What to demand from a generative engine optimization provider

Ask any vendor one question first: measured against what? A credible answer names a fixed set of queries your buyers actually ask, checked on a schedule across named assistants. Without that baseline, every later claim is unfalsifiable.

The minimum measurement set:

• Citation rate — for each query in the set, whether your domain appears among the cited sources in GPT and Perplexity, recorded on a fixed schedule, with the misses kept.
• Which page was cited — so you learn which formats earn retrieval and can repeat them.
• AI crawler access — whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended can fetch your pages at all. Our free AI crawler check shows this.
• Search Console — impressions, clicks and indexation for the same pages, because retrieval starts with being indexed.

Notice what is missing: rankings for vanity keywords and screenshots of one flattering prompt. A single conversation proves nothing; assistants vary their sources between sessions. Only a repeated query set, run the same way each time, turns citations into a number you can trend. Take your own baseline before any sales call with the AI visibility checker.

Measurement is the frame; the deliverable is pages. A provider that reports beautifully but publishes little is selling you a dashboard.

Every piece that leaves a serious GEO shop should carry:

• A direct answer near the top of each section, in one or two sentences an assistant can lift without editing.
• Facts that exist nowhere else — your product data, datasheet figures, the support questions your team answers every week. Readers and assistants both prefer the source over the paraphrase, and a competitor cannot copy what they do not have.
• Structured data — Article, FAQPage and, where relevant, Product JSON-LD — plus an FAQ block written for the question the query actually asks.
• Internal links into the rest of the cluster, so one cited page lends authority to the pages around it.
• Clean technical delivery — indexable, fast, a canonical URL, and a ping through IndexNow when it goes live.

Then, cadence. Publish steadily rather than dumping a quarter's pages in one week: a drip is what a crawl budget and an editorial calendar can both absorb, and it gives you a clean before-and-after to read. A refresh schedule matters too, because an answer that was right in March and wrong in September gets dropped as a source.

A useful GEO report fits on one page and answers four questions: what did we publish, what did it cost, what is being cited, and what changed since last month.

Look for:

• The fixed query set, unchanged month to month, with citation counts per assistant. If the set changes every report, you are being shown the wins.
• Per-page results tied to Search Console, so a citation can be traced to a URL and a URL to clicks.
• Cost per published page, not per draft, so you can see what a citation actually cost to earn.
• A list of what was rejected or rewritten and why. A provider that never rejects its own work is not checking it.
• What will be refreshed next, based on decay in the numbers rather than a hunch.

Be wary of reports built around "share of voice" indices without the raw counts behind them, and of any metric the provider invented and only they can compute. You should be able to reproduce the headline number yourself by asking the assistant the same questions.

Some signals are disqualifying on their own:

• Guaranteed citations, positions or traffic. Nobody controls what an assistant retrieves. A provider who promises it is either guessing or planning to move the goalposts.
• Screenshots as proof. One prompt, one session, one lucky answer. Ask for the query set and the miss rate instead.
• No mention of crawler access. If the pitch never checks whether GPTBot can fetch your site, the vendor has skipped the first gate.
• The same model writes and checks. A model grading its own draft finds the errors it did not notice the first time, which is to say very few.
• Charging for drafts you never see. You should pay for pages that go live, not for attempts.
• Twelve-month lock-ins for work that is measured monthly. If the numbers are real, the provider does not need the contract to keep you.
• No takedown control. Content published in your name should be yours to amend or remove, in your own CMS, without raising a ticket.
• Claims that Google or OpenAI prefer AI-written content. Neither has said any such thing, and a provider who tells you otherwise is inventing an endorsement.

None of this is exotic; it surfaces in the first ten minutes of a call if you listen for it.

IT Master is an autonomous engine, not a retainer, and the checklist above is largely what it was built to satisfy.

Topics come from real demand: DataForSEO keyword data and your own Search Console. Research reads competitor pages, forums and your first-party data — product records, datasheets, support Q&A — so drafts carry facts a rival cannot reproduce. A Claude model writes. Then Gemini and GPT models judge it: fact-check, novelty against competitors, an E-E-A-T critique and AI-tell detection, with up to three revision rounds. The model that writes is never the model that checks.

The judges are strict on purpose. Across 186 Standard-tier runs, 51% of drafts passed every check first time; the rest were revised or rejected. Pro-tier judges are stricter: 25% first-pass, across a small sample of 16 runs.

Passing articles publish to your site with JSON-LD, internal links, a hero image and an FAQ; IndexNow pings search engines. A nightly loop refreshes decaying pages and measures Search Console alongside citations in GPT and Perplexity. You pay per published article from a prepaid balance, with no subscription; see pricing. Delivery is a WordPress plugin, a Next.js SDK, a REST pull feed or a signed webhook. It runs for cctvline.co.uk and cctvmaster.co.uk (UK CCTV trade and retail), eurocctv.co.uk (UK CCTV trade) and 1xai.ir (AI developer tools, Persian).

Take these into any conversation about GEO services, including one with us:

• Which queries will you measure, and can I see the list before we start?
• Which assistants do you check, how often, and do you keep the misses?
• Who checks the writer's work, and is it a different model or a different person?
• What do I pay for a draft that fails your own checks?
• Can I remove a published page myself, today, without raising a ticket?
• Which of my own data will the content draw on that a competitor lacks?
• Can you show me the JSON-LD and the crawler access on a page you published last month?

A good provider answers each in a sentence. A weak one changes the subject.

If you want a baseline before you talk to anyone, run the free site check on your domain, then try the AI visibility checker for the citation side. The numbers they give you are the ones to hold every vendor to, this one included. How it works sets out the full pipeline if you would rather see the mechanism than the pitch.