How to tell a real agentic-commerce agency from repackaged SEO.
Most 'AI commerce' and 'GEO' agencies are an SEO retainer in new clothes. Here's how to spot the difference in one call — the 8 tells, the questions to ask, and the red flags that mean walk away. We'll hold ourselves to the same bar.
What is an agentic-commerce agency?
An agentic-commerce agency makes your products the option AI shopping assistants recommend — configuring Shopify Brand Agents and Copilot Checkout, enriching your catalog and schema so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Amazon's Rufus can read and recommend it, and measuring the AI-attributed revenue that results. The category is young, so it's full of SEO shops that relabelled their retainer. The tells below separate the operators from the opportunists.
The 8 tells
Real agency vs. repackaged SEO.
Ask about each on the call. If the answers land in the right column, keep looking.
Red flags — walk away.
- “Guaranteed citations in ChatGPT” — nobody can honestly promise this.
- “$500/mo, unlimited GEO optimization” — that's a content mill, not a strategy.
- “We'll just add schema and you'll rank” — schema is necessary, not sufficient.
- One-size-fits-all decks and case studies from unrelated industries.
- Goes quiet after you sign — no named contact, no response-time commitment.
The one question that settles it.
Ask: “Show me three live prompts where you moved a brand into an AI recommendation, and tell me how you'd measure my revenue from it.”
A real operator answers with specifics you can verify on the spot. A repackaged-SEO shop reaches for guarantees, impressions, or a “proprietary” black box. That single exchange tells you almost everything.
Questions we get a lot.
What is an agentic-commerce agency?
An agentic-commerce agency makes your products the option AI shopping assistants recommend — configuring Shopify Brand Agents and Copilot Checkout, enriching your catalog and schema so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Amazon's Rufus can read and recommend it, and measuring the AI-attributed revenue that results. A real one sells outcomes and measurement; a repackaged-SEO shop sells the same retainer with new vocabulary.
Is Commerce GEO just SEO with a new name?
The foundation overlaps — you still have to rank and be extractable — but agentic commerce adds catalog/feed quality, cross-surface coverage (Amazon + AI answers, not just Google), off-site corroboration, and product-level share-of-AI-shelf measurement. If an agency can't explain those specifics, it's repackaging SEO.
Do I need an agency, or can I DIY?
Under ~$100K/yr, start with free tools and a freelancer. From $100K–$10M, the work (catalog quality across surfaces, schema, authority, measurement) is usually worth offloading — but only to a team that publishes pricing, names its operators, and reports revenue. Run our free AI Shelf Check first to see where you actually stand.
How does GigaCommerce measure up to these tells?
By design: published pricing, revenue-and-citation reporting, live-proof over guarantees, month-to-month with full data ownership, one team across Shopify + Amazon + AI answers, and a transparent methodology. We also tell you when we're not a fit.
Hold us to your own checklist.
Run the free AI Shelf Check to see where AI skips you today, read our published pricing, and book a call — where we'll show you live proof, not promises.