The WordOut blog · July 27, 2026

How to judge a GEO or SEO vendor before you sign

By the WordOut team

A pitch for AI visibility work is easy to write and hard to check. The vendor tells you that AI is the new search, that your competitors are already being recommended by ChatGPT, and that for a monthly fee they'll get you named. Most of that is true as background. The question is whether the person saying it can actually move the outcome you care about, and whether they'll show you when they don't. A few questions asked up front tell you more than any deck.

Ask what they promise to move

The first thing worth pinning down is what the vendor is actually promising. There's a real difference between someone who will make your website cleaner and someone who claims they can make an AI engine say your name. The first is honest and useful. The second is a promise about a system nobody controls, and a careful vendor will say so.

Being named when a customer asks an assistant who to call is the outcome that pays, and it's the hardest thing to guarantee, because the engine is weighing you against everything else it has read. A vendor who guarantees a top spot in ChatGPT answers is either misunderstanding how these systems work or hoping you don't. What a good one promises is to improve the inputs the engines read — your listings, your site, the sources that describe you — and to measure whether that improves the outcome over time.

Ask how they measure, and against what

If a vendor can't tell you their starting number and how they got it, there's nothing to hold them to later. Ask what their score measures. A number built only from crawling your website tells you the site is well made; it says nothing about whether an engine ever cites you. A number built only from asking the engines tells you today's answer but not why. The useful measure weighs both, plus whether the sources engines trust can find you at all.

Ask them to run the plain test in front of you. Open an assistant and ask what a customer would ask — who's the best at what you do in your town. Whatever the answer is, that's the baseline. A vendor comfortable doing that with you is confident about the work. One who steers you toward a dashboard number instead may be selling the dashboard.

Ask about the timeline honestly

Movement in AI answers is slow. The engines re-read the web on their own schedule, and the sources they trust update at their own pace, so changes you make tend to show up over a period of weeks, not days. In our experience that window runs about 60 to 90 days before the picture shifts. A vendor promising results next week is describing something other than how these systems actually behave.

Slow also cuts the other way. If three months in nothing has moved and the vendor has no read on why, that's worth a hard conversation. The work should produce visible changes to the inputs early — a corrected category, a filled-out services list, a site that finally names your city — even before the answers catch up.

Ask what they actually do each month

Retainers get vague fast. Ask what the monthly fee buys in concrete terms. Fixing listings so your name, address, and services match everywhere. Making your website say plainly what you do and where. Getting your business described consistently across the platforms engines read. Publishing pages that answer the questions customers ask. These are real levers, and they map to the three things a score should track: whether you're named, whether trusted sources can find you, and whether your own site is readable.

Be wary of a scope that's mostly reporting. A monthly PDF full of rising graphs is not the same as work that changed something. The point of any of this is one outcome: when a customer asks an assistant who to call, your name is in the answer. A vendor worth paying keeps pointing back at that, and is willing to show you the plain test that proves it either happened or didn't.