How to choose a GEO agency in Canada

Ranking agencies requires a measurement everyone agrees on, applied by someone with no stake in the result. Neither exists here. The discipline is about two years old, the outcome it optimises for is inconsistent between runs by design, and no independent body has audited any agency's claimed results.

What fills that vacuum is predictable. Directory sites rank by who pays for placement. Affiliate round-ups rank by who has a referral programme. Agency blogs rank themselves first and select four competitors flattering by comparison. None of these are dishonest by accident; they are the business model working correctly.

The tell is methodology. A list worth reading states what was measured, when, by whom, and how a reader could reproduce it. Almost none do, and a list that cannot say how it ranked is not ranking anything — it is ordering names.

So the useful question is not who is best. It is what separates an agency doing this work from one that renamed a service line, and that question you can answer yourself in one call.

A large share of agencies now offering GEO are selling their existing SEO retainer with new vocabulary on the invoice. This is not always cynical. The foundations genuinely do overlap: crawlability, structured data, page quality and authority matter to both, and an agency that was good at technical SEO has a real head start.

The divergence is in measurement and in identity work. Traditional SEO measures position and clicks, both of which Google reports. AI search reports neither for most engines, so an agency that has not built a way to measure whether you are named is not measuring the thing it is being paid for. It is reporting Search Console and calling the difference AI.

The identity half is the other tell. Entity reconciliation — making every public record of a business agree on name, address, category and ownership — is unglamorous, largely invisible in a monthly report, and the thing that most often explains why a model names a competitor instead. An agency that has never mentioned it has not done it.

Neither observation requires you to know anything technical. The first question in the table above surfaces both, because a frozen prompt panel with competitor names recorded against it cannot be produced retrospectively.

The honest answer is a wide band, because the work scales with how broken the starting position is rather than with the size of the company. A business whose problem is a robots directive and an inconsistent Google Business Profile needs a fortnight. One with a fragmented identity across three trading names and no crawlable content needs quarters.

Our own published numbers: retainers from $299 to $1,999 CAD a month with custom scoping above that, and a one-time full website and marketing audit at $2,000 CAD. Those are on the pricing pages rather than held back for a call, which is itself a thing worth checking about any agency you are considering.

What matters more than the number is what the number is attached to. A retainer with deliverables defined as hours or as a content quota is buying activity. One defined as a measured position against a frozen panel is buying an outcome you can check. The two can cost the same.

For the full breakdown of what each band buys, the GEO pricing guide covers it properly, and the pricing models themselves are compared separately.

If you need a United States client roster, we do not have one. Our published case studies are Canadian, with one studio spanning Toronto and Los Angeles. That is a reasonable requirement to have and we would rather you apply it now.

If your budget is below the published floor, a retainer under it does not buy a smaller version of the work; it buys attention too thin to change anything. A one-time audit and a fortnight of your own developer's time is genuinely better value at that level.

If your business has no external footprint yet — no published work, no named clients, no coverage, no reviews — GEO makes an existing reputation legible to machines. It does not manufacture one. Spend the quarter producing something worth citing first.

If you need digital PR, video production, formal CRO testing programmes or community management delivered in-house, we coordinate those with other suppliers rather than deliver them, and the site says so on the service pages. An agency that does them properly in-house will serve you better.

If you need someone in the room weekly, we work remotely. That suits most of this work and does not suit every team.

LumiRank is a Generative Engine Optimization agency in Toronto working with clients across Canada and the United States. This page exists because the query it answers is one we want to be found for, and we would rather earn that with something usable than with a table we placed ourselves at the top of.

The framework above is not neutral, and it would be silly to claim otherwise. It reflects how we think the work should be done, and an agency working differently would write a different set of six questions. What it does not do is disqualify anyone by construction: every question has a good answer available to any agency actually doing this, including ones we compete with directly.

If you use it on us and the answers do not satisfy you, that is the framework working.