Generative Engine Optimization RFP: How To Make One

If your brand isn’t showing up in AI-generated answers, it’s already disappearing from the buyer journey.

Search is no longer defined by blue links and organic rankings. Instead, buyers are getting solutions directly from generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

This fractured landscape is shifting influence away from traditional SERPs and into AI answers, Reddit threads, and other third-party sources. This means high-intent queries that once drove reliable traffic are now resolved before a user ever reaches your site.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is how you protect and grow visibility in this new reality. With the right partner, you can increase your inclusion in AI responses, improve placement when you’re mentioned, and strengthen the sentiment tied to your brand.

A well-structured GEO Request for Proposal (RFP) helps you identify that partner. This guide walks you through how to create one, plus key questions and deliverables to include when drafting your own.

But before we get to that, here’s a quick primer (or skip straight to the RFP section).

First Things First: Understanding the GEO Landscape

Recent data from Sparktoro and Datos shows that over 20% of Americans are now heavy AI users, relying on tools like ChatGPT at least 10 times a month. Overall monthly usage has surged from 8% to 38% over the last two years.

Google search still dominates, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok are expanding the surface area of discovery and impacting user behaviour, while Google itself is transforming with AI Overviews and AI Mode. Add Reddit’s rising influence, and the result is a search environment that looks very different from just a few years ago.

The high-intent queries that once reliably drove website visits now get resolved entirely within AI overviews, Reddit threads, or directly within LLM platforms.

Collectively, these generative engines (or answer engines, if you prefer) are changing how buyers find, vet, and select brands.

The transformation is happening across every industry, from B2B software to higher education, from financial services to healthcare. When someone asks an AI tool about solutions in your category, it synthesizes information from dozens of sources to create a comprehensive answer.

How Generative Engines Process Queries

When someone submits a query, the AI engine performs what’s called a query fan-out, reformulating the original question into 10-20 variations. It then crawls multiple URLs for each variation, analyzing how brands are mentioned and where they’re positioned. From there, the engine evaluates:

• Inclusion – Are you mentioned at all in the sources AI engines trust?
• Placement – Where do you appear on those pages? (Top-3 mentions typically dominate AI responses)

AI engines weigh these signals to determine not just if your brand is included, but how prominently it’s featured.

Early analysis shows clear patterns. LLMs disproportionately cite comparative content — listicles, “best of,” “X vs Y,” and alternatives. Listicles alone account for ~30% of all citations. Ranking #1 on those lists significantly increases your chances of being surfaced in answers. Freshness also matters: stale mentions lose visibility quickly.

And the scope extends far beyond traditional web content. Reddit threads, YouTube videos, LinkedIn discussions, Quora answers, and Medium articles all frequently appear as citations.

Taken together with current SEO best practices, the constantly-evolving AI tools, and changing search behavior, brands are dealing with a web of factors that influence how people search with generative engines:

This complexity demands a sophisticated approach to vendor selection. An effective GEO agency should provide you with a comprehensive plan of attack that covers:

• On-site credibility – Strengthening EEAT signals like expert quotes, statistics, bylines, and schema.
• Off-site influence – Securing brand presence in third-party sources such as listicles, directories, analyst reports, communities, and social platforms.

In the next section, we’ll examine the key elements of a strong GEO strategy.

Understand the Key Elements of an Effective GEO Strategy 

A generative engine optimization strategy functions like an ecosystem: multiple interdependent components working together to influence AI responses. Your RFP should reflect this complexity and test whether potential partners can execute across all of these areas:

• Measurement & Monitoring – Track appearances in LLM responses through monthly sampling across major models, inclusion/Top-3 share tracking, accuracy monitoring, and tool-agnostic deliverables compatible with tools like Profound or SEMrush.

• Third-party Placement Program – Influence sources you don’t control through systematic research → editorial outreach → updates/contributions → syndication workflows, and selective pay-to-play programs backed by ROI analysis.

• On-site “Money Pages” for LLMs – Build AI-friendly content: comparison pages, citations with quotes and statistics, SME-authored sections with attribution, FAQs with schema markup, and snippets that engines can lift verbatim.

• Entities & Schema – Help AI engines understand relationships with structured markup (Organization/Product/FAQ/HowTo/Review). Maintain consistent documentation hubs and differentiated landing pages to guide AI interpretation.

• PR & Communities – Shape responses through authentic participation: expert quotes, research reports, Reddit engagement, LinkedIn essays, Medium articles, and YouTube content.

Success in GEO requires orchestrating all elements simultaneously. Your RFP should probe how agencies coordinate across these disciplines.

Pre-RFP: Identifying and Outlining Your GEO Opportunity

Creating an effective GEO RFP means expanding how you measure success, what capabilities you need from a partner, and how you’ll operate in an environment where the rules are still being written.

The following sections provide a comprehensive framework for building an RFP that attracts the right partners and sets clear expectations.

1) Define Your GEO Goals and Requirements

Traditional content and SEO programs typically start with identifying keywords and traffic targets. GEO requires a more nuanced approach that begins with understanding how AI engines perceive and present your brand. Your digital marketing RFP needs to reflect this shift in perspective.

Traffic alone no longer tells the full story. You might maintain strong organic rankings while becoming invisible in AI responses — a dangerous blind spot that traditional metrics won’t capture.

Your RFP should establish GEO-specific outcomes that measure true visibility and influence, such as:

• Inclusion % across engines
• Share of Top-3 mentions
• Zeros to mentions
• AI referral traffic
• Sentiment trends

It should also document the contextual factors that will shape your GEO strategy with these additional requirements:

• Target markets and geographic priorities
• Products, programs, and services requiring visibility
• Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas
• Regulated claims and compliance requirements
• AI usage/provenance policy (what’s human-authored vs AI-assisted)

Remember, challenges vary by industry. Highly regulated sectors like finance and healthcare need to ensure AI engines don’t make unauthorized claims, while competitive markets like SaaS need aggressive placement strategies to maintain share of voice.

2) Outline Your Current GEO Strategy

Many organizations still measure GEO success against their SEO strengths. While SEO is foundational, relying on it alone creates a false sense of security. You might appear frequently in AI answers for branded queries yet be absent from the non-branded conversations that shape buyer decisions.

Your RFP should demand a rigorous baseline assessment that distinguishes where you currently appear from where you should appear.

This requires starting with a target prompts workshop that identifies the questions your ideal customers are actually asking AI tools. These prompts differ from traditional keywords because they’re more conversational, more specific, and often include multiple criteria or constraints.

Using GEO tools like Profound or Semrush’s AI toolkit, you can identify some of the baseline information you need for benchmarking improvements:

• Start with a Top-15 target prompts workshop, identifying questions where you want inclusion
• Sample AI answers against that list (not just existing rankings)
• Build a Top-50 cited-URL tracker for your space

Once you’ve mapped citations, your RFP should make clear that you expect vendors to follow a three-part strategy:

• Zero Mentions → Mentions: Agencies should demonstrate how they’ll prioritize sources where your brand isn’t cited at all. These are high-leverage opportunities for first-time inclusion that can rapidly expand visibility. Your RFP should ask vendors to outline their process for identifying and securing those “zero-to-one” mentions. This includes third-party platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and industry publications, where many brand conversations are already taking place.

• Mentions → Top-3 Placement: Where your brand is cited but ranked low (e.g., #14 on a “Best Tools” list), agencies must show how they will improve placement. LLMs weigh top-ranked mentions more heavily, so moving into the Top-3 has a disproportionate effect on how AI-generated answers present your brand. Your RFP should require agencies to describe the tactics, relationships, or pay-to-play mechanisms they’ll use to influence higher placement.

• Owned Opportunities → Improve Clarity: Where your own content is already being cited but not consistently, agencies should show how they will strengthen clarity and authority signals. This includes aligning schema, reducing duplication, and ensuring that your most valuable program/product pages are optimized for consistent inclusion in AI answers. Agencies should also demonstrate how they’ll connect technical foundations (crawlability, XML sitemaps, structured data) with authority signals (SME bylines, research citations) so your “money pages” reliably contribute to AI-generated answers.

By framing the strategy in these three dimensions, your prospective partners will be explicitly accountable for:

• Turning absences into mentions.
• Lifting low mentions into influential placements.
• Tightening owned content so it reliably contributes to AI-generated answers.

The technical foundation of your website remains important, but the requirements differ from traditional SEO. Generative engines rely on indexes like Google to identify brand offerings and trusted sources of information. But in addition to the on-site SEO tactics and link-building, social platforms, forums, and review sites also influence LLM-generated responses:

Don’t ignore the current state of third-party platforms. Some battles are already being fought — and possibly lost — on Reddit, YouTube, and industry publications.

Organize Your RFP Into Strategic Workstreams

Structuring your RFP around clear workstreams helps agencies understand scope and makes it easier to evaluate proposals side by side. Each stream should have defined deliverables, success metrics, and handoff points.

Workstream 1: GEO Audit & Baseline Assessment (4-6 weeks)

• Current AI visibility analysis across all major engines
• Target prompts workshop and competitive citation mapping
• Technical audit of schema, entities, and on-site optimization gaps

Workstream 2: Third-Party Placement Strategy (8-12 weeks)

• Editorial outreach program for high-value listicles and directories
• Media relationship development and analyst briefing coordination
• Pay-to-play opportunity assessment and ROI modeling

Workstream 3: Content & Technical Implementation (6-10 weeks)

• “Money pages” development optimized for AI citation
• Schema markup and entity optimization
• FAQ and documentation hub creation

Workstream 4: Community & PR Programs (Ongoing)

• Reddit engagement strategy with compliance guidelines
• LinkedIn thought leadership and YouTube content development
• Expert positioning and quote syndication

This structure gives agencies clear lanes of responsibility while ensuring you can measure performance across every stage of the program.

What to Include in Your Generative Engine Optimization RFP

1) Provide Comprehensive Company Information

AI engines update constantly, but it takes time to influence the sources they cite. The faster your agency understands your brand, the sooner you’ll see results. Include the essentials upfront so they can represent your brand accurately across platforms and communities:

• Brand positioning and key differentiators
• Program/product taxonomy with clear hierarchies
• Approved claims and proof points (case studies, statistics)
• SME roster for bylines and expert quotes
• Analyst/media/partner contacts for editorial updates
• Priority geographies for localizable content
• Compliance requirements and legal guardrails

Without this context on your brand positioning and constraints, they risk misrepresenting your brand or making claims you can’t support.

2) Define Specific Deliverables with Acceptance Criteria

Your RFP should demand concrete, measurable outputs. Specify exactly what you expect to receive:

Week 1-2 Deliverables:

• GEO Citation Map identifying the top 50 sources influencing AI responses in your category
• Target Prompts Analysis with inclusion rates and competitive positioning
• Schema Gap Report with implementation priorities
• Editorial Outreach Plan, naming specific publications and contact strategy

Monthly Ongoing Deliverables:

• AI Visibility Dashboard tracking inclusion rates and Top-3 share across engines
• Third-Party Placement Report with secured updates and pending opportunities
• Content Performance Analysis showing citation rates and AI pickup
• Accuracy Monitoring Log with hallucination fixes and brand mention quality

Quarterly Strategic Reviews:

• Competitive Analysis comparing your AI visibility to key competitors
• ROI Assessment measuring the business impact of GEO initiatives
• Strategy Refinement based on algorithm updates and performance data

Each deliverable should include acceptance criteria, delivery dates, and clear ownership assignments.

3) Craft a Clear Project Summary

Scope creep is one of the fastest ways to derail GEO initiatives. With so many channels influencing LLM responses, it’s easy to lose focus. Your RFP should establish clear boundaries while maintaining flexibility to pursue emerging opportunities.

Define scope streams that map directly to your KPIs:

• Measurement & Reporting: Baseline, ongoing tracking, competitive analysis
• Third-party Editorial Outreach: Listicle updates, directory inclusion, analyst briefings
• Content Production: Money pages, FAQs, documentation, video assets
• Schema/Entities: Implementation, optimization, monitoring
• PR & Community: Reddit engagement, LinkedIn thought leadership, YouTube content
• AI Governance: Policy development, accuracy monitoring, compliance

Each stream should have clear deliverables, success criteria, and interdependencies. Remember: GEO success is cumulative. Results come from the compounding effect of multiple coordinated tactics, not a single silver bullet.

4) Specify Required Team Structure and Expertise

GEO success requires diverse capabilities that few agencies possess in-house. Your RFP should clarify required team composition and experience levels:

Core Team Requirements

• GEO Strategist – Proven experience with AI visibility measurement and citation analysis
• Editorial Outreach Specialist – Existing media relationships and publication expertise in your industry
• Technical SEO Expert – Schema markup, entity optimization, and structured data implementation
• Community Manager – Authentic Reddit participation and social platform expertise
• Content Specialist – Experience creating content that AI engines cite and trust

Experience Verification

Ask for documented proof of expertise, including:

• Case studies and portfolio samples
• References from relevant industries
• Certifications in schema markup and structured data
• Examples of community engagement with measurable outcomes

Capacity and Support

Clarify how the agency handles:

• Surge capacity for high-demand periods
• Which capabilities are in-house vs. partnered
• Bench strength for specialized skills

Understanding their operating model helps set realistic expectations for execution.

5) Establish a Project Timeline

GEO operates on multiple timescales simultaneously. Some optimizations, like correcting factual errors, need immediate attention. Others, like building community authority, require months of consistent effort. Your timeline should reflect this reality while maintaining urgency around quick wins.

0-30 Days: Foundation

The first month sets the trajectory for everything that follows. Focus on understanding the landscape and capturing low-hanging fruit:

• Target-prompts workshop (Top 15)
• Baseline measurement across all platforms
• Entity/schema audit
• Compile Top-50 cited URLs
• Quick-win corrections (errors/omissions)
• Draft 2-3 money pages

31-60 Days: Initial Implementation

With the foundations in place, the second month focuses on systematic execution across multiple channels:

• Outreach wave #1 (editorial updates + select pay-to-play)
• Publish money pages with quotes/stats/citations
• Reddit activations
• YouTube pilot
• Re-crawl nudges
• First performance analysis

61-90 Days: Scale and Optimize

The third month should demonstrate measurable progress while refining strategies based on initial results:

• Outreach wave #2
• Expand schema/entities
• Add additional money pages
• Accuracy fixes based on monitoring
• Executive readout
• Q2 roadmap development

6) Structure Budget Considerations by Investment Level

GEO investment varies significantly based on the competitive landscape and ambition level. Request tiered proposals that show clear relationships between spending and expected outcomes:

Budget Components to Address

• Strategy and Measurement: Baseline analysis, ongoing tracking, competitive intelligence
• Editorial and Outreach: Media contributions, sponsored content, analyst briefings
• Content Production: Money pages, video assets, documentation hubs
• Technical Implementation: Schema markup, entity optimization, site improvements
• Community Programs: Reddit engagement, LinkedIn content, YouTube production
• Tool and Platform Costs: Pass-through versus included in agency fees

Investment Tiers

Request three scenario budgets:

• Foundation Tier: Core measurement, basic outreach, essential content
• Growth Tier: Expanded editorial program, comprehensive content library, active community engagement
• Acceleration Tier: Aggressive placement strategy, premium content production, multi-platform authority building

Each tier should include 90-day KPI forecasts showing expected inclusion rates, citation improvements, and business impact. This helps you understand the point of diminishing returns and make informed investment decisions.

7) Set Capabilities Evaluation Criteria

Not all GEO capabilities are created equal. Your evaluation criteria should reflect the relative importance of different skills while ensuring comprehensive coverage across all necessary areas. A weighted rubric helps maintain objectivity when comparing proposals that might emphasize different strengths.

Use this weighted framework for consistent evaluation across different vendors:

• GEO Strategy & Measurement (20%) – Can they actually track and improve AI visibility?
• Third-party Placement & Editorial Outreach (20%) –Do they have real media relationships?
• Content for LLMs (15%) –Can they create content that AI engines trust and cite?
• Community/Reddit & Social Publishing (10%) – Will they authentically engage or just spam?
• Technical Readiness (10%) –Do they understand schema and entity optimization?
• Case Proof & Team Expertise (15%) – Have they done this successfully before?
• Compliance & AI Governance (10%) –Will they protect your brand while pushing boundaries?

Anyone can claim GEO expertise, but few can demonstrate measurable results. Make sure you ask for concrete proof of success to assist with your evaluation.

8) Define Your Budget Expectations

GEO investment differs from traditional digital marketing in both structure and scale. While some components (like content creation) have predictable costs, others (like third-party placements) can vary significantly based on your industry and competitive landscape. Transparency about your budget helps agencies propose realistic strategies rather than theoretical ideals.

Be explicit about what you’re willing to invest and how you want costs structured:

Budget Components to Address

• Strategy and measurement costs
• Content volume and production rates
• Editorial fees (contributions/sponsorships)
• Reddit/YouTube production expenses
• Reporting cadence impact on costs
• Tooling costs (pass-through vs included)

Consider requesting tiered proposals that show what’s possible at different investment levels. This helps you understand the relationship between spending and outcomes while identifying the point of diminishing returns.

After creating and submitting your request for proposal, you’ll hopefully have a shortlist of GEO partners available to help turn your goals into strategy and results. The next step is to pick the right vendor.

Post-RFP: How to Evaluate Potential GEO Agencies

You need to look beyond polished proposals to find genuine expertise. Since GEO is still emerging, many agencies repackage existing services with AI terminology. Focus on concrete evidence of success and relevant capabilities.

• Experience and Expertise: Look for documented evidence: listicle rank lifts, new citations on high-value platforms, inclusion percentage improvements across AI engines, accuracy fix workflows, and understanding of community norms. Pay attention to their methodology for discovering influential sources — if they can’t explain how they identify which URLs matter most, they’re likely guessing.
• Support Levels: Clarify ownership: Who handles measurement vs outreach vs content vs community? What capabilities are in-house vs partnered? How do they handle surge capacity needs?
• Industry Specialization: Verify familiarity with buyer terminology, compliance requirements, key publication relationships, and industry-specific AI use cases.
• Goal Alignment: Ensure agencies connect proposed activities to business outcomes through KPI trees that tie weekly tasks to quarterly results, clear theories of change, measurement approaches, and contingency plans.

The right GEO partner will demonstrate measurable expertise while being transparent about their methodology. Avoid agencies that promise quick fixes or can’t explain their approach to third-party influence.

Get Started With Your Generative Engine Optimization Partner

As AI search continues to grow as a discovery mechanism, brands that aren’t included in answers won’t even make the shortlist.

With a well-crafted RFP that addresses the full scope of GEO requirements, you can find a partner that can turn mentions into authority, and authority into demand.

The organizations succeeding with GEO understand that algorithm hacks and shortcuts don’t work. What matters is building real authority across the sources AI engines trust the most.

The future of digital marketing is being written now, one AI response at a time. If you’re ready to secure your place in it, now is the time to build your GEO RFP and choose the partner who can help you lead.

Want to start doing your research? Get on a call with the leading generative engine optimization agency today.