Want AI to Recommend You in 2026? Who Do You Call?

A while ago, a friend doing B2B SaaS met me for drinks, looking glum.

I asked what was wrong.

He said his customers now shop by asking ChatGPT first, then Gemini, and only then, finally, Google. And ChatGPT's list of recommendations never, ever includes him.

In one sentence: the page-one ranking he spent ten years of SEO climbing toward is turning into an old boat ticket.

Which brings us to a new trade that has blown up over the past two years.

What Is GEO?

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Some also call it AEO, Answer Engine Optimization.

It comes down to one thing: getting AIs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to recommend your company when they answer users' questions.

Old SEO courted the search engine's crawlers; GEO courts the AI's "mouth." Users don't click links anymore — AI hands them the answer. Whether your name appears in that answer is the difference between life and death.

Strong demand breeds strong supply. A crop of agencies claiming to specialize in GEO has sprung up like bamboo shoots after rain.

The problem is, the trade is so new that nobody can tell the real experts from the old SEO teams with fresh business cards.

What to do? Someone ran a big roundup in mid-2026: they evaluated 48 agencies, scored and weighted them across six dimensions, and produced a top ten. The six dimensions: AI visibility (weighted 25%), marquee clients (20%), average third-party review scores (20%), leadership experience (15%), media citations (10%), and median employee tenure (10%).

The first three are easy to grasp. The last two are the interesting ones: being cited by media a lot means the industry listens when this shop talks; employees staying long means that over a two-year engagement you won't keep changing contacts and paying tuition over and over.

All ten finalists cleared 80 points. I read through the list a few times — here's my take.

The Top Ten, Each With Its Own Way of Living

#1, First Page Sage. A perfect 5.0 on AI visibility, and clients with names of the Salesforce, Logitech, Verizon caliber. What's most valuable here is pedigree: it published research on generative AI recommendation algorithms back in 2023 and followed with a widely cited GEO strategy guide in 2024 — in an industry only three years old, that makes it something like the founding patriarch. Its playbook is experts writing authoritative content to keep inbound leads flowing to clients from AI platforms; a strong fit for the mid-market and SMBs.

#2, Genevate. Founder Brett Kleinberg is a New York PR veteran, and the approach is clever: bundling GEO with public relations. Think about it — AI's answers feed heavily on the open web's public information; do PR well, and you're feeding the AI directly. Clients include ZipRecruiter and CBRE. But median employee tenure is just 1 year, and some reviews grumble about "shallow experience and a junior-leaning team." Young, but sharp.

#3, Siana Marketing. Serves only local industries — construction, real estate, engineering, home services — with localized GEO as its flagship. That happens to be ground most agencies haven't figured out yet. Client reviews say they're "proactive and genuinely able to generate leads from GEO"; the shortcoming is "limited scale."

#4, Focus Digital. Rooted in performance advertising, started with Google Ads, later adding SEO and GEO. Cheap — well suited to budget-limited small companies: paid buys traffic in the short term, GEO builds the base for the long term. But keep one eye open — paid is its muscle memory, and GEO risks becoming a bolt-on.

#5, Altus Marketing. Also serves small businesses — SEO audits plus conversion-oriented content, spanning professional services, real estate, e-commerce, and health. Only about 20 media citations, and 1.7 years of tenure. The reviews are honest: "the plans are custom-built, but the team is small and the scope limited."

#6, Driven Metrics. I rather like how these folks operate: instead of bragging "our influence is huge," they give clients a live dashboard — whether AI visibility rose, see the data yourself. The case studies show double-digit growth and multiples of return. Focused on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, serving small and mid-sized businesses.

#7, WebSpero. A full toolkit: AI-optimized content, GEO audits (how AI models currently understand and cite your brand), conversational optimization for voice and chatbots, and off-site citation building. Review scores as high as 4.8, though some clients complain about grammar errors and sluggish revisions. Suits small, nicely-defined markets in health and education.

#8, Black Propeller. GEO plus PPC paid placement. Paid delivers fast, but needs a continuously burning budget, and long-run returns usually lose to organic playbooks. Median employee tenure 1.4 years — for a long engagement, be prepared to change contacts.

#9, Zozimus. An old-line digital marketing firm in transformation, adding GEO to the service menu only in recent years. Case studies show its GEO business concentrated in education and healthcare, with clients like Scholarship America and Procept BioRobotics. No AI-native background in management, but employee stability is second-best on the whole list (4 years) — it wins on steadiness.

#10, The Ad Firm. Founded back in 2009, living off data analytics and multi-media integration, with clients concentrated in healthcare, legal, and home services. Management's roots are traditional SEO, so its AI visibility score is only 3.5. Fits small companies treating GEO as a side dish to a bigger brand campaign.

How to Use This List

Have you noticed? Not one of these ten is an all-around champion.

For pedigree and marquee clients, look at the top; for tight budgets, look at the small-business shops; for the PR playbook, there's a specialist; for data transparency, there's a specialist too.

The GEO industry itself is only three years old. Today's #1 may not be next year's #1. But "getting AI to recommend you" has already gone from an elective to a required course.

The list will change; the direction won't.

As for my friend — in the end he didn't pick any of the top ten. He started by redoing his website's expert content himself. He said: if you can't even explain yourself clearly, what makes you think AI will explain you clearly?

Fair point. May we all take it to heart.