GEO Agency Contract Checklist 2026: What to Check in Performance Guarantees, Refund Terms, and Termination Clauses

Note. This article is general information for reviewing contracts. It is not legal advice. For an actual dispute or a large contract, have a lawyer review it. Pricing references reflect published rates and change often.

When a GEO agency hands you a contract, look at three places first: the performance guarantee, the refund terms, and the termination clause. Those are where agencies put language that promises results, collects money up front, and makes it hard to walk away. In Korea's online advertising agency market, firms that promised guaranteed sales and full refunds and then reneged, or that demanded steep penalties when clients asked to cancel, were referred to prosecutors through a task force led by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (FTC).^[4][5] Few companies have bought GEO services before, so the same wording slips into GEO contracts easily. This guide shows what replacement wording to ask for in each of the three clauses, with the evidence behind each request. Warning signs during the sales stage are covered separately in the GEO Agency Red Flags Checklist; this article picks up at the next step, the contract language itself.

Core clauses in a GEO agency contract: 30-second definitions

• A performance guarantee clause is the clause in which the agency promises results within the contract term and sets the remedy if it falls short.
• A refund clause is the clause that sets the grounds, claim deadline, calculation method, and payment deadline for returning money the client has already paid.
• A termination clause is the clause that sets the grounds, notice period, penalty, and balance settlement for ending the contract mid-term.
• A data ownership clause is the clause that sets who keeps the raw measurement data, content, and accounts after termination.

What to check in each clause: risky wording and replacement wording

The table below gives one row each to the three main clauses, plus measurement, payment, and data ownership. If you see the wording in the second column, ask for the wording in the third.

Performance guarantees: why a contract shouldn't promise outcomes

Short answer: a clause that promises AI answer visibility as an outcome sells something the agency cannot control. Google's documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode says indexing and display are not guaranteed.^[1] The same page says you don't need new machine-readable files or special schema.org markup to appear in AI features.^[1] Google took the same position long before AI search. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, it says, and if an agency promises one, look elsewhere.^[2]

The measurement data points the same way. SparkToro found that, regardless of the prompt, AI tools return the same list of brand recommendations twice in fewer than 1 in 100 runs, and the same list in the same order in fewer than 1 in 1,000 (SparkToro, 2026).^[3] The same post calls tools that claim to report rank inside AI hard to trust, while judging visibility rate across many prompts and many runs a reasonable metric.^[3] A promise of "#1 in AI search" fails at the first step: there is no way to measure it.

That doesn't mean leaving the performance clause blank. Change what is being promised. What an agency can control is its deliverables, its schedule, and its measurement method. All three can be written into a contract, and a shortfall in any of them can be judged. For metric design, the GEO KPI and Prompt Monitoring Guide helps you settle on a concrete formula.

An enforceable performance clause usually reads something like this: "For the target query list in Appendix A, the agency will report the visibility rate measured over repeated runs on each covered AI service every month, with the raw data attached. If the month-3 review shows no improvement over the baseline at kickoff, the client may terminate without penalty." The timeline and conditions here are only examples; both sides negotiate the real numbers.

Refund terms: why a full-refund promise is risky

A full-refund promise sounds client-friendly, but with no conditions attached you have little basis to demand payment. According to a May 2026 report, the FTC-led task force on illegal practices in online advertising agencies referred 18 agencies with high complaint volumes to prosecutors (Digital Daily, 2026).^[4] The flagged cases included agencies that promised higher sales or a full refund and changed their story right after signing, and agencies that charged five years of fees as a single prepayment without the victim's consent.^[4] Since launching in December 2024, the task force has referred 55 agencies in total. Separately, 6 agencies that violated the Information and Communications Network Act received administrative sanctions including fines (Digital Daily, 2026).^[4]

These cases involved online advertising agencies serving small business owners, not GEO firms. The contract structure overlaps with GEO contracts, though: a monthly service sold with a promised result and payment pulled forward. A refund clause only has force when all four of the items below appear in the body of the contract.

1. Refund grounds: which unmet condition triggers a refund, stated so it can be judged, for example "if the agency fails to deliver the items in Appendix B within 30 days after the deadline."
2. Claim deadline: how long after the triggering event the client has to file.
3. Calculation method: how work already performed is deducted.
4. Payment deadline: how many days after the claim the money is returned.

Termination clauses: notice period, penalty formula, balance settlement

Problems with a termination clause can surface right after signing. A 2025 task force announcement reported agencies that refused refunds or imposed penalties of up to 74% when clients asked to cancel immediately after signing, and agencies that stopped responding after a cancellation request (News Seoul, 2025).^[5]

Start with one legal point. The termination grounds and procedure in your contract can override the Civil Act's general rules. Article 689 of Korea's Civil Act lets either party to a mandate contract terminate at any time, but the Supreme Court held that this article is a default rule, so the parties can exclude it or agree otherwise (Supreme Court 2017Da53265).^[8] In practice, the termination clause you sign will likely apply as written. Read it before you sign.

When an agency uses a pre-drafted standard-form contract (terms and conditions) with every client, Korea's Act on the Regulation of Terms and Conditions may apply. Article 9 voids terms that exclude or restrict the customer's statutory right to terminate, terms that place an excessive restoration burden on the customer upon termination, and terms that unreasonably extend the duration of an ongoing contract or set tacit automatic renewal to the customer's detriment.^[6] Article 8 voids terms that impose unreasonably heavy damages on the customer.^[7] Clauses negotiated individually may fall outside the Act, so talk to a lawyer if a dispute arises.

Check these items in the termination clause:

• Notice period: how many days of written notice you must give.
• Penalty formula: whether it is based on work already performed and actual losses, not the full remaining term.
• Balance settlement: if you prepaid, when and by what calculation the unused portion is returned.
• Automatic renewal: whether the contract states a deadline for declining renewal.
• Handover after termination: within how many days raw measurement data, content files, and account permissions are transferred.

Refund and termination issues by contract type

GEO services are sold under three contract types, and each raises different refund and termination questions. Cost structures for each type are covered in the GEO Pricing and Contract FAQ and the GEO Agency Monthly Cost Guide.

Tools for independently verifying agency reports, and what to check in their contracts

Once the performance clause is tied to measurement, the next question is who does the measuring. Agency reports alone make it hard to judge a shortfall. The client needs to be able to cross-check the same query set with a different tool before termination or fee reduction terms can actually be used. Why numbers differ between tools is covered in Why AI Visibility Tools Disagree.

No single tool is the answer. Run the same query set on at least two of them and check whether the trends agree. On BOIDA BVI, AVING reported that Designovel exhibited BVI at MWC 2026 and that the product analyzes how a brand appears across major generative AI services such as ChatGPT and Gemini when you enter a URL or product name (AVING, 2026).^[9] Company details for the operator are on the Designovel page. Criteria for choosing an agency are covered in the Korea GEO Agency Comparison and Selection Guide and GEO Company Evaluation Criteria.

Six steps before you sign

1. Flag guarantee language: search the proposal and draft contract for "guaranteed," "full refund," and "no early termination," and mark every instance.^[4]
2. Rewrite the performance clause: ask the agency to replace outcome promises with a deliverables list, deadlines, a target query list, a metric formula, and a remedy for shortfalls.^[1][3]
3. Fill in the four refund items: confirm that grounds, claim deadline, calculation method, and payment deadline are in the body of the contract.
4. Run the termination math: get the agency to calculate in writing what you would pay and what you would get back if you terminated in month 2.^[5][8]
5. Change the payment schedule: split payment monthly or by milestone instead of prepaying the full term, and pay nothing until you have received the contract.^[4]
6. Keep records: the FTC urged clients not to pay before receiving the contract and to keep supporting records in case of a later dispute.^[4] We recommend that those records include the contract, proposal, chat messages, and call logs.

Key takeaways

• No contract can guarantee visibility in AI answers. Google states that indexing and display in its AI features are not guaranteed.^[1]
• Write performance clauses around deliverables, deadlines, visibility rate over repeated runs, and the remedy for a shortfall.^[3]
• A full-refund promise is hard to enforce without grounds, deadlines, a formula, and a payment date.^[4]
• A signed termination clause can override the Civil Act's general rules, so check the penalty formula and balance settlement before signing.^[8]
• In a standard-form contract, terms that strip termination rights or impose excessive penalties can be void under the Act on the Regulation of Terms and Conditions.^[6][7]