What services should a ChatGPT marketing agency offer?

Start with the audit, not the pitch

Before any service list matters, a ChatGPT marketing agency needs to show you where you already stand. That means running your real buyer prompts — "best [category] for [use case]," "is [brand] licensed in [market]" — through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and reporting exactly what comes back, including nothing at all. Suggesting.ai runs this as a free audit delivered in 48 hours, precisely because scoping a retainer before that step is guesswork on both sides.

This diagnostic should cover both content gaps and technical ones: is your site even reachable by OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot? Are your product, pricing and comparison pages structured in a way a model can extract cleanly? Most agencies skip this and go straight to a content package.

A common failure mode is an agency treating the audit as a sales gimmick rather than a real diagnostic — running one canned prompt and calling it done. A genuine audit tests a dozen or more real buyer prompts across every major engine your buyers actually use, and documents the result even when it's unflattering to the pitch that follows.

Generative engine optimization: the organic layer

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the service that earns unpaid citations inside AI answers. It covers structuring pages so facts are unambiguous, building the third-party citation surface (comparison sites, reviews, forums models pull from), and keeping regulatory or factual claims current — which matters enormously for regulated categories.

This is not the same skillset as blog SEO. A page can rank on Google and still be invisible to an LLM if the facts inside it are buried in marketing language instead of stated plainly.

It's also worth asking what happens after the audit if the findings are mostly technical rather than content-related. Some brands discover their biggest blocker is a robots.txt file quietly disallowing every AI crawler, a problem no amount of new content fixes until it's corrected first.

A useful gut check: if a proposal never mentions specific engines by name — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot — and instead talks generically about 'AI search,' that's usually a sign the agency is repackaging old SEO service descriptions rather than offering something built for how these engines actually work.

Paid ChatGPT Ads: the service most agencies can't run yet

Since the OpenAI Ads Manager opened to self-serve advertisers, a genuine ChatGPT marketing agency should be able to set up and manage campaigns with CPM, CPC or oCPC bidding inside a relevance-weighted auction, with no minimum spend. Ads are labelled "Sponsored," shown separately from the AI's own answer, and matched to the conversation topic rather than cross-web tracking — which changes how creative and targeting should be built compared to search ads.

• Campaign structure aligned to conversational intent, not keyword lists
• Bid strategy testing across CPM/CPC/oCPC
• Country-by-country availability checks, since rollout is expanding market by market

The line between paid and organic work matters because the skills genuinely don't overlap much. A strong copywriter who understands citation structure isn't automatically qualified to manage a bidding strategy inside an auction-based ad platform, and vice versa.

Worked example: a forex broker's full service stack

Take a forex broker trying to win the prompt "which broker is regulated in Cyprus and supports MT5 with low spreads." The audit shows whether the broker appears at all today. GEO work then makes the regulatory license, platform support and spread data explicit and current across the broker's own pages and third-party comparison sites. Paid ChatGPT Ads can run in parallel once available in that market, targeting the same conversational intent.

The same stack applies outside finance — a legal services firm answering "which firm handles cross-border M&A in the GCC" needs the identical mix: audit, GEO, paid where available, and reporting that ties back to qualified leads rather than vanity mentions.

This is the same reason Suggesting.ai treats a regulated finance client and a B2B software client with the same process rather than a generic template — the audit findings, not the industry label, determine what services actually get prioritized first.

Suggesting.ai's own audits often surface a mix of all three gap types in a single engagement — a broker missing entirely from one prompt, cited but outdated on another, and blocked by a crawler rule on a third — which is exactly why a bundled service list beats a single-tactic vendor for most businesses.

Reporting is a service, not an afterthought

The last service — and the one clients most often have to ask for explicitly — is ongoing measurement: citation frequency by engine, share of voice against named competitors on category prompts, and (where paid runs) cost per qualified click. Studies on AI-referred traffic report notably higher conversion rates than average Google organic traffic, so tracking referral quality matters more than counting mentions.

Suggesting.ai exists to make ChatGPT and the other engines suggesting a client by name, and reports against that outcome specifically, not against generic "AI visibility" scores with no baseline.

A monthly report worth paying for should also flag when something regresses — a competitor overtaking a prompt you previously won, or a factual detail about your brand going stale in an AI answer — not just list new wins.

It's also fair to ask how an agency prices these four services relative to each other — some clients need heavy audit-and-technical work upfront with lighter ongoing content, while others already have strong content and mainly need paid campaign management, and a rigid one-size package misses that variation entirely.