GEO agencies in Belgium: who does what, and what can you expect?

Since AI assistants took over part of the searching, a new kind of agency has appeared: the GEO agency, which tries to get your brand into the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. In Belgium there are now about fourteen of them.

The problem with the existing overviews is that they are short and unchecked. One doing the rounds names three agencies, puts itself first without mentioning that, gives no criteria at all, and carries a title claiming 2026 while the text dates from September 2025.

This overview does it the other way round: the criteria first, then the list, and with the note that ClickForest is in it. What you will not get here is a verdict on who is best. I cannot measure that and neither can anyone else.

How was this list put together?

One testable criterion: the agency demonstrably offers GEO as a named service on its own site, with a page describing it. Not counted: agencies that only do SEO and drop the word AI somewhere, and agencies that only wrote a blog post about it without offering the service. All fourteen entries were checked on 7 August 2026 on the agency’s own site.

The disclosure, right away and not in a footnote: ClickForest is in this list and has an interest in you choosing us. That is why this article contains no quality ranking, only a grouping by profile, and why there is a section at the bottom on who we are not the logical choice for.

Two things this overview deliberately does not do. It does not judge results, because no agency publishes verifiable client citation figures and neither do we. And it contains no links to the other agencies, because their name is enough to find them. Being in this list therefore means an agency demonstrably offers the service, not that it is good at it. What this article does give you are the criteria to test that difference yourself.

Which agencies in Belgium genuinely offer GEO as a service?

Fourteen, spread across Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia. Notably, five of the fourteen are French-speaking or Brussels-based, a group the Dutch-language overviews systematically miss. The order below is a grouping by profile and explicitly not a ranking, because the quality of the work cannot be measured from the outside.

That the shift is real and not just marketing shows in how the early movers talk about it. When Depends announced its GEO service in the trade press in February 2025, co-founder Mathias Noyez said the agency had transformed itself into an AI-first agency over the preceding year.

One observation that puts the whole discussion in perspective: the agency ranking highest in Google for “GEO bureau België” explicitly rejects that label. Digital Climax writes literally that shivers run down their spine when they hear the term GEO, and calls itself an AIO agency. Anyone comparing the search results with this list should know that.

Two candidates are deliberately absent because their site blocked retrieval: a Belgian agency with its own GEO page, and an international agency that puts its Belgian service page behind the same block. They may well belong here, I simply cannot substantiate it, and that seemed fairer than adding them on spec.

One agency was deliberately dropped during the research. It presents itself with a Brussels landing page, but its head office is in Prishtina, Kosovo. That is exactly the kind of entry an unchecked list falls for.

Why does Google say you need to do nothing extra for AI answers?

Because the underlying technique has stayed the same. Google writes it plainly in its own documentation: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” And more explicitly still: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.” That is an uncomfortable sentence in this market.

GEO stands for generative engine optimization: making sure AI assistants use your site as a source and name your brand in their answer. Where SEO is about positions, GEO is about being cited. The difference is worked out fully in the evolution from SEO to GEO.

The term does not come from agency marketing but from an academic paper accepted at the KDD conference in 2024. That research measured up to 40% more visibility in generated answers, but note what that says: relative visibility within a test benchmark from 2023 and 2024, no promise about traffic or revenue, and not measured on ChatGPT in 2026. Any agency using that 40% as a results promise is stretching the source.

Forrester analyst Nikhil Lai says the same thing in other words:

“Point solutions popularizing these acronyms […] tend to exaggerate SEO and AEO’s differences to carve a startup-sized hole in marketers’ tech stacks. […] AEO is significantly, but not fundamentally, different from SEO.”

— Nikhil Lai, Principal Analyst at Forrester

So where does the difference sit? Duane Forrester, who launched Bing Webmaster Tools at Microsoft and helped launch Schema.org, sums it up sharply:

“SEO focuses on pages and rankings. GEO focuses on fragments and retrieval.”

— Duane Forrester, formerly Microsoft and Yext

That is the honest state of play: GEO is largely good SEO plus work on entities and authority. The genuinely new part is the measurement, because citations in AI answers appear in no classic report.

Is there a certification or official ranking for GEO agencies?

No. There is no seal of approval, no certification and no independent ranking for GEO agencies in Belgium or Europe, and there is no body that could issue one today. Anyone claiming to be accredited should be asked by whom exactly, and what that accreditation actually tests. The answer usually turns out to be commercial.

What does exist, and what you may run into:

• Partner lists run by tool vendors. Belgian vendor Semactic keeps a list of six partner agencies, which you join through a button and where co-marketing is the benefit. At AEO Vision, using their own tool is one of the four criteria. Otterly runs a comparable programme. These are commercial arrangements, not quality judgements, and ClickForest is on none of those lists.
• Marketplaces, such as Semrush Agency Partners, which shows three agencies for Brussels. No selection criteria are published there.
• A standard that is often misquoted. DIN SPEC 33461 does exist, but its full title is “Methodology for search engine optimization (SEO) of websites”, it is about classic SEO and it is a methodology description, not a certifiable seal of approval for agencies. Presenting it as a GEO certificate circulates in agency marketing and is incorrect.

At ClickForest, GEO for SMEs in Flanders is therefore never a badge but a measurable track: what you buy is a demonstrable measurement of your mentions, not a label.

How do you spot an agency that only uses GEO as a label?

By three things, and you need no technical knowledge for any of them. The difference between an agency that masters GEO and one that uses the word rarely sits in the jargon on the website. It sits in what they can show you: a measurement, an own page that holds up, and text somebody proofread.

Ask about the measurement, not about the approach. An agency that genuinely does GEO can show you how it tracks citations: which questions it puts to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot periodically, and how the mentions move over time. If it cannot, it is selling SEO with a new label.

Read their own GEO page as if you were a client. A surprising number of agencies put a GEO heading above bullets that are about Google positions and advertising. In one of the existing Belgian overviews, an agency is recommended on points that literally concern “better positions in Google” and “integration of SEO with SEA”. That is classic SEO under a new title. Incidentally it says nothing about that agency, which does run a genuine AI search service: it says something about the list that did not check.

Watch for signs that the article or page was never proofread. While compiling this overview I came across a raw fragment of AI output in an existing Belgian GEO list that had simply been left in the published text, in an article meant to demonstrate AI expertise. Whoever does not check their own text will not check yours either.

If you want to see where you stand before talking to anyone, a GEO audit maps your visibility and its causes.

What can you expect from a GEO track, and what not?

Visibility in answers, not guaranteed revenue. Nobody can promise you will appear in ChatGPT, because no agency decides what a language model cites, and the models change faster than a contract term. Anyone giving a guarantee anyway is selling something they do not control. What a good agency does promise is a measurable direction.

Two figures to calibrate your expectations, both from American and worldwide panels by Similarweb, which sells GEO products itself. Indicative, then, and not to be read as Belgian figures. Citations are still rare but growing fast: according to Similarweb, about 6.8% of US ChatGPT prompts contained a citation in May 2026, against 1.6% in June 2025. And AI search layers on top of classic search rather than replacing it: 461 million of ChatGPT’s 494 million users, or 95%, also used Google between March and May 2026. Classic search still pulled 3.3 billion unique visitors a month worldwide in that period, against 655 million for AI chatbots, and that after 57% year-on-year growth on the AI side.

Even the agencies that jumped on GEO earliest say nothing is dying. Pieter Verschueren, founder of Depends, put it this way when launching his service:

“Hoewel traditionele SEO belangrijk blijft, is het noodzakelijk om vooruit te kijken en nieuwe technieken zoals GEO te omarmen.”

— Pieter Verschueren, founder of Depends

There is, incidentally, no Belgian figure on the share of searches running through AI assistants. What does exist: according to the FPS Economy, 34.54% of Belgian companies with ten or more employees used at least one AI technology in reference year 2025, against an EU average of 19.95%. That is about companies deploying AI, not about Belgians searching with it, so do not read too much into it.

One practical rule follows from all this: an agency telling you SEO is dead is selling you a story. Without a healthy search foundation you do not exist in the answers either, and that starts with whether you are found at all, worked out in why your website is not ranking high in Google.

Watch out for one-sidedness too. ChatGPT’s share of worldwide website visits to generative AI services fell from about 76% to 53% between June 2025 and May 2026, while Gemini and Claude gained ground (Similarweb). Note the wording: ChatGPT’s absolute visits stayed roughly flat, the competitors grew faster. An agency steering exclusively on ChatGPT is therefore optimising for a shrinking share of a growing market.

If you want to try it yourself before hiring anyone, you can: GEO strategies you can apply yourself and the test of whether ChatGPT already recommends your business give you an honest picture of what is achievable without an agency.

How do you measure whether a GEO agency delivers?

By how often you are mentioned, tracked over time, and by nothing else. Positions do not exist in an AI answer: there is no number one in a paragraph a model writes on the spot. A classic ranking report therefore says nothing here, and an agency presenting you with one as GEO evidence is measuring the wrong thing.

Three measurement layers work in practice. Mentions: put the same set of core questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot every month and note whether you are named. Citations: Bing Webmaster Tools shows for Copilot how often your site is cited and which pages are involved, which is the only free hard source available today. Branded search volume: when AI answers name you without a click, you see it back in how many people later search for your brand name.

That last point also makes clear why click figures alone do not suffice, worked out further in why zero-click searches change your findability.

Which brings me to the test I find the most honest myself:

“An agency selling you AI visibility but unable to show its own citations probably does not have that measurement. Which is why ours are simply in this article.”

— Frederiek Pascal, CEO and founder of ClickForest

Those figures, then: over a 180-day measurement period ending 27 July 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools recorded 12,569 citations of clickforest.com in Copilot, roughly 70 a day, with a 43% increase between the first and the second half of that period. The number of distinct cited pages per day nearly doubled. That is not a client result and not a promise, it is our own site as a test bed.

Who is ClickForest the right choice for, and who not?

For SMEs and scale-ups in Flanders that want SEO and GEO as one track, with the person who sells it also doing the work. ClickForest works founder-led from Bonheiden near Mechelen, measures citations structurally and publishes its own figures. The full approach is on the page about GEO optimisation, and for businesses in the region there is the local offer in Mechelen and Antwerp.

And honestly, three situations where you should look elsewhere. If you need a large team with several data analysts, an agency like Bluetime suits you better than a founder-led setup, and for a rollout across several markets outside the Benelux a player like OMcollective makes more sense. If you want GEO only, without working on your search foundation, that is an approach I do not deliver because it does not work; agencies such as Clyde and Bonnie do offer a GEO audit and citation monitoring as separate sub-services. And if you are in a niche with its own dynamics, real estate for instance, a specialist like Geo Limo may serve you better than a generalist.

Torn between SEO and GEO as a starting point? Usually that is not a choice: see SEO and GEO as one track. And if you are actually after something else, there are comparable overviews for AI chatbot agencies in Belgium and for choosing a Shopify partner.

Conclusion: what should you look at when choosing?

At the measurement, not at the label. There is no certification that does the work for you, so your only real test is whether the agency can show how it tracks your mentions and what has changed since the start.

What struck me most while compiling this was how thin the existing overviews are. Three agencies, no criteria, no sources, and an author putting itself on top without mentioning it. That is exactly why this list starts with the criteria and with the note that we are in it ourselves. ClickForest does GEO for SMEs in Flanders, so read this knowing that. The terms from this article are explained in the glossary.