GeoNexa vs NOVOS: an honest comparison

Who NOVOS is

NOVOS is a London-headquartered SEO agency that positions specifically around e-commerce. Founded in the late 2010s, the agency has built a portfolio of UK DTC clients and is well-regarded inside the UK DTC ecosystem for technical SEO + content work. Their service mix centers on traditional SEO disciplines: site architecture, on-page optimization, content production, link acquisition, and reporting — all tuned for Google's ranking system.

NOVOS doesn't publish pricing publicly. Industry context for UK-based e-commerce SEO retainers puts agencies of their tier roughly in the £2,000–£8,000 per month range depending on scope, with bespoke quotes above that for enterprise engagements.

Who GeoNexa is

GeoNexa was founded in 2026 as a specialist in AI search optimization (Generative Engine Optimization) for e-commerce brands on Shopify, WooCommerce, and Etsy. The thesis is simple: the search engine market has fractured. Google is no longer the only entry point for product discovery. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek now drive a material and growing share of category research queries. Most agencies — including most e-commerce SEO specialists — have not built the technical workflows aimed specifically at being cited in AI answers.

GeoNexa is solo founder-led at present, with three founding cohort spots open at 50% off standard retainer in exchange for permission to publish 90-day case studies. Standard pricing is public: Basic at $1,499 per month, Pro at $3,499 per month, Enterprise at $9,999 per month. The agency publishes its own AI visibility score live on the homepage — currently 4/100, with a public commitment to 60/100 within 90 days. See Case Study Zero for the full audit and plan.

Side-by-side comparison

The overlap is bigger than with general agencies

Most agency comparisons GeoNexa shows up in are against generalists. NOVOS is different because the e-commerce specialization is real and the SEO discipline is closely related to GEO. Both agencies ship Schema.org markup. Both think about technical site structure. Both pay attention to citation quality on third-party sites. Both produce monthly reporting tied to search visibility.

The agencies start to diverge once you ask which search engine the work is optimized for in the first place. NOVOS has a decade-adjacent body of practice tuned to Google's ranking signals: how Googlebot crawls, what Google's algorithm rewards in 2026, what link patterns work, what content depth signals matter. GeoNexa has a different reference model — how Perplexity assembles its citations, what content patterns ChatGPT's web-browsing module prefers, what Schema.org subsets Anthropic's Claude weights in its retrieval. Those are different bodies of practice with meaningful overlap in technical foundations but materially different application layers.

Where the work actively diverges

Foundation choices

For Google-first SEO, the technical foundation prioritizes things like crawl efficiency, internal link structure, page-speed-driven Core Web Vitals, and structured data that powers Google rich results. For AI-search-first GEO, the foundation prioritizes things like Schema.org subsets specifically used by AI extraction (FAQPage, AggregateRating, BreadcrumbList nesting), llms.txt manifests, and explicit allow-lists in robots.txt for AI training bots. There's overlap (Schema.org appears in both lists) but the prioritization and depth are different.

Citation seeding strategy

Google ranks pages partly on link authority — earning backlinks from established sites still moves Google rankings. AI engines weight citations differently: third-party review aggregators, Reddit threads, Wirecutter-class editorial content, and comparison content from category authorities are weighted higher than traditional backlink sources. The work to build each kind of authority looks superficially similar (PR outreach, content placement, partnership work) but the target list of "where to be mentioned" is meaningfully different.

Reporting metrics

NOVOS reports against Google-anchored metrics: keyword rankings, organic traffic, click-through-rate from SERP, conversion attribution from organic search. GeoNexa reports against AI-anchored metrics: citation rate across each of the five engines, position when cited, sentiment of the mention, share-of-voice against competitors in AI answers. The Google-side metrics still matter and we track them too, but they aren't the primary scorecard.

When each one is the right call

The both-eventually scenario

For larger DTC brands at the £5M+ annual revenue range, the strongest long-term setup is often both kinds of work running in parallel. Google still drives meaningful discovery traffic and is not going anywhere; AI search is growing and is increasingly where category research starts. A traditional SEO partner (like NOVOS) plus an AI-search specialist (like GeoNexa) cover both fronts without duplicating effort, because the underlying optimization targets are different.

For smaller stores or founding-stage brands, this two-agency setup is overkill. The right move is to pick the specialist for whichever visibility surface is your biggest current gap. For most stores under $50k/month in revenue, the biggest gap is usually AI search visibility because almost nobody has built foundations there yet — that's GeoNexa's case. For stores that haven't yet built solid Google rankings either, NOVOS's traditional SEO foundation work is the more proven starting point.

What we'd ask before deciding

1. Where is your discovery traffic plateauing first? If Google traffic has stalled and you've already done basic SEO well, AI search is the next under-served surface. If Google rankings are still your weakest discovery channel, fixing that first is the higher-yield move.
2. What does your customer's research path look like today? If your category buyers are still mostly Google-first researchers, traditional SEO is where they live. If your category is one where buyers have shifted to AI assistants (most knowledge-work-adjacent and many consumer categories in 2026), AI search optimization is where they live.
3. Which agency has built workflows specifically for your platform? Both NOVOS and GeoNexa work on Shopify, but NOVOS also serves Magento and custom builds well; GeoNexa is explicitly Shopify/WooCommerce/Etsy. Match this to your actual stack.

Disclosure and next steps

If your store fits NOVOS's profile better — UK/EU DTC, Google-first, established brand with multi-year SEO ambitions — their site is at thisisnovos.com. The team is competent and well-regarded inside the UK DTC ecosystem; if traditional SEO is your primary need, talking to them is the right next step.

If after working through this you think the AI search specialization fits your store better, GeoNexa's founding cohort still has spots open at 50% off. The full audit + 90-day plan lives at Case Study Zero, and you can book a free AI visibility audit from the homepage.