How Agencies Can Sell GEO to Small Businesses: Three Service Packages, Hours, Pricing and What Not to Say

If your agency wants to sell GEO to small businesses, split it into three service packages: a one-time audit, monthly tracking, and content and local optimization. For each one, spell out the deliverables and where the hours go, and build the price up from tools, labor and risk. Promise clients only deliverables and a measurement method. Don't guarantee rankings, don't guarantee an AI will recommend them, and don't promise a timeline.

GEO (generative engine optimization; see the beginner's guide) is about whether a brand gets mentioned, recommended and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude. This guide is for advertising, SEO and social media agencies whose clients are mostly small businesses and local shops. Most of the optimization is work you already know how to do. What's new is the measurement, and explaining it clearly to clients.

Split it into three packages so clients know what each dollar buys

Small business owners usually want to make one small decision at a time. An audit as the first sale, tracking as a monthly fee, and optimization quoted separately based on lost prompts are much easier to sell than one big “AI optimization” bundle.

The one-time audit should fit in one meeting

An audit isn't a thick report. It's a way for the owner to understand three things in one meeting: how AI talks about them now, who they're losing to, and which three things to do first. Order the deliverables like this:

1. Question list: 10 to 15 questions customers actually ask, covering different intents such as recommendations, comparisons, price, concerns and location. The questions must not include the client's brand name. If they do, you're prompting the AI, not measuring it.
2. Baseline report: for each platform separately, whether the client is mentioned, whether they're recommended and whether their pages are cited. Don't give a single total score. Platforms often differ a lot (our test).
3. 3 lost prompts: questions where AI recommended a similar brand but not the client. For each one, write one sentence: “The competitor was recommended because of this, and here's what we can add.”
4. AI crawler check: see whether robots.txt blocks the search crawlers. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and GPTBot, its training crawler, is a separate, independent setting (OpenAI crawler documentation). Google-Extended doesn't affect Google Search. It controls whether content can be used to train Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps, meaning as reference material for answers (Google's crawler list).
5. One-page action list: no more than 3 items, each saying who does it and what the client needs to provide. Don't list anything you can't deliver.

Monthly tracking sells the same questions every month, not a new report each time

The value of monthly tracking is that you can compare. Change the questions or drop a platform, and the numbers no longer line up. AI answers also vary on their own: we asked the same 14 questions in two rounds, and the mention rate came out 31.5% one time and 41.7% the other (how visibility is calculated). So put a range in every monthly report, and only count a change as real when the ranges don't overlap.

• Fixed questions: use the same set every time. If your tool doesn't re-run them automatically, put it on your calendar.
• Fixed platforms: if a platform is missing this month, the combined numbers can't be compared directly with last month's.
• Fixed format: the owner finds the same number in the same place every month. See the AI visibility monthly report template.
• In the monthly meeting, talk only about what changed and what's next. Explain the method once.

Content and local optimization takes the most labor, so plan it around lost prompts

The work list comes from the lost prompts. Whatever made the AI recommend a competitor is what you need to add for your client.

• Service pages and FAQs: spell out the facts, like price range, service area, hours and who it's for. One page, one topic.
• Google Business Profile: Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, that more reviews and positive ratings help, and that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (Google Business Profile Help).
• Structured data: local business markup can tell Google about business hours, departments and more. But Google also says it doesn't guarantee that features using structured data will show up (Google documentation). It helps AI recognize who the client is. It isn't a guarantee of being cited.
• Don't mass-produce pages: Google treats generating many pages that don't help users, mainly to manipulate rankings, as spam, and that includes using generative AI to churn out pages (Google spam policies). Quoting by page count pushes you down that path. Quoting by item is safer.

Measure your hours on the first client instead of guessing

We couldn't find reliable statistics on how many hours GEO services take, so we'll only give you a way to measure them. Your first client is your measuring stick:

1. Break the “Where the hours go” row in the table above into tasks, and give each task its own time-tracking field.
2. Log real time on your first pilot client. Track the time you spend waiting on the client and going back and forth to confirm facts separately. That's the part people underestimate most.
3. Reading raw AI answers takes the most time. 15 questions on 5 platforms is 75 answers per run. Decide up front which ones you'll read one by one (lost prompts and questions that mention the client) and which ones only need the stats.
4. Log it again on your second and third clients, and use the more stable number as your quoting baseline.
5. Every quarter, compare actual hours with what you quoted. If they're far apart, adjust the scope or the price.

Build your price up from cost instead of copying someone else's quote

We couldn't find reliable public statistics on what GEO services cost, so we won't quote market rates here. A safer approach is to work out your cost first, then add the margin you want:

• Tools: convert the tool's pricing (per run, per question or per brand) into a monthly cost for this client. The differences between pricing models are covered in how GEO tools charge.
• Labor: the actual hours for each task, times your internal hourly cost (salaries plus overhead like office space and software).
• Risk: budget for three common extra costs. One is re-runs: when the range is too wide to tell anything apart, you'll have to measure again. Two is waiting: the client takes weeks to give you website or Business Profile access, and your team is already booked. Three is scope creep: after seeing the report, the owner wants to add another market or another set of competitors.

On the quote, state the quantities: how many questions, platforms and markets, how many reports a year and how many pages you'll change. Then add a “Not included” line. With clear quantities, clients compare like with like when they shop around.

Ask these 5 questions at your first client meeting

1. “How do customers usually ask before they find you?” Write the questions in customers' own words, without the brand name. Also confirm which city and which market you're covering.
2. “Who do customers usually compare you with?” That's your list of named competitors. The rivals an AI brings up aren't always in the same category, so start with the client's own list so the report compares the right things.
3. “What else is your brand called?” Get abbreviations, former names, location names, the parent company's name and any names in other languages. When we measured our own product in October 2026, Perplexity actually did recommend us, but under our company name, TriloAI. We hadn't entered that alias, so it was counted as not mentioned.
4. “Who manages your website, Google Business Profile, and booking or review platforms right now? Can we make changes?” Access decides which package you can sell. Without access, start with the audit and tracking.
5. “Six months from now, what would make you feel this money was well spent?” Turn expectations into things you can measure: a mention-rate range, fewer lost prompts, and the client's own pages starting to get cited by AI.

Never promise rankings, recommendations or a timeline

Google's page for site owners on whether you need an SEO is blunt: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, and if an SEO guarantees first place, find someone else. It also suggests owners ask an SEO what results to expect, in what timeframe, and how they measure success (Google Search Central). Your clients will ask you the same things sooner or later, so have your answers ready:

Deliver white-label reports so the client relationship stays with you

If you measure with GEO by TriloAI, the Agency plan (US$1,198 a month, up to 15 brands, 120 credits a month) lets you deliver white-label reports: exported PDFs carry your company name, logo and brand color in the header and footer. A full analysis uses 3 credits, which works out to about US$30 per analysis. With annual billing you pay for 10 months and get 12, or about US$25 per analysis (plans and pricing).

• Share links can show only your company name and logo. You pick an expiry of 7, 30 or 90 days or none, can hide the copy, SEO and competitor sections, and can revoke the link at any time. The URL still lives under geotriloai.com, so if the client must not see the tool's name, send the PDF.
• The Pro plan (US$398 a month) includes PDFs and share links, but not white-label. White-label is only on the Agency plan.
• You can deliver or resell reports to your clients (Section 5 of our terms of service), and we don't reach out to an agency's clients.
• Want to try it first? Apply for a trial on the agency plan page. Once you're approved, we enable one full analysis. During the trial, you can only view the report inside the app.

Frequently asked questions

Next step: run a free quick scan on your own agency, or on a client who's willing to try it. It looks at ChatGPT only, needs no sign-up and takes about 1–2 minutes. It checks whether AI can understand the website, then runs 2 live test questions in ChatGPT, and each email address can get the PDF once. For full reports across 5 platforms and many clients in one place, see the agency plan.