If you are a law firm CMO or marketing director evaluating GEO and AEO agencies, you’ve probably already noticed the problems: the discipline is roughly 18 to 24 months old as a structured practice, the vendors pitching it are mostly SEO shops that added an AI service tier without rebuilding their methodology, and the outcomes worth buying (i.e., AI citations, share of model voice, prompt coverage) don’t appear in any standard analytics dashboard.

Understanding What You Are (and Aren’t) Buying

What you are actually buying with a GEO/AEO engagement is a specific methodology for building and maintaining AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the platforms that follow them, with reporting that proves it is working. 

What the Scope Must Include

• Platform coverage. Which AI platforms the engagement actively covers. At minimum: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Ask the agency to specify which platforms they monitor, which they optimize for, and how that list will evolve.
• Practice area prioritization. GEO strategy for a firm with 20+ practice groups cannot be run firm-wide. The RFP must require the agency to demonstrate how they handle practice area-level segmentation; which practices get prioritized in year one, how prompt sets are built by practice, and how reporting rolls up to a firm-level view without losing the practice-level signal.
• Geographic market definition. AI citation patterns vary by jurisdiction and market. Require clarity on which cities, regions, and jurisdictional markets the prompt monitoring covers, and how that maps to the firm’s business development priorities.
• SEO foundation scope. AI engines cite authoritative, well-structured content. GEO layered on top of a broken technical SEO foundation does not work. The RFP must address whether the agency will manage or audit the firm’s underlying SEO health — site architecture, content quality, schema, page speed, internal linking — or whether GEO is being sold in isolation.

How to Evaluate Proposals

Use a weighted scorecard rather than holistic scoring. GEO is too new for evaluators to hold consistent standards across a review committee without an explicit framework, and weighted scoring forces the committee to decide what matters before they read the responses.

A suggested weighting:

Firms with strong technical SEO already handled in-house may shift weight from the SEO foundation criterion to GEO methodology. Firms in heavily regulated practices may weigh legal industry experience higher. The numbers are a starting point, not a fixed standard.

The Questions That Reveal Real AI Optimization Capability When Evaluating GEO and AEO Agencies

The questions below can be dropped directly into an RFP document. Each one is paired with what a strong answer should include — useful for evaluators who are scoring responses against a framework, not against their own intuition.

The Methodology Questions

1. Walk us through your AI citation tracking methodology. Which platforms do you monitor, how frequently, and what tools do you use for automated monitoring versus manual testing?

A strong answer names specific platforms, specifies frequency (weekly at minimum for enterprise engagements), distinguishes between automated tooling and human review, and acknowledges the gap between what tools can capture and what requires manual prompt testing. A weak answer is vague about platforms or frequency.

2. Show us a sample AI citation report from a current or recent client engagement with platform-level breakdown and competitor comparison. 

A strong answer produces a real report. A weak answer says they track this internally but cannot share an example, or sends a slide that summarizes activity rather than citations.

3. How do you define and monitor “share of model voice” relative to competitor firms? What is the reference set of prompts you track against?

A strong answer explains the methodology, names a typical prompt set size (50–200 prompts is standard for enterprise legal), and describes how the prompt set is built and refreshed as the firm’s practice mix evolves. A weak answer treats share of model voice as a marketing concept rather than a measured metric.

4. If our AI citation frequency drops in a given month, what is your diagnostic process and how quickly do we receive a response?

A strong answer describes a defined diagnostic workflow: which signals are checked first, who reviews them, how root cause is identified, and what the response SLA is. A weak answer treats this as a hypothetical.

The Accountability Question

5. What does your reporting cadence look like? Walk us through what we would receive monthly, who prepares it, and how it connects to strategy decisions.

A strong answer describes a structured monthly report covering citation frequency, share of model voice, prompt coverage by practice area, and recommended priorities for the following 30 days — plus a quarterly strategy review that connects the data to business development outcomes. A weak answer describes an automated dashboard with no interpretation layer.

The Industry-Specific Question

6. How many of your current or recent clients are law firms? What practice areas have you run GEO for, and in which markets?

A strong answer names practice areas and markets specifically. A weak answer pivots to adjacent verticals or non-legal case studies.

Red Flags in Proposal Responses

Specific responses that should eliminate an agency from consideration or trigger deeper scrutiny.

Automatic Disqualifiers

• They cannot produce a sample citation report with platform-level data. “We track this internally” without evidence is not acceptable at enterprise scale. If they cannot show you what reporting looks like before contract, they will not produce it after contract.
• They define success in terms of organic traffic increases. This signals they are applying SEO measurement logic to a GEO engagement. The frameworks are not interchangeable.
• They cannot explain how their GEO approach builds on SEO foundations. Agencies that position GEO as completely separate from SEO either do not understand the discipline or are upselling a second service tier the firm does not need.
• They cannot describe their conflict policy. For enterprise legal, working with competing firms in the same market and practice area is a real risk. An agency without a clearly articulated conflict policy has not thought about how to protect client strategy.

Yellow Flags Worth Probing Further

• The team presented in the proposal includes no one with legal industry background. Not an automatic disqualifier, but GEO for Am Law 50–200 firms requires familiarity with legal advertising compliance, YMYL content requirements, multi-practice complexity, and the way sophisticated legal buyers actually research counsel. None of that transfers cleanly from consumer or B2B verticals.
• The case studies are from industries other than law. Useful for understanding methodology, but insufficient as proof of legal GEO capability. Ask for a follow-up call with a law firm client reference before scoring this criterion as met.
• The pricing model is purely deliverable-based. Pricing tied to outputs (X blog posts, Y pages optimized) rather than retained capability and outcome reporting suggests the agency is selling production hours rather than a managed visibility program.

Agencies that cannot answer the methodology questions, cannot produce sample citation reports, and cannot describe their reporting cadence in concrete terms have already told you what you need to know. The procurement process does the diligence for you if the questions are specific enough.

The agencies that can answer these questions — with evidence, with detail, with the comfort of practitioners who do this work every week — are the short list.

See How 9Sail Handles GEO Accountability

If you are running an active agency review, three resources to start with:

The 2026 Am Law 200 Digital Visibility Report shows where your firm’s AI visibility currently stands relative to peers — a useful baseline before evaluating proposals.

The Best Law Firm GEO Agencies guide walks through 9Sail’s evidence-based methodology for evaluating agencies across citation outcomes and legal industry experience.

The Working with 9Sail page lays out 9Sail’s process, reporting structure, and conflict policy — the exact questions you would ask in an RFP, answered before you have to ask them.

Related: Law Firm GEO Services | Am Law 200 Marketing Services | Enterprise SEO for Large Law Firms