MARKAIGEN / TREND ANALYSIS
GEO becomes a service: buy evidence before buying a retainer
Publishers are commercialising GEO services. Evaluate deliverables, sampling and content ownership before accepting promises of AI citations or leads.
Markaigen · · 3 min read
Commercial interest is growing; results still need proof
Digiday’s 1 October reporting describes publishers turning GEO work into commercial services. This is evidence of a changing service market, not proof that every programme produces incremental customers. Google’s current guidance still emphasises useful, accessible content and core SEO practices; there is no special markup that guarantees inclusion in AI answers. [1] [2]
Ask for an evidence-shaped proposal
A useful proposal states the business questions to improve, the pages to change, the evidence missing from those pages and the method used to observe results. Require a baseline with exact queries, locations, platforms and dates. Ask what the supplier will deliver if an answer does not change. Content improvements and a transparent observation log are controllable deliverables; a guaranteed citation in every AI platform is not.
Protect the canonical source of your expertise
Agree where original research, definitions and product facts will live. Supporting coverage should point towards that source when appropriate, rather than reproduce competing versions under slightly different titles. Keep ownership and reuse rights explicit. Evaluate whether a proposed article serves a distinct audience question before approving it. Volume of published pages is a poor substitute for a coherent body of evidence.
Run a no-spend evaluation first
Choose one important question and audit the existing answer. Check factual support, author or organisational responsibility, readable text, internal links and whether the page is indexable. Use supplied answer samples to identify omissions, then improve the source page once. Keep referral conversions separate from answer visibility. This small exercise gives a practical basis for evaluating a paid proposal without committing to new software or a retainer.
Does GEO require an llms.txt file or special AI schema?
Google does not require either for its AI search features. Use relevant structured data that matches visible content; do not treat a file or markup score as a visibility guarantee.
Sources and method
Sources checked on 8 October 2026. Prepared with AI assistance. Proposed workflows are editorial analysis; hypothetical examples are not research findings. Availability may differ by market and account.
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