AEO·GEO4 min read한국어로 읽기

How Do You Pick an SEO, AEO, and GEO Consultant?

A practical checklist for evaluating consultants who handle both search rankings and AI answer citations.

Search for "SEO AEO GEO consulting" and you'll meet the same sentences everywhere: "search optimization for the AI era," "we'll get your brand into ChatGPT answers." The problem is that those phrases don't help you tell who actually does the work. This is the official SAENRU blog, so yes, we'll introduce our own service at the end — but first, here are the criteria that work even with every company name blacked out.

What should you actually evaluate?

The single most important question is: what do they measure, and how do they show it to you? Search visibility and AI answer citations are different metrics, and a proposal that can't separate them in diagnosis usually can't separate them in execution either. Ask about these before signing anything.

  • Diagnostic method: a single automated score, or real prompts run against real AI assistants and observed
  • Deliverable format: a summary deck only, or a page-by-page document saying what to change
  • Technical scope: structured data (JSON-LD), rendering method, robots.txt and llms.txt, sitemaps
  • Local search: Google only, or the search channels that actually matter in your market
  • Who executes: advice only, or advice plus the engineering to implement it
  • After the contract: whether the code, docs, and account access stay with you

That last one matters more than people expect. If the optimization work lives inside a vendor-only CMS or script, ending the contract can quietly undo it.

What are the warning signs in a proposal?

Any promise of a guaranteed ranking or citation should be your first filter. Neither search engines nor generative models publish their ranking logic, and both change frequently, so certainty is structurally impossible. Here are the red flags that show up most often.

  1. "Guaranteed #1 in AI search" — an unverifiable claim.
  2. A quote before any diagnosis — priced without looking at your site.
  3. Volume-only content plans — publishing N articles a month doesn't convert to citations by itself.
  4. No technical items — pages rendered purely in JavaScript or missing markup won't be fixed by more writing.
  5. Monthly retainers without a measurement plan — if nobody defined what to check, reports become ritual.

The good signal is simpler: a firm that tells you what it can't do. Proposals that say "this takes time" or "this isn't our scope" hold up better once the work starts.

How does SAENRU handle this?

SAENRU's SEO, AEO and GEO consulting diagnoses and optimizes one continuous path — from Google and Naver search to citations inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude answers. The entry point is a measured diagnostic report (₩190,000, 5 business days), and that fee is fully credited if you go on to a build contract. It's designed for teams that want to see their current state before committing budget.

  • Diagnostic report: ₩190,000 / 5 business days, fully credited toward a build contract
  • Build package: from ₩3,600,000
  • Monthly operations: from ₩1,470,000 per month
  • All prices exclude VAT

Our credential here is our own site. The SAENRU homepage is built as raw HTML with JSON-LD and llms.txt embedded — an AEO implementation we applied to ourselves before recommending it to clients. If you need the site rebuilt first, SAENRU Studio delivers websites from ₩2,700,000 (about 2 weeks) and web app MVPs from ₩8,700,000 (4–6 weeks), handed over as a full GitHub repository so ownership stays with you.

If you'd rather start with the vocabulary, our complete SEO, AEO and GEO guide covers definitions, a comparison table, and which to prioritize in which situation. You don't need all three at once. Knowing where your business is currently losing ground comes first — and good consulting doesn't make that judgment for you, it gives you the evidence to make it.

FAQ

Should one firm handle SEO, AEO, and GEO together?
The three share much of the same technical foundation — markup, rendering, site structure — so splitting them across vendors often creates duplicated work and unclear ownership. That said, claiming to be integrated isn't the same as being integrated, so check whether the diagnostic report reports each area with its own distinct metrics.
What should I budget for this kind of consulting?
It varies widely with site size, existing technical debt, and whether you need ongoing operations. At SAENRU, the measured diagnostic report is ₩190,000 (5 business days), build packages start at ₩3,600,000, and monthly operations start at ₩1,470,000 — all excluding VAT, with the diagnostic fee fully credited toward a build contract.
If I could ask only one question before signing, what should it be?
"What stays with us when the contract ends?" Whether the code, structured data, documentation, and account access remain yours determines if you can hand the work to another team or continue it in-house later.

← Back to Insights