GEO agency vs DIY: hire one or do it yourself? (2026)

I first wrote this on 13 August 2026, after asking ChatGPT and Claude eight questions a business owner might type about AI search. For the exact question this article answers, neither cited anything at all.

On 30 September 2026, Nest Content asked it again across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode. Perplexity cited this article on all three runs, quoting the price range from its earlier version. ChatGPT cited nothing, and AI Mode cited other pages. So the answer is still fairly open.

Should you hire a GEO agency or do it yourself?

Most small businesses can do generative engine optimisation (GEO) themselves first, without an agency. The work that gets you named by ChatGPT, which is mostly directory profiles, steady reviews and answer-first pages, takes about 5 to 10 hours a month and very little budget. An agency starts to make sense when you already rank well but never get cited, or when nobody in the business has those hours.

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: the work of getting your business named when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude or Google's AI for a recommendation. A fair bit of that work is simple, repetitive and free, which is a slightly awkward thing for an agency owner to write. What an agency adds is knowing which parts of the work tend to move citations, and having the tooling to measure it. You can buy that, or build it up yourself over a few months. Both are fine, and the right one mostly depends on your hours more than your budget.

What does a GEO agency actually do?

A GEO agency gets your business into the sources AI tools already trust, then formats your own pages so the AI can quote them. In practice that means directory and review profiles, mentions in "best of" roundups, answer-first page rewrites, entity cleanup, and monthly tracking of which questions name you and which name your competitors.

Written out, it looks more like a checklist than anything clever, because it mostly is one. It works for a fairly boring reason: AI assistants don't make up recommendations. They run web searches, read a handful of pages they already trust, and repeat what those pages agree on. If you're in those pages, you have a good chance of being in the answers.

Two things surprised me this year. The overlap with Google is smaller than you'd expect: Ahrefs' citation research found that most pages cited by AI assistants don't rank near the top of Google for the same question. And the pages that do get cited are often small. In my August test, the pages ChatGPT and Claude quoted for agency recommendations were fresh, dated comparison pages on small agency sites, some only a few weeks old.

So when an agency pitches GEO, what you're mostly buying is placement work plus measurement. That frame makes the rest of this article easier to judge.

Why one check tells you very little

On 28 September 2026, Nest Content asked 12 buying questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Mode, three times each. They were the kind of questions a business asks when looking for a marketing agency in Ireland. That's 180 answers.

The spread was wide. On ChatGPT, "best SEO agency Dublin" returned the same 8 agencies in all three runs. "Who can help my business show up in ChatGPT Ireland" returned 14 different names across three runs, and none of them came up twice.

The answers came through each engine's API with web search on, which is close to, though not always identical to, what you'd see in the app.

What can you do yourself?

Most of it. Here's the list, in the order I'd run it for a business starting from zero:

1. Google Business Profile. Complete it properly: categories, services, photos, regular posts. AI tools pull local recommendations straight from it. Free.
2. The two directories that matter for your trade. For agencies it's Clutch and GoodFirms. For trades it's Checkatrade and MyBuilder. For clinics, Fresha or Treatwell. Fill every field and keep pricing current. Most have a free tier.
3. Reviews, steadily. Directories and AI answers both seem to weigh review volume and recency. Ask every happy customer, and point them all at one platform. Free, but it needs discipline.
4. One answer-first page per question you can win. Question as the heading, a direct 40 to 60 word answer straight under it, specifics below. Include your prices.
5. Show up where AI already looks. A useful answer on the Reddit threads your buyers read, or a short LinkedIn article a month. Both seem to get cited far more than most company blogs.

Both are made up for illustration. The second one answers a question someone actually asks, with a price and a place in it, which gives an AI answer something to quote.

None of that needs an agency. It needs about 5 to 10 hours a month, kept up for several months, without it slipping when things get busy. That last part is usually where DIY stalls, and it's a big reason agencies exist.

What does DIY actually cost?

DIY is paid in hours, so it's worth pricing those hours before comparing:

If your time is worth £50 an hour to the business, DIY comes to £250 to £500 a month in time. That's real money, though still cheaper than most retainers, and what you learn stays in your business. The maths flips once your hours are worth more than the retainer, which for a lot of owners happens sooner than they'd like.

There's also tooling. Agencies run monitoring that re-asks AI tools the same buyer questions every week and logs who gets named. You can do a rough version by hand: ask ChatGPT your five most valuable buyer questions once a month, with web search on, three times each, and note every business and source it names. It's cruder than what I run, but it's the same signal. Nest Content's free AI visibility checker does a quick version too, more on that below.

How much do UK GEO agencies charge?

Ask Google and its AI Overview gives a wide range, and it cites other agencies' price pages to do it:

Published UK prices vary a lot, which suggests "GEO agency" covers everything from a software subscription to a full consultancy. Tilio's comparison of 14 UK GEO agencies, last updated 29 July 2026, lists published prices from £450 a month up to £12,950 and above. Only 5 of the 14 agencies publish prices at all. Grouped by level, it looks roughly like this:

Terms vary too. Tilio's first two levels run on 30-day rolling terms, for example, so it's worth asking about the minimum before comparing prices.

Nest Content's monthly work starts from £1,500, with a one-off audit from £500, credited to the first month if the client carries on. GEO sits inside that work, with no separate line for it on the invoice. My thinking is that it's the same content and visibility work with a second kind of search engine reading it. Some agencies sell it as a standalone service at a premium, which is a fair choice too. If you're quoted that way, it might be worth asking what's in the GEO deliverable that an SEO retainer wouldn't already cover. Agencies reselling this work to their own clients have separate white-label pricing.

What to check before you sign

A few things come up again and again in UK agency pricing, and they're easy to ask about up front:

• Setup fees. Some agencies charge an onboarding fee on top of the first month.
• Content billed separately. Check whether articles and page rewrites are included or priced per piece.
• Minimum terms. Ask how long the minimum is, and why.
• What the report shows. A useful report lists the actual questions asked and who got named. A single "visibility score" is harder to check.

It also helps to ask who does the work day to day, and what happens in month one.

The same checks work for an agency you already pay. There's more in how to tell if your SEO agency is working.

How fast should you expect results?

A single page can get picked up quickly. A brand takes longer. Profound's research puts the median time to a new page's first AI citation at 6.81 days, with the slowest tenth of cited pages taking about 37 days. Semrush ran a similar test on 81 new pages: ChatGPT cited 8 of them (10%) the day after publishing, and 34 (42%) by day 30.

Those numbers are for pages on sites that already have some standing. A brand starting from zero has a harder job: several independent sources usually need to name you before AI answers treat you as a safe recommendation, and that tends to take 2 to 4 months of steady placement work. So a promise of AI visibility within a fortnight is worth a second look.

For one UK executive search firm, Google's AI Overviews started citing it on most of its tracked searches within about six weeks. We've written up what changed, and what happened in October.

If a page still has no AI citations after about five weeks, which is past where Profound's slowest tenth get picked up, it's worth checking what might be blocking it, usually something technical or structural.

When is hiring a GEO agency worth it?

In my experience, three situations:

1. You rank but never get named. Your pages sit on page one of Google, and the AI answers still recommend competitors. That's usually a formatting and consensus problem, and it's the kind of thing a GEO specialist can often help with fairly quickly. There's an example in our case studies.
2. Nobody owns the hours. The DIY list above needs a steady 5 to 10 hours a month. If that keeps slipping for a quarter, buying the hours might cost less than not being recommended. If you want something to compare against, this is what our AI search service covers.
3. One customer is worth a lot. If one client is worth £5,000 or more to you, a £1,000 to £1,500 retainer can pay for itself with a single AI-referred lead. Below that, the maths gets harder and DIY looks better.

When should you stay DIY?

Also three:

1. You haven't checked where you stand. Twenty minutes of asking ChatGPT your own buyer questions might show you're already being named, or that your whole niche gets few citations. It's worth knowing there's a problem before paying to fix it.
2. Your basics aren't done. No Google Business Profile, empty directory listings, three reviews. An agency would likely spend its first two months on the free checklist above. Doing that layer yourself first gives you a better starting point.
3. Budget under about £500 a month. At that level it's mostly monitoring and light fixes. If your basics aren't done yet, the same money on reviews and better photos might do more.

How do I check where my business stands in AI search?

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI the questions your customers ask, with web search on, and write down two things: whether you're named, and which websites the answer cites. Run each question three or four times, because answers change between runs. The cited websites are your roadmap. Every one you're missing from is a place to get listed or mentioned.

I ran our own checker on this site while updating this article. It's a fair reminder that writing about GEO doesn't get you named:

You can run the same free check on your own site. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and shows who gets named for your search.

If you'd like to go through it together, book a 20-minute call and we can look at who the AI answers name for your searches.