Want ChatGPT to Recommend You? These 8 GEO Agencies Are Worth Knowing

Not long ago, a friend who runs a B2B SaaS business grabbed drinks with me.

He told me about something keeping him up at night: a big prospective customer went straight to ChatGPT and asked "which software is best in [category]" — and the AI named three companies. His wasn't one of them.

Their website, content, and reputation are all solid. But the AI didn't mention him.

Not once.

Think about what that means. It means the customer eliminated you before you ever walked in the door. You never even got a ticket to the game.

That's what I want to talk about today: GEO — Generative Engine Optimization.

First, Let's Define the Term

So what exactly is GEO?

Simply put, it's making your brand and content found, understood, trusted, and cited in AI-generated answers.

And note: not just on your own website. When AI answers a question, it pulls from the entire web — media, review sites, industry pages, comment sections. What it finds, believes, and cites determines who you are in the AI's eyes.

So are GEO, SEO, and AEO the same thing?

No.

SEO governs traditional search rankings. AEO is about giving questions an answer that can be directly lifted. GEO covers more ground: how the whole generative system retrieves you, interprets you, and ultimately decides whether to mention you in its answers.

The three overlap, but don't use them interchangeably.

Why This Is Urgent Right Now

Because the gateway where traffic enters is changing hands.

It used to be that customers looking for a vendor would open a search box, type keywords, and click through ten pages. Now? More and more people just ask ChatGPT, ask Perplexity, or read Google's AI Overviews — take the ready-made answer, and go.

The search box is still there, but the thing answering inside it has changed from a list of blue links to a machine that talks.

The battleground of rankings is shifting toward "being cited." Whoever the AI mentions has made it to the finals.

But here's the awkward part: GEO is a new craft, and most SEO companies haven't truly learned it yet. So the market has sprouted a crop of "we do GEO too" signs, with wildly uneven quality.

That's why I went through the 8 companies that have actually put in real work here. The judging criteria are simple: look at what research they've published, what proprietary methodology and tools they have, and what case studies they've done — not what they say.

The 8 Companies, One by One

Go Fish Digital

If you can only remember one name, remember this one.

Their approach treats GEO as a full engineering effort: researching how AI retrieves content, doing semantic analysis, mapping buyer prompts one by one to your pages, filling in structured data, then using Digital PR to build third-party authority. Their client roster includes content teams at GEICO, Wayfair, and Amazon, and their own case studies have reported actual growth in AI-referred traffic and conversions.

A good fit for mid-size and large companies running an integrated program. Smaller companies may find it too heavy — a full program spanning strategy, technical, content, and PR won't come cheap.

iPullRank

The technical school — hardcore, at that.

They built a framework called Relevance Engineering that blends information retrieval, embeddings, paragraph-level optimization, and technical SEO. Their published research tackles real problems head-on: probabilistic retrieval, query fan-out, AI Mode's impact on content. A client list of SAP, American Express, and HSBC-caliber names didn't happen by accident.

Big websites and enterprises with messy content libraries — go to them. Small teams should pass: they can't digest the depth, and can't afford enterprise pricing either.

Relevance

What's interesting about this one is that it targets a blind spot in GEO that's easy to overlook.

AI doesn't just look at what your website says. It looks even more at what others say about you.

Relevance's approach is called AI Authority Engineering: using digital PR and earned media to move third-party citations and brand authority. EY, Chime, and 1-800-GOT-JUNK are all on their roster. For brands with reputation issues, or those repositioning within a category, this route fits the diagnosis.

One caveat: they haven't carried GEO as an explicit banner for very long, so for purely technical-engineering work, confirm scope with them first.

Siege Media

An established content marketing company that pivoted here.

Their strengths are original research, data-driven content, content freshness, plus PR distribution. The logic is plain: AI cites good content too — build the "material worth citing," and both humans and machines will cite you. Mentimeter's considerable exposure and traffic on ChatGPT is their public case study.

If I had to nitpick: their GEO-specific public cases are still few, and work like deep retrieval analysis should be scoped clearly up front.

Omniscient Digital

They specialize in B2B SaaS content, with clients like SAP, Adobe, Loom, and Jasper.

They use a term I really like: source-worthiness — being worth treating as a source. Their approach helps enterprises build an entire authoritative topic ecosystem, rather than scattering articles around individual keywords. For B2B companies with complex products and long sales cycles, this approach fits well.

The weakness: few public GEO-specific tools and case studies — less transparent than the top names on this list.

Perrill

The steady hand.

Technical SEO, schema, semantic HTML, brand mention strategy — one integrated stack. They don't pull GEO out of existing search programs as a separate thing; they fold it in and push it all forward. A good fit for companies thinking, "I don't want to start from scratch — I just want to build AI visibility on what I already have."

The cost: they publish little GEO-specific research, and public information on proprietary measurement tools is limited.

Single Grain

The market-growth route.

GEO, content, SEO, demand generation, paid media — packaged into one growth playbook. They publish a lot of GEO educational content and do it well. A good fit for SaaS and B2B teams that want to plug AI visibility into their existing acquisition system.

But their content leans marketing-flavored; depth on retrieval engineering depends on team staffing and isn't guaranteed on every engagement.

Spicy Margarita

A small, sharp boutique.

While others chase "broad informational visibility," they specialize in commercial-intent prompts — the questions buyers ask when making a purchase decision: which one is best, how to choose, compare A and B. What they do is find source gaps and entity gaps, then fill them with content that gets B2B brands into high-value recommendation slots.

Want to influence "the answer at the moment of purchase"? Call them. For large-scale engineering implementations, they'll be too small.

How to Choose: Four Hard Criteria

Having covered the 8, back to one question: if you're choosing, what do you look at?

My advice is four things.

First, do they understand the underlying retrieval mechanics? Real experts chew through patents and research papers — for example, Google's several patents on stateful search responses, neural retrieval, and generating answers from user history. These documents explain how LLMs retrieve, rank, and present content. The gap between those who understand this and those who don't is an order of magnitude.

Second, do they have their own tools? A standard SEO toolbox can't measure "did the AI mention me." They need to track brand appearances in AI answers, compute the similarity between your content and AI output, and tally AI Overview inclusion frequency. Anyone cobbling it together with off-the-shelf tools — pass.

Third, is the delivery structure flexible? GEO spans technical, content, and engineering disciplines. Vendors that only sell fixed packages can't match your actual gaps.

Fourth, do results land on the business? AI exposure doesn't pay the bills. Leads, inquiries, revenue — that's the ultimate answer. Be wary of anyone who shows you exposure reports but no conversion data.

Questions You're Bound to Ask

Money: monthly retainers — focused projects start at a few thousand dollars, enterprise programs can run past $20,000. One-time audits are cheaper, but implementation and measurement are long games.

Timeline: some changes show visibility movement within weeks; authority and citations accumulate over months. Don't judge success by a single query — test repeatedly across multiple prompts, platforms, and points in time.

Do they guarantee citations? No. You can rule out any company that flat-out guarantees "you will definitely appear in AI answers." Generative systems are probabilistic — same question, rephrase it, and the answer changes. Serious companies improve the conditions for being retrieved and cited; they don't control each generation.

Finally, back to my friend.

His real problem isn't "why doesn't the AI mention me." It's "in an era when machines make decisions for people, what does my brand actually look like in other people's narratives?"

That question is going to get more and more expensive.

While for now — it's still cheap.