What a GEO Agency Should Do in Your First 90 Days

A generative engine optimisation (GEO) agency’s first 90 days with an Australian service business should produce four things you can check: a written baseline of what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI say about the business today, fixed crawler and indexing access, a current Google Business Profile with the core service pages rebuilt to answer buying questions, and a month-three report measured against that baseline. Citations often take longer than a quarter, but the foundations should be finished inside it.

I think the first quarter is the fairest test of any GEO provider, because it is the part you can judge before results are possible. Rankings and AI mentions move slowly and depend on things no provider fully controls. Whether the audit was specific, whether the fixes shipped and whether the report tells you something new are all visible by week twelve.

We sell this work, so weigh what follows with that in mind. We do it as Compound SEO & GEO, one plan covering SEO and GEO for $1,500 a month plus GST, with a three-month minimum and then 30 days notice either way. The three-month minimum exists for exactly the reason this post describes: the first quarter is foundations, and it is the period I would want any client to hold us to.

What should a GEO agency deliver in the first 30 days?

A GEO agency’s first 30 days should deliver an audit and a baseline, both in writing. The audit says what on the site and the business listings stops search engines and AI assistants from finding, trusting or quoting the business. The baseline records, question by question, what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews say about the business right now, so month three has something to be compared against.

Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO is a good standard for that audit, and it applies just as well to GEO:

“An SEO audit should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved.”

Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO? (Google)

The same page says to only grant read access to Search Console at the audit stage, not write access. I agree with that, and I’d add one thing to the brief: ask for the list of questions the baseline was run on. A baseline built on twenty questions your customers actually ask is useful. One built on your brand name alone tells you very little, because I’d expect an assistant to find a business that someone searches for by name.

The baseline matters more for GEO than it ever did for SEO because the assistants are where Australians are now asking. Roy Morgan counts 10.5 million Australians (45%) using ChatGPT in an average four weeks (Roy Morgan), a figure we track alongside other indicators in our Australian small-business AI index. If you are not checking what that audience is told about you, you are guessing.

What technical fixes belong in the first month of GEO work?

Technical GEO fixes in the first month are the ones that decide whether an AI assistant can read the site at all: crawler access in robots.txt, indexing in Google and Bing, and the content that matters sitting in plain text on the page. They are cheap to fix and expensive to miss, because a blocked crawler stops every later piece of work from counting.

The two crawlers I’d check first belong to ChatGPT and Perplexity. OpenAI’s documentation is direct about what blocking its search crawler costs:

“Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.”

OpenAI, crawler documentation (OpenAI)

Perplexity’s equivalent is PerplexityBot, which its documentation describes as designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity (Perplexity). On the Bing side, Microsoft Bing supports IndexNow (IndexNow), a protocol that tells the search engine when a page has changed rather than waiting for a crawl.

What does not belong in month one is a pile of new files. Google says plainly what its AI features need:

“You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”

Google Search Central, AI features and your website (Google)

So if a first-month plan is mostly llms.txt files and special schema, I would ask what else is in it. Structured data is still worth doing properly, and we do it, but Google is clear it is not a ticket into AI Overviews on its own.

How should the 90 days be split month by month?

A sensible GEO quarter spends month one on the audit, baseline and technical access, month two on the pages and listings that answer buying questions, and month three on new content, a second baseline run and a report that compares the two. The split matters less than the order: nothing written in month two counts if the crawlers were blocked in month one.

Month	The work	What you should receive
1	Audit, AI baseline, crawler and indexing fixes, Search Console access	A written audit, the baseline questions and answers, a list of fixes made
2	Google Business Profile, core service pages rebuilt, consistent details across directories	The changed pages, before and after, and the profile updates
3	New articles on customer questions, the baseline re-run, the quarter’s comparison	A report comparing month three with month one, and the plan for months four to six

The useful test of this table is the right-hand column: by day 90 every row should have produced something you can open and read, even if the citations themselves have not moved yet.

Month two is where I would expect most of the effort to go, because the Business Profile, the service pages and the directory listings are, in my view, what both Google and an assistant lean on most when they choose which local business to show. A complete Business Profile, a page for each service you want more of, and the same name, address and phone number everywhere are dull work, and they are the base the rest compounds on.

Reviews sit inside that work too. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 found that use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local recommendations grew from 6% last year to 45%, which made it the third most popular source of business recommendations (BrightLocal). For an Australian business the point is that the review profile now gets read by software as well as people.

What should the first GEO report show after 90 days?

A first GEO report after 90 days should show the baseline questions again with the new answers beside them, which pages were changed and whether they are indexed, the Search Console data for the searches that bring work, and the enquiries the business received. It should say what moved, what did not and what comes next, in plain words rather than a dashboard of scores.

I’d put enquiries in that list on purpose. Clicks from search are getting harder to win even when the business ranks well. A Pew Research Center study found that users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of all visits, against 15% of visits without one, and clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits. Ahrefs found the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page (Ahrefs).

Pew’s numbers come from US users, so read them as direction rather than an Australian measurement. They are still the reason a GEO report built on traffic alone misleads. A business can be named in an AI answer, never get the click, and still get the phone call. We cover the manual checks and the tools in our guide to measuring AI search visibility, and the questions to put to a provider before signing in how to choose a GEO agency.

When is a 90-day GEO plan the wrong place to start?

A 90-day GEO plan is the wrong place to start for a business whose website does not yet describe its services properly, for one that is booked out and cannot take more work, and for one that wants guaranteed AI citations by a fixed date. In each case the money buys work the business cannot use yet, or a promise nobody can honestly make.

The website case is the one I’d check first. If your services sit on a single page with no detail, or the site is mostly images with little text, the first job is the site itself, and that is a web project before it is a GEO retainer. We do that as Compound Web, from $2,990 per project plus GST, and the GEO plan follows once the pages exist.

Google’s advice on hiring an SEO is blunt about promises: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” The same is true of a citation in ChatGPT. If a provider promises you one by a date, I’d take that as a reason to keep looking, whoever it is.

How do you start a GEO engagement with Compound Co?

Starting a GEO engagement with Compound Co begins with a conversation about your site and the questions your customers ask, before any plan is signed. From that we tell you what the first 90 days would focus on, and whether the plan makes sense for your business yet or the site needs work first.

That first conversation is the same whether you are in Melbourne or in Far North Queensland, where we do GEO work for local Cairns businesses. The plan itself, Compound SEO & GEO, runs at $1,500 a month plus GST with the three-month minimum, and you can see it next to our other prices on the pricing page.

If you want to start there, send us your website and the three services you most want more enquiries for. We will tell you what we would do in the first 90 days, and if the site needs work before GEO makes sense, we will say that first.

Frequently asked questions

What does a GEO agency do in the first 90 days?

A GEO agency’s first 90 days should cover an audit, a written baseline of what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI say about the business, crawler and indexing fixes, a current Google Business Profile, rebuilt service pages and a month-three report against the baseline. Citations can take longer; the foundations should be finished inside the quarter.

How long does GEO take to show results?

GEO usually takes three to six months before there is much to measure, which is why Compound SEO & GEO has a three-month minimum. Technical fixes and Business Profile updates can show earlier, because they change what assistants and Google can read straight away. Judge the result by enquiries and the baseline comparison, not by rankings alone.

Do I need llms.txt or special schema for AI search?

Google says you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there is no special schema.org structured data to add. Structured data is still worth doing properly. Crawler access, indexing and clear service pages matter more in the first month.

Is a GEO agency worth paying for a small service business?

A GEO agency is worth paying for when the enquiries it helps bring in earn more than the fee and the website already describes your services well. With 10.5 million Australians using ChatGPT, being named in its answers is a real channel. Compound SEO & GEO covers SEO and GEO together for $1,500 a month plus GST.