Stage 4: What should you ask before signing a GEO agency or monitoring contract?

Give each supplier the same brief and ask for the same evidence. Do not compare a monitoring subscription with an implementation retainer as though they deliver the same outcome.

Procurement checklist

• Coverage: exact surfaces, access routes, countries, languages, prompts and refresh schedule.
• Definitions: separate mentions, recommendations, owned citations, external citations and accuracy.
• Collection quality: failed-run handling, retries, model changes and continuity arrangements.
• Evidence access: full answers, timestamps, URLs, historical exports and a sample export before purchase.
• Implementation: named deliverables, responsible people, approval dependencies and deployment responsibility.
• Validation: a frozen core benchmark, independent spot-checks and disclosed changes to scoring.
• Commercial terms: base fee, engine add-ons, overages, minimum term, renewal notice and cancellation.
• Exit: export format, access after cancellation, retention and deletion arrangements.
• Security: permitted data, subprocessors, access controls and incident responsibilities.
• Conflicts: referral payments, publisher ownership and any supplier involvement in supposedly independent evidence.

NIST’s generative AI risk profile supports documented third-party risk management and ownership of incident response. Use it as a diligence reference, not as a claim that a supplier has satisfied every applicable legal obligation. (nvlpubs.nist.gov)

Which promises or practices should trigger a pause?

Unexplained collection methods. OpenAI’s individual-service terms prohibit automated or programmatic extraction of data or output. Require suppliers to explain their applicable access arrangements; do not assume a technically functioning collection method is authorised. (openai.com)

Guaranteed performance without substantiation. Ask for the underlying evidence, exclusions and measurement rules. The FTC states that a money-back guarantee does not substitute for evidence supporting advertising claims. (ftc.gov)

Fabricated reviews or disguised independent endorsements. The FTC’s rule addresses fake reviews, sentiment-conditioned review incentives and misrepresentation of company-controlled review sites as independent. Reject these tactics rather than treating them as an aggressive optimisation option. (ftc.gov)

An intervention without a delivery owner. Put the publishing and approval responsibilities in the contract. An agency/vendor podcast published in February 2026 highlights resourcing and approval bottlenecks in AI-search work; that is useful practitioner context, not evidence of how common the problem is across buyers. (beomniscient.com)