Look around the agency landscape right now and you’ll see a new line item appearing on quotes: GEO audit. Generative Engine Optimisation – the practice of structuring a website so that AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews are likely to cite it – is being packaged up and sold as a standalone service. Prices range from around £1,800 for a one-off audit to £3,500 for an audit plus a recommendations document. Some agencies are quoting monthly retainers on top.

We don’t sell GEO separately at Solopreneur Superpowers. Not because it isn’t important – it’s the most important shift in search since Google launched – but because of how it’s important. GEO isn’t a bolt-on. It’s a property of a well-built site. Selling it separately is a bit like selling “having a foundation” as an upgrade on a house.

Let me explain what we do instead, and why I think the standalone GEO audit is mostly a category error.

What GEO actually is

If SEO is the practice of being findable by traditional search engines, GEO is the practice of being citable by AI ones. The mechanics overlap but the success criteria are different.

Traditional search rewards click-throughs from a results page. AI search rewards being one of the sources synthesised into an answer. Your visibility shows up not as a position on a SERP but as a phrase like “according to Solopreneur Superpowers…” in someone’s ChatGPT conversation. The user often never visits your site at all – which is either a disaster or an opportunity, depending on what your site is doing for your business.

The research that has emerged over the past 18 months suggests three things matter disproportionately:

  • Brand mentions outrank backlinks by roughly 3-to-1 as a citation signal. AI models notice who is being talked about, in what context, by whom.
  • Position-in-text matters: around 44% of AI citations are pulled from the first 30% of an article. If your answer is buried under three scroll-lengths of preamble, it doesn’t get extracted.
  • Freshness roughly doubles the probability of citation. Stale pages, even authoritative ones, fade out.

There are more factors – schema markup, entity clarity, topical depth, whether the site loads cleanly enough for a crawler to parse – but those three carry a lot of the weight.

What an agency GEO audit typically delivers

I’ve seen the shape of these audits because clients have shown them to me. They tend to include:

  • A spreadsheet of pages, each scored against a checklist (schema present? FAQ section? answer-statement at the top? meta description under 155 characters?).
  • A list of recommendations, often very generic.
  • A “competitive citation analysis” that tells you which sites are currently being cited by AI for queries in your space.
  • A retainer pitch at the end.

The recommendations are usually correct. The problem is that they’re being delivered as a deliverable, separate from the build process, and someone has to act on them. Often that someone is a developer who didn’t build the site, working from a document that doesn’t quite match the codebase. The recommendations get partially implemented, the audit gets shelved, and six months later nothing has changed except the invoice.

This is the same pattern as the SEO audits that proliferated in the late 2010s. Lots of recommendations, weak implementation, and a recurring fee.

What we do instead

Every Solopreneur Superpowers website is built GEO-aware from the beginning. That means the architecture, content structure, and schema are decided up front, not retrofitted.

Specifically:

  • Schema-first. Every page type has structured data designed in before the first line of code is written. Article schema, FAQ schema, organisation schema, person schema, product schema where relevant. The schema isn’t decoration on top of HTML – it’s the same data, expressed in a form AI crawlers can extract cleanly.
  • Answer-first writing. TL;DR boxes at the top of long-form content. Clear answer-statements in the first paragraph. FAQ sections at the end of articles, written as actual answerable questions. The first 30% of every page does the heavy lifting.
  • Topical depth, not topical sprawl. Sites are built around a small number of pillar topics with deep coverage, rather than scattered keyword-chasing posts. When AI models look for an authoritative source on a niche, depth wins.
  • Freshness as a habit, not a project. We help clients build a content rhythm they can actually keep up with. Two well-maintained pillar articles refreshed quarterly beat twenty stale ones.
  • Internal linking that reinforces entity clarity. Every site has a defined entity graph – who you are, what you do, what topics you own. Internal links reinforce that graph rather than diluting it.
  • AI visibility monitoring as part of ongoing site care. We use a Claude-powered agent that periodically asks the AI tools your audience uses about queries in your space, and tracks whether you’re being cited, by whom, and how. That tells us what’s working and what’s drifting.

None of this gets a separate invoice line. It’s how the build is done.

The case study sitting in plain sight

Remote Work Europe – Maya’s publication, and one of the reasons we ended up working together – is the live case study for this approach. Roughly a thousand pages of content, mostly built and rebuilt over the past two years with GEO in mind from the early days of the rebuild. It now gets cited regularly by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews when users ask questions about digital nomad visas, European employment law for remote workers, country-specific freelancer tax setups, and similar.

She didn’t run an audit. She changed how content was structured, schema was applied, and topics were grouped. Then she kept the freshness habit going. The citation behaviour followed.

That experience is what informs how we build for SS clients. Not a checklist of recommendations after the fact. A way of building, applied from day one.

Why selling it separately would be wrong

There’s a genuine ethical issue here, and it’s the reason we hold this line firmly. You can’t guarantee citations. Nobody can. The AI tools that cite you change their citation criteria continuously, often without notice. A site that ChatGPT loves this month might be cited less next month because the underlying retrieval mechanism shifted. Selling “GEO” as a fixed service implies a deliverable you can’t truly deliver – the citation – when in reality what’s deliverable is the probability of citation, raised by good architecture.

Selling separate audits also creates the wrong incentive. The agency is rewarded for finding things wrong with a site – which means even a well-built site gets dinged for minor things, because if there’s nothing to fix, there’s nothing to bill. We’d rather build sites that don’t need the audit, and trust the work to speak for itself.

The clients who come to us for GEO usually come after they’ve paid for one of these audits and felt slightly hollow about the experience. Once we explain that the recommendations they paid £2,500 for are mostly things that would have been baked into a build from scratch, they get the picture.

What this means if you’re hiring

If you’re shopping for help with AI visibility, two questions will tell you a lot.

Ask: “Is this work being delivered as a recommendation document, or as changes to the live site?” A document is not a result. A live site that gets cited is.

Ask: “How are you measuring success?” If the answer is “improvements to the audit score” rather than “citations in actual AI tools your audience uses”, you’re being sold the wrong thing.

GEO matters. It’s becoming the new SEO and the next 24 months will reshape how small businesses get found. Just don’t pay separately for it. Pay for a site that’s built right in the first place – one where being citable is the natural consequence of how the architecture and the content fit together.

That’s how we approach every Solopreneur Superpowers build. Not as an upsell. As the standard.