Generative Engine Optimisation Agency in Chicago

Week 1–2

GEO Audit & Baseline

Full AI visibility scan across 5 LLM platforms using 200+ Chicago-relevant queries. Citation map, competitor benchmark, and prioritised action plan delivered before any execution begins.

Week 2–3

Strategy Build

Custom GEO roadmap for your Chicago market: content gaps, entity priorities, platform targets, and a 90-day sprint plan presented for sign-off before execution.

Week 3–6 · First results

Content & Technical

Schema deployment, FAQ architecture, page restructuring, and author signals. First measurable AI citations typically appear here – within 6 weeks of project start.

Week 6–10

Authority Building

Brand mentions, editorial citations, and structured placements in authoritative sources that LLMs use as credibility proxies for Chicago brands.

Month 3+ · Ongoing

Monitor & Scale

Monthly AI Share of Voice reports. Continuous optimisation, new platform expansion, and ongoing citation rate improvement across all major AI platforms.

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your brand's content, entity signals, and off-site mentions so that LLMs – specifically ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot – cite your business when users ask questions relevant to your market category. LLMs do not crawl the web and rank pages the way Google's algorithm does. Instead, they synthesise answers from a retrieval pool of sources they have been trained on or can access in real time, and they cite the brands that appear most frequently and authoritatively in those sources. For a Chicago B2B company – say, a supply chain software vendor serving manufacturers in the Chicagoland corridor – this means that when a procurement director types "best supply chain platforms for Chicago manufacturers" into ChatGPT, the model will name two to four brands. Those brands are not necessarily the ones with the best Google rankings; they are the ones whose names, use cases, and authority signals appear consistently across the specific publication types and content formats that LLMs weight most heavily. GEO is the process of getting your Chicago brand into that citation pool through structured content creation, entity graph optimisation, and targeted off-site placement – so that AI answers about your category include your name, not just your competitors'.

Based on our work with over 500 brands, Chicago B2B clients typically see their first measurable AI citations within six weeks of programme launch, with the timeline broken into four specific stages. Weeks one and two are dedicated to audit and strategy: we run over 200 AI queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to establish your baseline citation frequency, map your entity gaps, and benchmark you against three to five named Chicago competitors in your category. Weeks three and four are the execution phase: we produce and publish structured content assets in the formats LLMs preferentially retrieve – definitional pages, FAQ clusters, comparison content, and structured data markup – and begin off-site mention placement in the publication types that carry the highest citation weight for your B2B vertical. By weeks five and six, the retrieval layer of the AI models begins reflecting the new authority signals, and clients record their first new citations in tracked AI answers. Weeks seven through twelve scale that initial citation base: we expand placements, monitor which content formats are generating the most AI mentions, and iterate based on live weekly citation data. The 212% leads increase our clients have recorded is typically achieved within the full 90-day window rather than at week six – the six-week milestone is first citation appearance, not maximum citation density.

SEO and GEO are optimising for fundamentally different systems with different ranking and citation logic. SEO improves your position in Google's blue-link results by building backlink authority, optimising page structure, and targeting keyword-matched queries – the signals Google's PageRank-derived algorithm weights most heavily. GEO improves your brand's citation frequency in AI-generated answers by building entity recognition, structured content authority, and off-site mentions in the specific source types that LLMs draw from. A concrete Chicago example: a Fulton Market B2B SaaS company might rank position one on Google for "project management software Chicago" and still receive zero mentions when a buyer at a River North consulting firm asks ChatGPT the same question. That happens because ChatGPT is not reading Google's rankings – it is synthesising from its training data and real-time retrieval sources, which include industry publications, structured review platforms, and authoritative content patterns that have nothing to do with your domain authority score. The content formats that win in SEO – long-form blog posts optimised for keyword density – are often not the formats LLMs preferentially cite. GEO requires a separate content architecture, a different off-site placement strategy, and entirely different measurement metrics including AI Citation Frequency and Share of AI Voice rather than keyword rankings and organic traffic.

We optimise across five major AI platforms that Chicago B2B buyers are actively using for vendor research, each of which has a distinct retrieval logic requiring specific optimisation approaches. ChatGPT – particularly the GPT-4o model with web browsing enabled – draws heavily from real-time web retrieval and weights structured, authoritative content from industry publications and well-formatted brand pages. We optimise content format and off-site placements specifically to appear in ChatGPT's retrieval results. Perplexity operates as an AI-native search engine and cites sources explicitly, meaning that appearing in Perplexity answers requires your content to rank in its real-time web index for the specific query formats Chicago B2B buyers use. Google AI Overviews appear at the top of Google search results pages and are driven by a combination of Google's knowledge graph, structured data, and E-E-A-T signals – we address all three. Microsoft Copilot, integrated into Microsoft 365 and Bing, is increasingly used by enterprise procurement teams at large Chicago employers and weights Bing-indexed content and LinkedIn-adjacent entity signals. Gemini, Google's AI model, uses Google's knowledge graph heavily and responds well to structured entity optimisation and Google Business Profile signals. Each platform receives a tailored citation-building strategy within our programme – we do not apply a single content template across all five.

The free GEO Audit is a five-deliverable diagnostic completed within 48 hours of your request, and every element is specific to your Chicago market category rather than a generic report. First, an AI Citation Frequency Report: we run over 200 AI queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews that reflect the actual questions Chicago B2B buyers ask when researching vendors in your category, and we document how many times your brand is cited versus named competitors. Second, an Entity Gap Analysis: we audit your brand's entity presence across structured data sources, knowledge panels, and the information architecture that LLMs use to confirm brand identity – identifying specific gaps that are suppressing model recognition. Third, a Content Audit: we score your existing website content against the structural patterns – FAQ format, definitional content, comparison pages – that AI models preferentially retrieve, flagging the specific pages most in need of restructuring. Fourth, a Competitor Citation Benchmark: we name three to five Chicago competitors in your category and show exactly where they are being cited in AI answers that you are currently missing from. Fifth, a prioritised 30-day Action Plan with specific content creation tasks, off-site placement targets, and entity optimisation steps ranked by estimated citation impact. The audit is free, takes 48 hours, and carries no obligation to proceed with a paid programme.

Chicago is the largest inland logistics hub in North America, with the Union Pacific and BNSF intermodal terminals, O'Hare cargo infrastructure, and the I-55 and I-80 distribution corridors making the city the centre of gravity for B2B logistics procurement decisions across the Midwest. Logistics technology vendors, 3PL providers, freight brokerage platforms, and warehouse management system suppliers based in the Chicago area are competing for a buyer pool that increasingly uses ChatGPT and Perplexity to pre-screen vendors before issuing RFQs or RFPs. The specific query patterns in this sector – questions about temperature-controlled 3PL capacity near O'Hare, cross-docking providers in the Joliet rail corridor, TMS platforms used by Chicagoland manufacturers – are not well served by generic national AI citations. A Chicago logistics company that builds GEO authority around the specific geographic and operational terms that local buyers use gains a structural advantage over national competitors who have not localised their AI citation strategy. Our GEO programme for logistics clients includes content architecture around Chicago-specific logistics terminology, off-site placements in supply chain publications that LLMs retrieve for this sector, and entity signals that associate your brand with Chicago's logistics geography. Clients in this vertical have moved from zero to top-three AI citations for Chicago-specific logistics queries within the standard 90-day programme window.

We offer three programme tiers designed to match the scale and budget of different Chicago B2B businesses. The Starter plan at $1,490 per month is designed for smaller Chicago B2B companies – typically under 50 employees or those in early-stage GEO adoption – and includes an initial AI citation audit across 100 queries, one structured content asset per month, foundational entity optimisation, and monthly citation frequency reporting across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The Growth plan at $2,990 per month is the most commonly selected tier for Chicago mid-market B2B companies and includes a full 200+ query audit, four structured content assets per month, active off-site mention placement in two to three industry publications per month, entity graph optimisation, weekly citation tracking, and a dedicated strategist. The Authority plan at $5,990 per month is designed for Chicago B2B companies seeking category dominance in AI citation pools – it includes eight or more content assets per month, off-site placements across five or more publications, full entity architecture across all five major AI platforms, Share of AI Voice tracking against up to ten named competitors, and a monthly strategy session. All plans include the free 48-hour audit as the starting point, and there are no lock-in contracts beyond a 90-day initial term. The right plan depends on the competitiveness of your Chicago B2B category and your current citation baseline, which the audit will determine.

GEO and SEO are complementary disciplines that address different stages of the modern B2B discovery journey, and running both in parallel produces better results than either alone. A well-executed SEO programme improves your Google organic rankings and drives traffic to your website from buyers who are actively searching blue-link results – this remains a valuable channel. A parallel GEO programme ensures that the growing share of B2B buyers who are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to pre-screen vendors are also encountering your brand in AI-generated answers before they ever reach the Google results page. In practice, the content created for GEO – structured FAQ pages, definitional content, comparison assets – often improves SEO performance as well, because these formats align with Google's E-E-A-T quality signals. Similarly, strong domain authority built through an SEO programme makes it easier for LLMs to recognise your brand as an established entity. For Chicago B2B companies currently working with an SEO agency, we integrate cleanly alongside that existing programme: we do not duplicate keyword content, we focus exclusively on the AI citation layer, and we coordinate content publication schedules to avoid cannibalisation. The combination of strong organic rankings and high AI citation frequency creates maximum brand coverage across both traditional and AI-mediated discovery channels.

We use three primary metrics to track and report GEO performance for Chicago clients. AI Citation Frequency measures how many times your brand is named in AI-generated answers across a tracked set of 200+ queries on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot – reported weekly so you can see the citation growth curve from baseline through programme progression. Share of AI Voice measures your brand's citations as a percentage of all brand citations appearing in AI answers for your Chicago market category, benchmarked against up to ten named competitors – this tells you not just how often you are cited, but how that compares to the competitive landscape. Brand Mention Velocity tracks the rate at which new AI citations are accumulating week over week, which serves as a leading indicator of whether the content and entity work is gaining momentum in the models' retrieval layers. All three metrics are delivered in a weekly dashboard with plain-language commentary from your dedicated strategist, and the 90-day programme report shows before-and-after comparisons across all tracked queries and platforms.

BAMS Digital was founded in 2024 as a GEO-native agency – we did not begin as an SEO or content marketing agency that added GEO as a service line. Our entire methodology, tooling, and team structure was built around AI citation logic from day one, which means we are not applying SEO frameworks to a different problem. Our founder Alisa Bolokhovets holds an MBA from the University of Edinburgh and developed our proprietary citation-building methodology through direct analysis of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews select and repeat brand references across B2B categories. Across 500+ brands, we have generated over 5,200 verified AI citations – a documented, trackable output, not an estimated reach figure. Most digital agencies serving Chicago that now offer GEO are doing so by repurposing content calendars and backlink strategies with GEO language applied on top; the underlying logic is SEO, which does not transfer directly to citation optimisation. Our weekly citation tracking dashboards, five-platform optimisation coverage, and 90-day structured programme with a defined first-citation milestone at week six are specific to AI search mechanics – and the 212% AI-driven leads increase our clients have recorded reflects that specificity.