SEO & GEO
How to Hire a GEO Specialist for AI Search Visibility
As buyers ask AI assistants instead of searching, brands need someone focused on being cited. Here is how to hire a GEO specialist.
To hire a GEO specialist, look for strong technical SEO foundations plus specific skills in answer-first content, entity optimisation, structured data, llms.txt and AI visibility tracking. A good GEO specialist will benchmark how AI platforms describe your brand today and show monthly progress on mentions and citations.
What a GEO specialist does
- Audits how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews describe your brand and competitors.
- Rewrites key pages so the main answer appears in the first few sentences.
- Adds and validates schema markup across the site.
- Publishes llms.txt and reviews robots.txt for AI crawlers.
- Strengthens consistent entity information across directories, profiles and review sites.
- Tracks a fixed set of buyer prompts every month.
Skills to test
| Skill | Test |
|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Audit a sample page and list issues |
| Answer-first writing | Rewrite an introduction to answer a question in 50 words |
| Schema | Write JSON-LD for a service page with FAQs |
| AI tracking | Design a prompt panel and reporting sheet |
Questions to ask
- How do AI Overviews choose which sources to cite?
- What changes would you make to our homepage for AI visibility?
- How do you measure GEO progress without guessing?
Red flags
- Promises guaranteed AI citations.
- No technical SEO experience.
- Treats GEO as only adding FAQ sections.
Where GEO fits
GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Most businesses pair a GEO specialist with an SEO expert and a content writer. Read our guide to what generative engine optimization is for background.
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