Should You Hire a GEO Agency or Do It Yourself? (2026)

This morning, 13 August 2026, I asked ChatGPT and Claude the same eight questions a business owner might type when they're thinking about AI search. Things like "best AI SEO agency UK" and "how much does generative engine optimisation cost". Both tools ran live web searches and named their sources, 25 different websites in total. For the exact question this article answers, they cited nothing. Not one source. Nobody owns the answer yet.

That's the state of the GEO market in plain sight. It's young, the data is weeks old rather than years old, and most of what's written about it comes from agencies with something to sell. I run one of those agencies, so read this with that in mind. I'll show you my working as we go.

Should you hire a GEO agency or do it yourself?

Most small businesses should do GEO themselves first. The work that gets you named by ChatGPT, which is mostly directory profiles, steady reviews and answer-first pages, takes 5 to 10 hours a month and very little budget. Hire a GEO agency 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. The uncomfortable truth for people like me is that a big share of that work is simple, repetitive and free. The valuable part an agency adds is knowing which 20% of the work actually moves citations, and having the tooling to measure it. You can buy that judgement, or you can build it yourself over a few months. Both are legitimate choices, and the right one depends mostly on your hours, not 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 prompts name you and which name your competitors.

That's the honest list. Written out, it looks less like wizardry and more like a checklist, because it mostly is one. The reason it works is boring: AI assistants don't invent recommendations. They run web searches, read a handful of pages they already trust, and repeat what those pages agree on. Get into those pages and you get into the answers.

Two findings from my own tracking this year reshaped how I think about the split between AI search and normal SEO. First, the overlap with Google is smaller than you'd expect. Ahrefs' citation research found that most pages cited by AI assistants don't rank anywhere near the top of Google for the same question. Ranking helps, but it isn't the gate people assume. Second, the sources that do get cited are often small. In my morning test, the pages ChatGPT and Claude quoted for agency recommendations weren't Forbes or TechRadar. They were fresh, dated comparison pages on small agency sites, some of them published weeks ago.

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

What can you do yourself?

You can do most of it. Here's the DIY list, in the order I'd run it for a business starting from zero:

1. Google Business Profile. Complete it properly: categories, services, photos, weekly 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, keep pricing current. Free tiers exist on almost all of them.
3. Reviews, steadily. Directories and AI answers both weigh review volume and recency. Ask every happy customer, point each one at a single platform rather than scattering them. Free, but it needs discipline.
4. One answer-first page per question you can win. Question as the heading, a direct 40-60 word answer immediately under it, specifics below. Include your prices. I've written a full guide to this format in how to rank on ChatGPT.
5. Show up where AI already looks. A genuinely useful answer on the Reddit threads your buyers read, or a short LinkedIn article a month. Both get cited far more than most company blogs.

None of that needs an agency. It needs about 5 to 10 hours a month, kept up for several months, without anyone dropping it when things get busy. That last clause is where DIY usually dies, and it's the honest reason agencies exist.

What does DIY actually cost?

DIY isn't free, it's paid in hours. Price those hours honestly before comparing:

If your time is worth £50 an hour to the business, DIY runs £250-£500 a month in opportunity cost. That's real money, but it stays cheap compared with a retainer, and the knowledge compounds inside your business instead of inside your supplier. The trade-off flips once your hours are worth more than the retainer, which for a lot of owners happens sooner than they'd like to admit.

There's a second cost people miss: tooling. Agencies run monitoring that re-asks AI tools the same buyer questions every week and logs who gets named. You can approximate it manually for nothing. Ask ChatGPT your five most valuable buyer questions once a month, with web search on, and note down every business and source it names. Twenty minutes, a spreadsheet, done. It's cruder than what I run, but it's the same signal.

How much do UK GEO agencies charge?

Published UK pricing runs from £99 to over £10,000 a month, which tells you the label "GEO agency" covers everything from a software subscription to a full consultancy. The comparison tables on Tilio's agency roundup show most named UK agencies clustering between £500 and £3,500 a month for a retainer.

For scale: I charge £1,500 a month, flat, no lock-in, and that includes normal SEO delivery rather than GEO as a separate line. I price it that way because I don't think GEO deserves its own invoice. It's the same content and visibility work with a second search engine reading it. Some agencies disagree and sell it as a standalone service at a premium. When you see that, ask exactly what's in the deliverable that their SEO retainer wouldn't already cover. The answer is often "reporting".

Whatever you're quoted, the questions from my guide on how to choose an SEO company apply unchanged: who does the work, what happens in month one, and what does the monthly report actually show.

How fast should you expect results?

Faster than you'd think for individual pages, slower than you'd like for a brand. Profound's research tracked around 900 newly published pages and found the median time to a first AI citation was just under 7 days, with 9 in 10 cited pages picked up within 37 days. Semrush ran a similar test on 81 new pages in late 2025: ChatGPT cited 10% of them on day one, climbing to 42% by day 30, and pages tended to stay cited once they got there.

Those numbers are for pages on sites that already have some standing. A brand starting from zero is playing a different game: you need multiple independent sources naming you before AI answers treat you as a safe recommendation, and that consensus takes 2 to 4 months of steady placement work to build. Anyone promising AI visibility in a fortnight is selling you the fast half of the curve and hoping you won't ask about the slow half.

The useful rule from Profound's data: if a page has had zero AI citations after 5 weeks, stop waiting. Something's blocking it, usually technical or structural, and more patience won't fix it.

When is hiring a GEO agency worth it?

Three situations, in my experience:

1. You rank but never get named. Your pages sit on page one of Google and AI answers still recommend competitors. That's a formatting and consensus problem, and it's precisely the thing a good GEO operator fixes quickly.
2. Nobody owns the hours. The DIY list above fails without a steady 5-10 hours a month. If that keeps slipping for a quarter, buying the hours costs less than the invisible cost of not being recommended.
3. The prize per customer is large. If one client is worth £5,000 or more to you, a £1,000-£1,500 retainer pays for itself off a single AI-referred lead. Below that, the maths get harder and DIY looks better.

When should you stay DIY?

Also three:

1. You haven't tested 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 no citations at all. Don't buy a fix before checking there's a problem. This question, the one you're reading about, currently returns zero cited sources. Whoever answers it well first gets it by default.
2. Your basics aren't done. No Google Business Profile, empty directory listings, three reviews. An agency would spend its first two months doing exactly the free checklist above and charging you for it. Do that layer yourself, then reassess.
3. Budget under £500 a month. No serious operator can deliver placement work at that price. You'll get software dashboards and a PDF. Spend the money on getting reviews and better photos instead.

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

Ask ChatGPT and Claude 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 vary between runs. The cited websites are your roadmap. Every one you're absent from is a placement target.

That's the manual version of what I ran this morning across eight buyer questions. The pattern in my data was blunt: the businesses getting recommended weren't the biggest brands. They were the ones present in the small set of comparison pages and directories both AI tools kept coming back to, most of them updated within the last few months. Freshness mattered more than size. Absence from those few sources meant absence from every answer, regardless of how good the actual business was.

If you'd rather see it done properly, I'll run the full version for you: your real buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI answers, who gets named, which sources drive it, and the shortest placement path to getting your name in. Book a free strategy call and I'll show you exactly where you stand.