stack deployed across 60 pages, Wikipedia entity expansion (4 new citations added through legitimate notability work), llms.txt with curated 30-link map. Outcome at month 6: brand cited in 7 of 10 prompts on ChatGPT and 8 of 10 on Perplexity. AI referral traffic grew from 0.3% to 8% of total organic, converting at approximately 2x the rate of standard Google organic clicks.

Adobe Firefly — 5x citation lift (publicly documented)

Adobe’s internal GEO program, documented in their business.adobe.com post on building a GEO practice for the AI-driven web. Adobe shipped a coordinated content refactor across Firefly product pages plus an authoritativeness build through paired research. The published outcome was 5x citation lift for Firefly within weeks. The Acrobat program followed and produced 200% LLM visibility lift. Combined LLM referral traffic across the program lifted 41%.

Smart Rent — 32% lift in SQLs from AI search in 6 weeks

From published industry case studies. Smart Rent ran a focused GEO sprint targeting 50 high-intent prompts in their category (multifamily property tech). The work centered on FAQ section deployment with FAQPage schema, comparison tables versus three named competitors, and statistics addition in the first 200 words of cornerstone pages. Reported outcome was 32% lift in sales-qualified leads attributed to AI search referrers within 6 weeks. (Source: industry GEO case study aggregation; I cite this with the caveat that it is third-party reported, not first-party verified.)

How I am different from other GEO offerings

Built on the Princeton academic methodology

The Aggarwal et al. KDD 2024 paper is the only peer-reviewed, large-scale validation of GEO tactics. I treat it as the source-of-truth playbook. Most agencies are running on agency-blog opinion or in-house hypotheses with no statistical validation. If a tactic is not in the Princeton paper or in a credible replication study (Adobe, ALM Corp, BrightEdge), I do not bill clients for it.

Pricing transparency on the page

$1,500 Foundation, $2,500 Acceleration, $4,000 Domination. $300 audit. Most GEO agencies hide pricing entirely or quote “starts at $3,000/mo” ranges that mean nothing. Publishing the number is a filter.

I do not resell tools at markup

Otterly, AthenaHQ, Profound, Frase: all passed through at vendor pricing. The retainer is what you pay for my work, not for tools you could buy direct.

Founder-led, no junior handoff

I run the audit, refactor the pages, write the original research, build the schema, monitor the dashboards. There is no second person on the engagement. Clients are buying my pattern recognition from running GEO across SaaS, healthcare, legal, and ecommerce, not a SOP-trained team.

Original research as a default, not an upsell

Acceleration and Domination tiers include original research production because original research is statistically the most-cited content type. Most agencies sell research as a separate $5,000+ project. I bundle it.

Honest about what GEO cannot do

GEO cannot fix a broken business model. It cannot make AI cite you for a query that does not exist. It cannot work without an SEO foundation. I tell clients these things on the discovery call. The ones who buy are the ones I can credibly help.

FAQ

Book the audit

SEO got you ranked. GEO gets you quoted. The brands cited inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini in 2026 are the ones who will own their category for the next decade as AI captures search share. Pricing is on the page. The audit is $300 and pays for itself within 30 days for most engagements. The retainer tiers start at $1,500/mo with no contract.