Our agency wants to sell us 'Generative Engine Optimization' — what is it and does it help?

I love how agencies make up new acronyms every few years to inflate their invoices. Two years ago they were pushing voice search optimization, now GEO is the trend. They won't do anything beyond tweaking schema markup in your content, don't pay extra.

We run a similar B2B wholesale business in Cologne. When our agency pitched the same thing, we declined and simply added detailed spec tables to our product pages ourselves. Looking at our analytics dashboard, traffic coming from AI referrals doesn't even make up four percent of our total visits; so glad we didn't increase our budget.

Technically speaking, what we call GEO is strengthening your website's JSON-LD schema, brand entities, and knowledge graphs. Crawlers love clear, consistent, and structured data. A decent SEO specialist should already be doing all of this within standard search engine optimization anyway.

Honestly, don't rush into it. Your customer whether a plant manager or a buyer, still types the product code into a search engine and calls the phone number on the first site that pops up. Giving that 550 Euro monthly difference to your warehouse crew as a bonus would do a lot more for your business.

What kind of reporting did the agency promise in exchange for this price hike? Given how difficult it still is technically to isolate and verify referral traffic from AI engines using standard analytics tools, how exactly do they plan to measure success?

edit: I wrote something wrong above, sorry about that.

the only difference from classic seo is the content formatting tbh... just have them add faqs and technical spec tables to your pages and call it a day absolutely no need for an extra package.

Correction: I misremembered the figure, it was a bit lower.

Trust and data transparency are fundamental in B2B marketing. Rather than increasing your budget, asking your agency to improve your current website's page load speed, mobile catalog compatibility, and product filtering capabilities would be a far more commercially viable decision.

Don't jump right into a 1,400 Euro contract. Ask the agency to add detailed Q&A sections and technical spec tables to your top five best-selling product categories within your current 850 Euro budget first. If you don't see any uptick in orders after three months, just walk away.

Here's how it went for us. Ranking is the result, search intent is the input. Look at intent first.

A page that answers one question works better than one touching on five topics. Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

The answer above hits the nail on the head. The biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks for writing this, that's the right way. A page with low traffic might be reaching the right people. Look at where sales come from.

Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

Let me share my experience. Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

When making a decision, first look at what data you have on hand. Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

I was thinking the same thing. If it's your first time, start small; scaling comes later.

If I were you, I'd go this route.

I went through the same thing.

Saved.

I went through the same thing two years ago. Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

There's also a measurement aspect to this. The harder it is to reverse a decision the slower you should make it.

Hope this helps.

I went through the same thing two years ago. Most time waste accumulates in tasks waiting for approval.

When making decisions, write down the worst-case scenario too, not just the best. Just leaving this note, it might be useful.