Generative engine optimization is being googled 9,200 times a month. Most agencies haven’t priced it yet.

Here’s the call you’re about to get.

Tuesday afternoon. A client you’ve had on retainer for three years pings you. They typed “best [their category] for [their customer]” into ChatGPT that morning. A competitor came up three times. They didn’t. They want to know what you’re doing about it.

You don’t have an answer — because it isn’t on the retainer. It isn’t in any proposal template you’ve ever sent. Nobody asked you to track it.

That conversation is happening in agencies across the country right now, and it’s going to happen a lot more over the next six months. Worth getting ahead of.

What the Category Actually Is

Three names, one thing. Generative engine optimization (GEO). LLM SEO. AI visibility tracking. The terms are being used interchangeably, and your clients will pick whichever one they heard first — you’ll need to recognize all of them.

The work is straightforward to describe: figure out what questions your client’s customers ask ChatGPT, measure whether the client’s brand appears in the answer, identify the gaps, fix them. If that sounds a lot like traditional SEO with a different surface area, that’s because it is. The methodology isn’t new. The measurement layer is.

Worth knowing: ChatGPT holds roughly 80% of the AI search market. Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot split most of the rest. If you’re only going to track one engine for a client, track that one. Everything else is a rounding error for now.

Why It’s a Natural Service Add

The skills you already have transfer. Keyword research — you do that. Content gap analysis — you do that. Authority building, on-page optimization, third-party mentions — you do that. What’s different is that instead of measuring rankings in a SERP, you’re measuring mentions in a generated answer.

The muscles are the same. The dashboard is different.

Agencies already running SEO retainers are in a better position to sell GEO than any pure-play AI visibility vendor is. The vendor has a tool. You have the relationship, the historical keyword data, and the ability to actually move the needle on what the tool measures. That’s a real gap — and it’s a window, roughly the next 12–18 months before the category saturates, where agencies can add this service at relatively low competitive pressure.

How to Run a Client Baseline in Under an Hour

Here’s the workflow.

1. Pull 10–15 queries from the client’s existing keyword data. Pick the ones with commercial intent — “best X for Y,” “top X tools,” “X vs. X.” The exact queries your client’s buyers would type into ChatGPT when they’re close to a decision.
2. Run each query through a tracking tool. This is where a free tier matters. You don’t want to burn your own budget running audits for prospects who haven’t signed yet. A free tier is enough to baseline a small client and decide whether the story is worth presenting. For bigger audits, you’ll want paid tooling — we’ll get to the economics in a moment.
3. Capture every brand named in the responses. Note which ones appear most often, which contexts they appear in, and which of your client’s actual competitors are getting mentioned instead of them.
4. Calculate a share of voice against the top three competitors. How often does the client appear out of all mentions? That number is your baseline. It’s also the number you’ll be moving in reports for the next year.
5. Screenshot, annotate, present. The screenshots do most of the selling. Clients understand “your competitor got named three times, you got named zero” immediately.

Setting up Ongoing Monitoring

The tooling category is more crowded than it looks. Otterly, LLM Pulse, AI Peekaboo, Peec AI, SE Visible, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Beamtrace — and that’s not all of them. Here’s the thing worth understanding before you pick one: at the API layer, they’re all doing the same job. They hit the LLM endpoints, parse the responses for brand mentions, and track the results over time. The technology isn’t proprietary to anyone. You’re paying for coverage (how many engines), frequency (daily vs. weekly), prompt count, and dashboard polish.

Once you internalize that, pricing makes more sense. Otterly sits at $29/mo for ChatGPT plus a few others. LLM Pulse runs €49 for five engines weekly. Peec AI is €85 for three engines daily. SE Visible is $99 for 200 prompts weekly. Ahrefs Brand Radar starts at $199/mo per AI index, or $699 for all six — that’s enterprise territory.

Beamtrace is the lowest entry point in the category: free forever for 5 prompts weekly, $20/mo for the Starter plan with 10 prompts every 3 days and competitor tracking. It’s built by the team at Elfsight — 13 years in SaaS, 3M+ active users across 90+ products — so the infrastructure story is solid, but the product itself is honest about its limits. ChatGPT-only for now (Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok listed as coming soon). Weekly checks on the free tier. Ten prompts on Starter isn’t enough to cover a client comprehensively.

For agency workflows, that math works out well: use the free tier for prospect audits and small-client monitoring, upgrade to Starter or Growth when a client’s retainer justifies it, and switch to something with broader engine coverage only once your clients start asking about Perplexity or Gemini specifically. Most of them aren’t yet.

One tip that isn’t in the documentation anywhere — when you set up a Beamtrace account, it auto-fills your prompt slots with defaults so the dashboard looks populated from day one. Your quota looks fully used before you’ve even done anything. Delete the defaults and the slots free up. Takes ten seconds and it’s the difference between feeling boxed in on free and having room to run a real audit.

How to Price It

Two honest models.

• Bolt it on. Add a GEO monitoring line to existing SEO retainers. The incremental work is modest — you’re running scheduled reports, annotating what changed, folding findings into your monthly recap. Clients get a new column in their dashboard, you get a retainer uplift, nobody has to renegotiate scope from scratch.
• Sell the audit. Offer a one-time GEO baseline as a standalone engagement. Scope: 20–30 queries, full competitor comparison, gap analysis, recommendations. This works especially well as a top-of-funnel product for prospects who aren’t ready for a retainer but want to understand where they stand.

I’m not going to quote rates here — pricing varies too much by market and client size, and nothing ages faster than a consultant’s rate card in print. But the rule of thumb holds: price the monitoring at what dashboard work is worth on your other retainers, price the audit at what a strategic deliverable is worth, and don’t undersell either. The category is new, clients don’t have comps, and “we’re the people who understood this first” is a position worth charging for.

What to do when the Client Asks, “Can you fix it?”

This is where most tool-led conversations fall apart, and where agency-led conversations shine.

The current weakness of the whole GEO category is that measurement is solid, and the action layer is thin. Most “recommendations” generated by these tools are recycled on-page SEO checklists with the word “AI” prepended. Add FAQs. Improve your schema. Get mentioned on more third-party sites.

Which — and this is worth saying plainly — is just SEO. That’s the work. That’s what your agency already does.

Real fixes for AI visibility come from the same playbook as real fixes for search visibility: content that answers the question clearly, authority signals from places the LLM has crawled, and presence on the third-party sites that feed the training data and the retrieval layer. The tools tell you where the gaps are. Closing them is an agency engagement.

That’s the whole argument for why this is an agency opportunity and not a tool opportunity. The tools are commoditized. The execution isn’t.

The Window

Six to twelve months, give or take. That’s how long agencies have before clients start assuming GEO is part of the standard SEO package, just as local SEO and technical audits are now. The agencies that add it in 2026 will have case studies, benchmarks, and pricing dialed in. The ones who wait will be answering “why didn’t you bring this up?” in renewal conversations.

Worth doing the math on which side of that you want to be on.

Pricing verified April 2026. Check current plans at beamtrace.com before quoting clients — this category is moving fast enough that numbers shift quarterly.

Frequently Asked Questions