The GEO Vendor Shuffle: Why Month One Matters
You're shopping for a Generative Engine Optimization vendor. Everywhere you look, consultants promise "AI visibility strategy" and "LLM readiness." Most of them won't have shipped anything by week 4.
The difference between a serious GEO platform and a freelancer masquerading as a vendor shows up immediately. Real vendors hand you working infrastructure. Consultants hand you a deck and a discovery call scheduled for next quarter.
If you're shortlisting right now, demand concrete deliverables before you sign. Here's what to actually expect—and what to walk away from.
Concrete Deliverables: What Ships in Week 1
The submission audit that matters
A serious GEO vendor will have mapped your entire content ecosystem against the indexing patterns of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews within seven days. Not a guess. Not a spreadsheet template. An actual audit showing:
Which of your domains appear in LLM training data (and which don't).
Content fragments already surfacing in AI-generated answers.
The gap between your organic search visibility and your AI engine visibility.
Competitor benchmarks in the same vertical.
If a vendor can't produce this by day 7, they're running on assumptions, not data.
Your first schema migration
Month one should include live schema implementation for your most critical pages. Not recommendations. Not a spreadsheet of what you should do. Working, submitted, indexed schema that signals your content to AI engines in the language they understand.
We're talking structured data for entity relationships, authority signals, content freshness, and answer-ability. This moves the needle immediately on Perplexity citations and Claude knowledge retrieval.
The Pricing Model That Separates Serious Players
"GEO vendors charging by the hour are still consultants. Vendors charging by results or platform access are building defensible moats."
Watch how a vendor prices. Three models dominate:
Hourly or daily rates: Classic consultant model. Red flag for accountability. They profit from slowness.
Per-submission or per-domain fees: Better signal. You're paying for work units, not time. Still not ideal if volume scaling breaks the model.
Tiered platform access with success metrics: Best model. The vendor's revenue grows when your visibility grows. Alignment is real.
Modulus uses outcome-aligned pricing. You're not paying us to submit content—you're paying for measurable AI engine visibility. If citations don't increase, mentions don't spike, and your content doesn't move inside Claude's retrieval layer, the model adjusts.
Success Metrics: What Month One Proves
Week 1 wins
Completed content audit. Schema submitted. Baseline citation tracking live in your dashboard. You can see which competitors appear in Perplexity answers in your category and you can't yet.
Month 1 wins
First measurable AI mentions (even if small). Schema indexing confirmed. Content recommendations prioritized and ranked by impact. Early wins in at least one AI engine—usually Perplexity first, then Claude retrieval, then Google's overviews.
Anything less is theater. Demand proof.
Who This Is Actually For
GEO matters if you're a B2B company with knowledge-forward content, analyst-grade research, or thought leadership that deserves credit inside AI systems. It matters if your competitors are already appearing in AI-generated answers and you're invisible. It matters if you have regulatory, product, or market intelligence that should be authoritative but isn't being cited.
It doesn't matter if you're selling commodity products or competing on price. AI engines don't drive furniture sales. They drive authority, trust, and lead quality for expertise-backed businesses.
Work with us on this
In week one of any Modulus GEO engagement, you get a complete visibility audit across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. We map where you appear today, where your competitors dominate, and the exact gaps holding you back. By end of week one, you'll have live schema deployed on your highest-impact pages and a ranked roadmap of opportunities worth pursuing in month two.
We work with B2B teams who have content assets but aren't getting AI engine credit yet—founders with research nobody knows exists, marketers whose best material never surfaces in LLM outputs, product teams building defensible knowledge moats. If you ship content that deserves visibility inside AI systems, this is built for you.
Ready to see what Month One actually delivers? Explore Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and book a 20-minute conversation with our team to walk through your specific AI visibility gaps. We'll show you the audit and the roadmap before you commit to anything.
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Originally published on the Modulus1 insights blog. Browse more analysis on AI, SEO, and automation.
