Indian brands are now paying up to Rs 15 lakh per month for GEO — generative engine optimization — according to a report by StoryBoard 18. The new service line aims to make brands visible inside answers produced by AI tools such as chatbots and AI-assisted search engines.

The catch is straightforward. Agencies selling GEO cannot control what the AI actually says.

That is the core tension in this emerging market. Brands are writing large cheques for a service whose output no vendor can guarantee, script, or audit in advance. Traditional search engine optimization, whatever its flaws, at least let practitioners influence rankings through links, keywords, and technical fixes. Generative AI answers are different. The model composes its response at the moment a user asks, drawing on training data and retrieved sources in ways that remain opaque even to the companies building the systems.

The money is real regardless. At up to Rs 15 lakh per month, top-end GEO retainers sit in the same bracket as significant digital media spends for mid-size brands. That pricing signals how quickly marketing departments have moved from treating AI search as a curiosity to treating it as a channel worth budget line items of its own.

What those budgets buy, in practice, is a bundle of activity rather than a guaranteed placement: shaping the information available about a brand online so that AI systems, when they cite or summarize sources, are more likely to reference accurate and favourable material. The mechanics of how much any of this moves the needle remain, by the admission implicit in the agencies' own positioning, outside their control.

The report's framing cuts at the credibility of the category. If an agency cannot control what an AI says about a client, what exactly is the client paying Rs 15 lakh a month for? The honest answer appears to be influence attempts, not outcomes — an unusual posture for an industry that has grown accustomed to selling measurable performance against defined key performance indicators.

For brands, the risk calculus is genuine. AI assistants increasingly sit at the top of the consumer discovery funnel. When a shopper asks a chatbot for a product recommendation or a summary of a company's reputation, the answer that comes back shapes perception whether or not the brand participated in it. Sitting out entirely means leaving that surface to whatever the model finds on its own.

Paying for GEO, on the other hand, means funding an effort with no contractual control over the result. The StoryBoard 18 headline captures the squeeze in a single line: the spend is climbing toward Rs 15 lakh a month at the top end, while the agencies taking that money concede they cannot dictate the machine's output.

It is a familiar pattern in the advertising technology cycle. A new surface emerges, agencies rush to productize it, brands rush to buy, and only later does the market settle questions of measurement, accountability, and value. Programmatic advertising went through it. Influencer marketing went through it. GEO is going through it now, on an accelerated timeline, because adoption of AI tools by consumers has outpaced the development of any accepted standards for verifying whether optimization work changed an AI's answer.

What happens next will likely hinge on whether AI platforms open up visibility into how they source and weight information. Until then, buyers of GEO are operating with limited visibility into the effectiveness of their own spend — and the agencies selling it are, by their own account, working the controls of a machine whose behaviour they cannot command.

For marketing budgets under pressure, the Rs 15 lakh question is whether presence in AI answers is worth paying for without proof of control. The market, for now, is answering yes.