Two decisions come up before anyone buys generative engine optimization: whether to hire at all, and if so, whom. We have written both up properly rather than leaving them to a sales call, including the parts where the honest answer sends you somewhere other than here.
the comparisons
| the decision | where to read it |
|---|---|
| should we hire anyone at all? | agency, tool, or do it yourself — what each option actually buys, what it costs, and the cases where a monitoring tool plus your own team is the cheaper correct answer. |
| which agency? | best GEO agencies in 2026 — ten agencies against stated criteria, with our own affiliation disclosed first and the criterion where we rank last named openly. |
| what would it cost here? | pricing — the audit is complimentary, the retainer starts at $2,000/mo, and the page explains what moves that number. |
| is this even the right discipline? | generative engine optimization services — including the section on the five different names the same work is sold under. |
why we publish these
Partly self-interest: comparison pages are exactly the kind of source AI engines cite when someone asks who to pick, and we would rather the answer be assembled from something we wrote carefully than from a listicle that has never met us. We say that plainly because pretending otherwise would be the first thing to disqualify the page.
The other reason is that the alternative is worse for us. A client who hires us when a $200 tool would have done the job leaves in four months, and the referral we would have earned by saying so up front is gone too. Being referral-first makes the honest version the commercially better one.
Where a comparison is not yet written, the underlying evidence is public anyway: the method, the sample, the failure frequencies and the raw numbers are all in 100 GEO audits: the report, and the terms are defined in the glossary.