FAQ

Most sites see the first meaningful movement within 60 to 90 days, with compounding gains building over 6 to 12 months. Timelines depend on your starting authority, technical health, and how competitive your niche is. We never promise a fixed ranking date because no honest agency can control Google’s crawl and index schedule.

Pricing is scoped to your site’s size, competitiveness, and goals rather than sold as a flat package. During a free audit we review your current position and give you a proposal built around the work that will actually move the needle, not a generic tier.

SEO is optimizing to rank in traditional search results. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is structuring content so voice assistants and answer boxes can extract a direct response. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is optimizing so AI chat tools like ChatGPT and Gemini cite your brand in generated answers. Voctos builds all three into one strategy so you are visible everywhere people search.

No, and any agency that does is misleading you. Google’s algorithm considers hundreds of signals that no external party controls. What we guarantee is a transparent process: real technical fixes, real content, real reporting, and a strategy built on data instead of promises.

Yes. All content, backlinks, and rankings we build belong to your business permanently. If you stop working with us you keep everything: the pages, the content, the links, and any accounts or tools we set up in your name. Our agreements run for a year and renew, and either side can end them with 30 to 60 days notice, but nothing we built is taken back or switched off when the engagement ends.

AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity now answer many queries directly, reducing clicks to some traditional results. The sites that still win are the ones with clear, well-structured, genuinely expert content that both search engines and AI models can easily extract and trust. That is exactly what our AEO and GEO work is designed to produce.

Yes, especially in local and niche search where topical depth and genuine customer trust often outweigh raw domain size. A focused strategy on the right keywords and content gaps can outperform a much larger, less targeted competitor.

You receive a clear monthly report covering ranking movement, organic traffic, technical fixes completed, content published, and links earned, along with our read on what is working and what we are adjusting next.

No. GEO sits on top of SEO, it does not replace it. Every AI answer is assembled from sources the model can crawl, parse and trust, and those are the same signals SEO builds: clean technical foundations, clear structure, topical depth and credible external mentions. A site with weak SEO does not suddenly get cited by ChatGPT. What changes is the goal: you are no longer only competing for a click, you are competing to be the source the answer is built from.

Ask it. Type the buying questions your customers actually use, see which companies get named, then repeat the same prompts in Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Most brands discover one of two uncomfortable things: they are not mentioned at all, or the model describes them with outdated or wrong information. We run this at scale as part of a free AI visibility analysis, and you can start yourself with our AI Visibility Checker.

It looks for sources that are easy to understand and safe to quote. In practice that means three things: your brand exists as a clear, consistent entity across the web, your content answers a specific question in a self-contained way that can be extracted, and the third-party sources the model already trusts mention you. Most GEO work is closing those three gaps, in that order.

We cannot edit the model, and nobody can. What we can influence is the evidence it reads. When your entity data is consistent, your pages answer questions directly, and credible sites and communities describe your brand accurately, the generated answer changes because the inputs changed. That is measurable: for one client we tracked 3,600 citations in Google AI Overviews, and for another 149 pages became cited sources in AI engines.

GEO often moves faster than classic SEO on individual prompts, sometimes within weeks, because a model can start pulling a well-structured page as soon as it is indexed and trusted. It is also less stable, since answers get rewritten as models update, so holding a position is ongoing work. Realistically: early prompt wins in 4 to 8 weeks, and a defensible position across a full prompt set in 4 to 6 months.

For us it is one strategy with one budget, because the technical work, content and authority signals overlap heavily. Splitting them into two retainers usually means paying twice for the same foundations. Standalone GEO retainers on the open market run from a couple of thousand dollars a month to tens of thousands depending on scope, which is exactly why we scope after an audit instead of selling a fixed package.

Four things: share of voice across a defined set of buyer prompts, meaning how often you are named versus your competitors; citation count and which pages earn those citations; the accuracy and sentiment of how the model describes you; and referral traffic and conversions arriving from AI tools. Those numbers sit in the same monthly report as your rankings and organic traffic, so you can compare both channels side by side.

That is the clearest symptom of AI search today. An AI Overview or a chatbot answers the question above your result, so the user never clicks. Ranking first no longer guarantees the visit. The fix is not to chase the lost click but to make sure your brand appears inside the answer itself, and to widen how you measure success: branded search, direct visits and assisted conversions.

Ask them, because most companies underestimate this. Even if only a fraction of your market starts in ChatGPT today, those users are often the ones researching a high-value purchase, and they arrive already shortlisted, or already talked out of you. GEO is also far cheaper to build before a competitor owns the answer than after.

No, because we do not use tricks. There is a whole cottage industry selling prompt injection, review farms and hidden text, and all of it is fragile and reputationally risky. Our work is the unglamorous version: accurate entity data, genuinely useful and quotable content, correct schema and real editorial mentions. It survives model updates, which is the entire point.

All of the major ones, because they behave differently. ChatGPT and Copilot lean heavily on the Bing index and on brand consensus, Perplexity favors fresh and clearly sourced pages, and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode reward existing organic authority and structured content. We build one foundation, then tune for each engine, with dedicated work for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and knowledge panel and entity optimization.

Three things you can verify before you sign anything. First, every engagement comes with the Voctos Client Portal, where AI visibility measurement, SEO, content workflow, paid media and your invoices sit behind one login instead of four disconnected systems. Second, we built our own measurement instead of reselling somebody else’s tracker, and the rules it runs on are printed inside the product so you can argue with them. Third, you can test us before you speak to us: our AI Visibility Checker is free and needs no account, and our homepage has buttons that ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity to tell you whether we are the right choice.

Fair question, because plenty of GEO offers are an old SEO deck with new slide titles. The test is whether the work is organised around prompts or keywords. Ours starts from the questions buyers actually type into an engine, then maps who currently gets named, which sources the answer was built from, and what has to change. We also run engine-specific services for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, plus entity and knowledge panel work and AI crawler access, because those are different problems with different fixes. If an agency cannot tell you which engine a result came from, they are reporting SEO and calling it GEO.

They overlap, and the labels matter less than what each one targets. AEO is about being the extracted answer in featured snippets, voice results and answer boxes. GEO is about being cited inside a generated answer from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot. LLMO and AIO are largely newer names for the same territory as GEO. We run them as one programme because the underlying work is shared: a clear entity, extractable content, and sources the engines already trust. Anyone selling them as four separate retainers is selling you the same foundations four times.

Yes, and we will tell you the unpopular part. An llms.txt file on its own does very little, because most AI crawlers still read your HTML and skip the file. What matters is three things together: a valid llms.txt and llms-full.txt listing the pages you want cited, robots rules that let AI search bots in while keeping training bots out exactly as you decide, and clean fast HTML so a bot sees real text instead of an empty script-rendered shell. We do all three rather than shipping a text file and calling it AI optimization.

Yes, from your server logs. We look at which AI bots are genuinely fetching your pages and how often, so decisions rest on real crawl data instead of the assumption that publishing something means an engine has read it. It is also the fastest way to catch an access problem that no ranking report would ever show you.

Yes, because that is the shape of content generative engines reach for. When someone asks an engine for the best option or the alternatives in your category, the answer gets assembled from comparison pages, category explainers and third-party lists. We map the prompts first, see which sources the engines already pull for them, then build or earn the pages that can occupy those slots. Keyword volume is a secondary input here, not the starting point.

Please do, and do not rely on our own page for it. Our Clutch profile carries a 5.0 rating from 8 verified client reviews, where timeliness, communication and project management are the most repeated themes, and Clutch verifies reviewers directly rather than accepting a form submission. We are also ranked the number one GEO agency in Egypt on TechBehemoths and third for digital marketing in Egypt on DesignRush. And our homepage has buttons that hand the question straight to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, which is a deliberately risky thing for an agency to publish.

Then we fix the website. That is a practical advantage of not being a pure consultancy: we have web development and technical support teams, including WordPress and OpenCart, so a recommendation does not have to sit in your developer queue for two months. If you would rather your own developer implements, you get specced tasks instead and we keep control of the KPIs. What we try hard to avoid is the familiar pattern where an agency delivers advice, nothing gets deployed, and everyone blames the algorithm.

That is a specific job and we treat it as one. There are two halves to it. The measurement half is Brand Health in the portal, which stores what each engine says about you word for word and flags the sentences that are false or damaging. The delivery half is search and online reputation management: correcting the sources the engines draw on, since nobody can edit the model but you can change what it reads. Reviews, forums and press coverage shape the description far more than your own site does.

Yes, and without handing over your details. Our AI Visibility Checker runs your site through 45 visibility signals and puts real buyer questions to live ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, then shows the evidence behind every finding, including which rivals the engines recommend instead of you. We also publish free Chrome extensions such as the Voctos Rank Checker. If the score comes back bad you are under no obligation to hire anyone, you will simply know where you stand.

Fully in-house. Every specialist on your account is part of our team: strategy, technical SEO, GEO, content, outreach, paid media and development. Nothing is handed to a freelance marketplace or a white-label vendor you never meet, which also means the person who wrote a recommendation is the person you can question about it. It is the reason we are careful about how many accounts we take on at once, because capacity is a real constraint when nothing is subcontracted.

Subject specialists, organised by industry rather than by word count. For medical work that means doctors writing and reviewing the material in Arabic and English, and the same principle applies in finance, legal and technical niches. This matters more than it used to. Google and the AI engines both weigh whether real expertise sits behind a page, health and finance topics are held to the highest bar of all, and a page written by somebody who genuinely understands the subject is the only kind an engine can safely quote.

We separate earned editorial coverage from paid placements and treat them differently. The priority is always a link a site gives because the content deserves the reference. When we select sites we look at topical relevance to your audience, the editorial quality of the publication, the strength and cleanliness of its own backlink profile, and whether it has real traffic and engagement rather than an impressive DR or DA with nothing behind it. The placement also has to make sense to a reader, not only to a crawler. Where a placement is paid we handle it in line with Google’s guidelines, including rel=sponsored or nofollow where that applies, and we report paid placements separately from earned coverage. What we do not do is buy links in bulk to move a ranking.

It is a client-facing platform at portal.voctos.com that comes with a Voctos engagement and is not sold as separate software. You log in and see AI visibility scored across eight signals for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, every prompt we monitor, every citation gained or lost, Search Console, GA4 and Semrush unified into one SEO view, live Google and Meta ad performance with waste analysis, and the roadmap, tasks, content approvals, goals and invoices for your account. That is more than 20 modules behind a single login. As of August 2026 we have not found another agency in the Middle East that puts all of that behind one client login, and we published a full screen-by-screen walkthrough so you can check the claim yourself.

Because we reviewed more than thirty AI visibility products before building it, and the measurement in most of them is fine. The gap is what happens after the measurement. A tracker can tell you your score moved from 58 to 67. It cannot tell you the number moved because an accreditation page went live three weeks ago, that Gemini picked it up first, that a forum thread which used to carry you has gone dead, and that the fix for that thread is already a task with a name against it. Those four facts normally live in four different systems, and that gap is where clients stop believing the reporting.

Once a month the portal asks every connected engine five direct questions about you: who you are, what you offer, where you are, who you serve, and what you are known for. The answers are stored word for word, then a human marks each one correct or wrong and writes the correction underneath. On one client run, an engine stated the company had branches in a city where it has none. That is not a ranking problem or a sentiment problem, it is a false sentence an engine will repeat to anyone who asks, and no visibility chart would have surfaced it. Brand Accuracy is the one signal of the eight we always fix first.

Yes. Generative engines rewrite their answers continuously, so a screenshot from last month proves nothing. The portal stores the answer text per engine per run, with the date, your rank at that point, and the brand that outranked you. That is what lets you line a change in wording up against a page you published, a review that landed, or a competitor campaign that started, instead of guessing.

Both, and we print the uncomfortable one. Most agencies report cost per conversion on media spend alone, which quietly leaves their fee out of your true cost of a customer. The portal shows the media-only CPA next to the all-in CPA that adds our management fee, on the same screen as what you pay us and what percentage of total investment that represents. It makes our numbers look worse and your decision better, which is the correct trade.

Rules that are printed inside the product, on the page they govern. We never show a zero in place of a missing number, an unmeasurable metric stays greyed with the reason and the fix, because a zero and an unknown are different facts. Nothing from the last seven days is judged as wasted ad spend, since a click on Tuesday can convert on Friday. Below 100 clicks, a zero-conversion result is marked low confidence rather than stated as fact. Every recommendation prints the threshold it used. And when a data connector fails, the page says which one failed and what it fell back to, instead of drawing a flat line you have no way to interpret.

No, deliberately. The portal cannot change a campaign. A specialist reviews, you approve, we execute. Automation that spends your money without a human in the loop is not a feature we want to ship.

Yes. AI Assistant is its own acquisition channel in the portal, sitting next to Organic Search and Direct, with named sources such as chatgpt.com listed by session. For most clients it is still a small share of sessions and the fastest-moving line on the page, which is exactly why it explains a flat organic number that would otherwise look like nothing happened.

It went live at the start of July 2026 and we rolled it out deliberately slowly, beginning with a limited group of clients so we could watch how the first version was actually used and fix what confused people before widening access. Several of those changes are already in the product. We are still adding accounts in stages rather than switching everyone on at once.

Your login is closed, and the workspace data is kept for twelve months before it is deleted. The reason is practical: clients come back, and a returning client whose prompt history, citation timeline and stored AI answers are intact is in a much better position than one starting from an empty dashboard. If you would rather it was removed sooner, ask and we will delete it. Everything we produced for you, content, links, technical fixes and rankings, is yours regardless and does not live only inside the portal.

Voctos is a search agency built for the AI era, based in Egypt and serving clients in more than 22 countries. We run three connected disciplines: SEO for traditional rankings, AEO so answer boxes and voice assistants can extract your content, and GEO so ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot cite your brand inside the answers they generate. We have spent over 9 years in the search market and delivered more than 500 projects, and we are ranked the number one GEO agency in Egypt on TechBehemoths and a top 10 SEO agency in Egypt on Clutch.

Large agencies are good at scale and process, but you are usually one of hundreds of accounts, running a templated playbook, priced in a currency that inflates your retainer. We are smaller and deliberately specialized: senior people on your account, a strategy written after an audit rather than picked from a tier list, and working fluency in Arabic and MENA search that most international agencies do not have. We also moved into AI search early instead of renaming an existing SEO package.

Because search is global even when the results are local. We have delivered work in more than 22 countries and rank clients in markets including Saudi Arabia, and our team works natively in Arabic and English. Judge us the way you would judge a London or New York agency: on case studies, on the questions we ask in the first call, and on whether our audit tells you something you did not already know.

A few we can point to publicly: a medical laboratory that reached over one million monthly organic visits, 159,200 ranked keywords and 3,600 Google AI Overview citations, while ranking first for 1,186 keywords in Saudi Arabia; a VPN brand that peaked at 65,000 monthly organic visits with 149 pages cited by AI engines; and an education platform that grew search traffic twelve times in ten months. We will walk you through the strategy behind any of them, including the parts that did not work.

There are three ways and you choose. If you have a developer and a marketer in-house, we provide the strategy, specced tasks and KPI control while your team executes. If you would rather not think about it, we do everything turnkey and take responsibility for the result. And if you want us to share the risk, we agree on KPIs and work on a performance basis.

Engagements run on an annual contract that renews, and either side can end it with 30 to 60 days notice depending on what we agreed. We are upfront that SEO and GEO compound over months, so a very short engagement means paying for foundations you never get the benefit of, but you are not stuck in something you cannot exit. Everything we build, content, links, technical fixes and rankings, belongs to your business permanently.

The specialists you meet, not a junior who inherits the account after the sales call. Depending on scope you get an SEO or GEO lead, a technical specialist, and content and outreach people, coordinated by a single point of contact. You will know their names.

Week one is audit and access: technical crawl, content and entity review, and a competitor benchmark at the prompt level for AI visibility. Week two we agree on the strategy, the priority list and the KPIs. From week three we start shipping, usually technical fixes and the highest-intent pages first because those pay back fastest. Your baseline numbers are recorded in writing, so nobody can move the goalposts later.

Less than you fear, more than zero. Expect a kickoff session, access to your site, analytics and Search Console, one review cycle on content or strategy each month, and a few developer hours if we are not deploying changes ourselves. If your team has no capacity at all, the turnkey option exists for exactly that reason.

Yes, and the cleanest way in is often a one-off audit or a GEO-only engagement while they continue running classic SEO. If their work is solid we will say so, there is no upside for us in pretending otherwise. If it is not, you will have a documented list of the issues either way.

The ones where we have a track record rather than a guess: e-commerce, healthcare, real estate, finance and insurance, SaaS and technology, education, travel and tourism, legal services, automotive, logistics, construction, home appliances and electronics, media and sports. If your niche is not on that list, say so on the call and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it.

No. Once we take on a client in a specific niche and market, we do not take a competing brand in that same niche and market. You cannot run two conflicting strategies honestly, and we would rather keep one client than lose both.

You get a review of your technical health, your current organic position, the gaps your competitors are exploiting, and a benchmark of how AI engines currently describe your brand, plus a proposal scoped to what that audit finds. The catch is only that we hope you hire us. If you do not, the findings are yours to fix in-house or hand to another agency.

We do not publish one, because the honest answer depends on the project. The same monthly figure can be generous for a focused local campaign and nowhere near enough for a competitive multi-country site carrying technical debt. So we audit first, then tell you what the work costs and what is realistic to expect at that level, including the times when our answer is that the budget is not enough yet and here is what to fix first.

A weekly meeting is standard, plus whichever channel your team actually uses: WhatsApp, email or Slack. For anything about the work itself, messages inside the client portal are usually better, because a comment there stays attached to the page, task or report it refers to instead of scrolling out of a chat thread. Requests you raise anywhere in the portal arrive as tasks with a named owner against them.

We quote in US dollars by default and issue an official invoice before payment. Clients outside Egypt can settle in their local currency by bank transfer without complication. Your retainer, invoice history, what is pending and when it is due all sit in the client portal on the same login as your results, which is unusual on purpose: the fee and the outcome should be readable on the same afternoon.

Yes to both. Brands we work with include Delta Medical Labs, FBS, Al Hokail Medical Group, Planet VPN, Eduverse, ChMeetings, Ogaei and Egypt Pyramids Tours, across healthcare, finance, SaaS, education and travel in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and international markets. Several are written up as case studies with the numbers attached. And if you would rather hear it from a client than from us, ask on the call and we will arrange an introduction with one who is happy to take it.