How to choose a GEO consultancy for B2B SaaS in Portugal

The objective criteria for assessing whoever does AI visibility for B2B SaaS: a declared method, its own measurement, scope beyond the technical, and an SEO base.

When a B2B SaaS buyer asks an AI assistant for the best solution in their category, the answer carries two or three brands. Getting into that answer is a job of its own, with a name: Generative Engine Optimization, GEO. Hiring somebody who does it well is where most Portuguese companies still stumble, because the market is new and the term is ambiguous. This piece gives objective criteria for assessing a partner, with no promises and no jargon.

First, clear up the confusion: GEO is not geomarketing

The acronym misleads. GEO, here, is Generative Engine Optimization: making the brand citable in the answers of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. It is not geomarketing (geographic market analysis), not growth ops, not location targeting. It is a common mistake, and not only a human one: when we measure how the engines themselves interpret the term, some of them confuse it with the geographic sense if the context is not clear.

The practical consequence for whoever is hiring: if a supplier uses GEO to talk about ads by area or about growth hacking, they are not talking about AI visibility. The first screening question is worth asking: when you say GEO, do you mean appearing in ChatGPT's answers, or something else?

What a GEO consultancy for B2B SaaS actually does

Before the criteria, the work itself. In a B2B SaaS, honest GEO rests on four fronts that hold each other up:

• Technical foundation: schema, llms.txt, robots.txt for AI crawlers, extractable HTML, performance. Without this, the engines do not read the site well and the best external authority never gets seen.
• The brand's citability as an entity: consistent presence in the sources the models read (comparison sites, software directories, sector publications, qualified communities), with structured data linking the profiles.
• Content the AI cites: clean definitions, data with sources, direct answers to the category's buying questions. Different from content optimised for the click.
• Its own measurement: citation rate and share of voice per engine, over real sector prompts, not SERP position.

Seven criteria for assessing a partner

1. A declared method, not a list of tactics

Ask about the method. A serious partner has an explainable system, with phases and dimensions, not a bag of tricks. What matters most is the scope: GEO is not only technical. A good method covers technical, content, entity, external authority, social signals, on-site authority, measurement and positioning. Whoever reduces GEO to "we add schema and llms.txt" is doing an eighth of the work. That is the rationale behind the eight dimensions of the SINAL method we use, and the reason we publish it with no black box.

2. Verifiable measurement, with dated numbers

If it is not measured, it is not known. Demand concrete metrics: what percentage of the answers cite you (citation rate), what share you have against the competitors (share of voice), in what place you appear when you are recommended. And demand that they be reproducible: the same prompts, the same cadence, a history over time. A consultancy that only shows loose screenshots has no measurement, it has anecdote.

3. Bottom-of-funnel prompts, not vanity

For a B2B SaaS, what converts are the buying questions: "best [category] for [use case]", "alternative to [tool]", "[category] for teams in Portugal". Confirm that the partner measures these, organised by persona (who decides) and by funnel stage, and not only generic top-of-funnel terms that impress but close no business.

4. They understand the engines' two modes

Your brand can appear in an engine's memory mode and disappear in search mode, or the other way round. That distinction, knowledge vs augmented, says whether the problem is one of entity (the AI does not know you) or of presence on the web (the AI does not find you when it searches). Whoever does not measure both modes does not know which of the two problems they are solving.

5. They treat SEO as a base, not a rival

GEO rests on technical SEO. A partner who treats both as a single stack (indexing and schema in order, and the citability layer on top) is building on foundations. Whoever promises GEO while ignoring the base is putting a house on sand. For brands with an address, the same applies to local SEO: Google Business Profile, reviews and geographic signals count.

6. Honesty about what is not guaranteed

No consultancy controls a model's answer. Whoever guarantees positions in AI is selling what they cannot deliver. The legitimate commitment is to measure transparently, tie each gap to an action, and show the before and the after. A promise of guaranteed recommendation is, on its own, grounds for exclusion.

7. Local plus digital scope, where it applies

Most B2B SaaS companies are a purely digital brand. But if you also have an operation with an address (events, an office, a local service component), look for somebody who covers both layers with the same rigour, instead of treating the local side as an extra. The advantage is having a single reading of your visibility, digital and local, instead of two half-readings.

Compare proposals side by side: the grid

When you have two or three proposals on the table, apply the same grid to them, line by line. You do not need names or third-party rankings: you need verifiable answers in writing. What each line separates:

A proposal that fails two or more lines in the exclusion column is not negotiated, it is discarded. And the grid applies to us as to anybody else: our answers are written down, not said.

Questions to ask in a first conversation

• What is your method, and which dimensions does it cover beyond the technical?
• Which metrics do you report, how often, and how are they reproducible?
• Do you measure bottom-of-funnel prompts in my category? Can you give examples?
• Do you distinguish memory mode from web search? Why does it matter?
• How do you handle the technical SEO base and, where applicable, the local one?
• What do you explicitly not guarantee?

The answers separate whoever does from whoever pitches in a few minutes. Vagueness, promises of position and confusion between GEO and growth are the signals to stop.

To close

The GEO market in Portugal is new, and because it is new there is a lot of ground to occupy and some noise to filter. For a B2B SaaS, the criterion that sums up the others is simple: look for whoever measures what they do, covers the whole scope and is honest about the limits. A partner like that does not promise you the place in the AI's answer. They promise to show you where you stand, what is missing, and the before and after of each step. That is what you can demand, and what is worth hiring.

Frequently asked questions

Read next

• When GEO does not pay off, four criteria for knowing whether it is worth the investment now.
• Consultancy or in-house team, the other side of the same decision.
• What a GEO consultancy costs in Portugal.