How to Buy GEO Services: First Meeting to First 90 Days

Buying a GEO service takes four steps: internal preparation, a first meeting and a baseline measurement, putting the scope in writing, and handing over access and starting. Once those steps are done, the first 90 days typically open with discovery, continue with infrastructure and structured data, and from the fourth week onwards turn into content work and monthly measurement. The durations shift with the state of the site; the order usually stays the same.

This article does not cover choosing an agency; it assumes you have largely made that decision already. If you are still weighing candidates, our guide to choosing a GEO agency is a better place to start. What is described here is the buyer's side: what you prepare, who decides, which accounts you open the door to and with what permissions, and what you should expect to see in the first three months.

The reason this side matters: some of the items that push the timeline back sit inside the business. An approval left waiting, an access not yet granted, an expert interview put off.

You have decided: what are the four steps from here?

The buying decision does not end with a signature; four steps run before and after it. Each one should have an owner and a concrete output.

1. Internal preparation. You write down which service or product you want to be named for in AI answers, who will make the decisions, and what your customers actually ask. The output is a one-page note.
2. First meeting and baseline measurement. The preparation note goes on the table, the real questions from your sector are put to the chosen engines, and a dated record of the current position is produced. The output is the question set and the raw answers.
3. Putting the scope in writing. Which work items will be done, what will be delivered and how often the report will arrive go into the document. The output is a scope text that both sides read the same way.
4. Access handover and start. The accounts are opened to the provider in a way that keeps them in your name, and the calendar starts running. The output is a list showing who sits in which account with which permission.

The order matters. A scope written before the gaps have been seen either bloats or aims at the wrong place; permissions granted before it is clear what will be done end up wider than necessary.

What should I pin down internally before the first meeting?

Going into the meeting without answering four questions internally means the first session is spent answering them with you.

Goal. "Being visible in AI" is not a goal. Write down which of your services you want to be named for, in the questions of which type of customer. If you have more than one main service, rank them by revenue or strategic importance.

Decision-maker. Name a single person for the whole project. This should be someone who can open access, get drafts approved and, when needed, say "we are not doing this now". If the decision is spread across several people, every meeting produces decisions deferred to the next meeting.

Approval process. Who approves a content draft or a site change, and within how many days? If you operate in a regulated field such as health, law or finance, this is also where you write down who will check that texts stay within the limits on advertising and promotion. That check is not the provider's job; it belongs to your authorised person.

Real questions. Collect the 15-20 questions your customers ask before buying, in the words they use. Draw on the sales team's notes, customer service records, and email and messaging conversations. The list the marketing team writes in industry language and the customer's own sentence are often not the same; the measurement is done with the customer's sentence.

What should I bring to the first meeting?

Gather the following in one folder and share it before the meeting; the first hour then goes to diagnosis rather than introductions.

• The list of services or products in priority order, with a short description of each
• The raw list of 15-20 questions collected internally
• The decision-maker's name and a short outline of the approval flow
• An inventory of existing accounts: Search Console, GA4, Google Business Profile, the domain, the site admin panel, and which email address each one was opened with
• The site's technical setup: which content management system, who does development, who publishes changes
• Reports from any earlier SEO or advertising work
• The business's official details: registered name, address, service area, the people on the team who will be featured
• Wording you cannot use because of regulation, or sensitive topics

Do not skip the account inventory: if it is unknown in whose name each account sits, the access handover can drag on for weeks.

Why is the baseline measurement taken before the work begins?

The baseline measurement is a record of where your brand stands in AI answers before any change is made. The first measurement taken after work has started no longer counts as a baseline; some of the changes have already seeped into it, and no later comparison will be clean.

The measurement runs on a question set built from the questions you collected internally and from the provider's scan of your sector. The questions are put one by one to the engines in scope, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. For each answer, it is noted whether your brand is named, whether your site is cited as a source, and who is recommended instead of you.

By the end of this stage you should be holding three things:

• A dated question set. The exact wording of the questions, and on which engine and on which date each was asked. The text is stored unchanged so that later measurements can use the same words.
• The raw answers. Not a summary table but the answer texts themselves. A summary carries interpretation inside it; the raw answer lets you do the interpreting yourself later.
• A findings list. Problems ranked by priority under the headings of crawler access, structured data, consistency of entity information and content gaps.

These three should stay with you whichever way the engagement goes. Whether you later change provider or bring the work in-house, without the record from day one you cannot prove any progress.

What should I get written into the scope?

The findings from the baseline measurement are the raw material of the scope. The scope text's job is to turn the sentence "GEO work will be done" into items that can be read without argument.

In our own work we build the scope around the six work items written out on our GEO agency service page: visibility audit, entity and brand information infrastructure, structured data, question-based content architecture, AI crawler access and monthly measurement. Whichever provider you work with, ask for these three layers to be written out separately in the document:

• Work items. Which headings are in scope and which are not. Writing down what is out of scope matters as much as writing down what is in.
• Deliverables. What ends up in your hands at the close of each item: a findings report, a schema list, the URLs of the pages that went live, a record of the profiles that were updated.
• Report frequency and content. How often the report will come, whether the same question set will be asked again, whether the raw answers will be attached to the report, whether AI-referred sessions will be shown separately in analytics.

On top of these three layers, two buyer requests are reasonable: having it in writing that the measurement data and the content produced will be handed over to you, and that the access granted will be removed when the work ends. If you need to read proposals from different providers side by side, the framework in our GEO agency comparison article is useful; which items the cost is made up of is the subject of our guide to GEO cost components. We publish our base fee, the scope it includes and the add-on items openly on our GEO service pricing page.

Which accounts should I give access to, and with what permissions?

The rule fits in one sentence: the account stays open under the business's company email and in the business's name, and the provider is added as a named individual user with the narrowest permission the work requires. Shared passwords are not used; a named user can be removed in a single step when the work ends. We covered the same principle on the advertising side in detail in our article on ad agency fee models and account ownership.

The last column is uniform on purpose. If you have a row where it would have to say "the provider", fix it before the start.

How do the first 90 days unfold, week by week?

The calendar below shows typical ranges; the site's technical state, the content inventory and the speed of approvals shift them. The stages do not run one after another; they partly overlap.

Weeks 1-2: discovery and baseline measurement. The question set is settled, the baseline measurement is taken, and the site's crawler access and structured data are audited. What is asked of you: opening access, approving the question set and a first interview with the subject expert. What you should see: the dated question set, the raw answers and the prioritised findings list.

Weeks 2-6: infrastructure and structured data. AI crawlers are let through in robots.txt and the security layer, llms.txt is prepared, it is confirmed that pages arrive from the server fully rendered, and schema markup based on the information visible on the page is added. Business name, address and service area information is aligned across the site, Google Business Profile and third-party listings. What is asked of you: approval to publish the technical changes and confirmation of the business details. What you should see: a list showing which change was made at which URL and on which date.

From week 4 onwards: content and entity work. Pages that answer customer questions in the first paragraph are written, or existing pages are converted to that structure. What is asked of you: expert interviews and draft approvals. What you should see: the URLs of the pages that went live and which question each one answers.

Around weeks 4, 8 and 12: monthly measurement and report. The original question set is asked again without changing its wording, AI-referred sessions are tracked separately in analytics, and the next month's priority is adjusted to the findings. What is asked of you: reading the report and deciding on any proposed change of direction. What you should see: a table comparing against the baseline, and the raw answers.

How quickly a change in mentions will show up in the first 90 days is not known. Generative search systems do not disclose how they select sources, and that logic can change without notice. So the realistic output of the first three months is not a lasting result; it is the work done, documented by date and URL, and the same questions measured comparatively more than once.

Which part of the work stays on your desk?

Buying a GEO service does not mean handing off the whole job. Some inputs can only come from the business, and when they are late, the calendar is late too.

Expert interviews. The paragraphs that AI engines quote draw not on general knowledge but on detail from inside the work. How your service works, in which situations you would advise against it, the point customers most often misunderstand: only you or the expert on your team can explain these. The interviews can be short, but they should be regular.

Business and team details. Registered business name, full address, service area, and the names, roles and expertise of the people on the team. Person and organisation markup is only added for information that is genuinely visible on the page; writing a title or a team member into the schema who does not appear on the page is not right. That is why the information first has to become visible on the page, which means it has to come from you.

Approval speed. If a draft waits two weeks for approval, half of a four-week content plan goes by on a single draft. Settle from the start how quickly drafts will come back internally, and assign someone to remind the decision-maker of that schedule.

External signals. Customer reviews, how current your Google Business Profile is, industry directories and professional body registrations. The provider can point out the gap; but asking a customer for a review or updating an organisation's registration has to go through the business. In fields such as health and law, the ways of asking for reviews and of promoting yourself may be restricted by regulation; your authorised person should decide on the appropriate route.

How do I know at the end of the first month that things are on track?

At the end of the fourth week what gets assessed is not results but how the work is organised. Put two lists side by side.

Signs that things are on track:

• You have the baseline measurement, dated and together with its raw answers.
• The findings list is prioritised; it is written down why each problem is being tackled first.
• The technical changes made are listed by URL and date, and you can verify them yourself.
• What is asked of you arrives concrete and dated: which information, which approval, by when.
• The first report asks the original question set again in the same words.

Signs to watch out for:

• You were never shown the question set, or it changes with every measurement.
• Access was set up with a shared password or through the provider's own account.
• The report consists only of a list of tasks done, with no comparison.
• "Visibility has gone up" is claimed with no baseline measurement.
• It is unclear which approval is being waited on; nobody can say why the calendar is slipping.

The last item cuts both ways: sometimes the source of the delay is an approval on your side. If the signs persist into the third month and you cannot tell where the problem lies, the diagnostic sequence in our article on three months of GEO with no results goes deeper.

My preparation is done; what should I do now?

The first of the four steps is entirely in your hands: writing the goal, the decision-maker, the approval flow and 15-20 real questions on a single page. If that page and the account inventory are ready, the second step, the meeting and baseline measurement, does not start from an empty table.

The entry step to working with Next GEO Agency is the free business analysis on our contact page: a preliminary meeting where we talk through your business and your customers' questions and settle the scope together. The baseline measurement is taken after this meeting, as the first step of the paid engagement. Bringing the note you prepared makes it easier for the meeting to run on your own questions. You can find the stages and the six work items in detail on our GEO agency page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I do first to buy a GEO service?

Before the meeting, pin down four things internally: which of your services you want to be named for in AI answers, who will make the decisions, who will approve drafts and within what time, and the 15-20 real questions your customers ask before buying. When these four are gathered in a one-page note, the first meeting goes to diagnosis, and the baseline measurement is done using the customer's own sentences.

Which accounts do I need to give access to for GEO work?

The typical list is Google Search Console, GA4, Google Business Profile, the site admin panel and, where needed, the domain, DNS and the security layer. Every account should stay open under the business's company email and in the business's name; the provider should be added as a named individual user with the narrowest permission. Full user in Search Console and manager in Google Business Profile are enough for most of the work.

What should I expect in the first 90 days of a GEO service?

In the typical flow the first two weeks go to discovery and the baseline measurement, and the second to sixth weeks to technical infrastructure and structured data; content work starts from the fourth week, and each month a measurement is taken with the same question set. When changes in the answers will show up cannot be known in advance, because these systems do not disclose how they select sources. The realistic output of the first 90 days is work documented with comparable measurements.

What is a baseline measurement, and why should I keep it?

The baseline measurement is a record of where your brand stands on engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews before any change is made: a dated question set, the answer texts themselves and prioritised findings. Every later measurement is compared against this record. It should stay with you because, even if the provider changes or the work is brought in-house, progress can only be proven against this record.

How much time do I need to set aside as a business when buying a GEO service?

The time depends on the scope, but the inputs expected from you are clear: the decision-maker opening access and reading reports, the subject expert joining short and regular interviews, drafts being approved within an agreed period, and the business details being kept up to date. When these inputs are late, the calendar is late too; setting the approval period in writing from the start matters more than the total number of hours set aside.