The 9 best AI SEO agencies in 2026 — and why we didn't put ourselves at number one

In June 2026, Lily Ray published an analysis of 100 B2B "best [category] software" queries, checked in Google AI Overviews on three dates between April and June. Eighty of them triggered an AI Overview. Inside those answers, self-promotional listicles were cited 323 times.

In 224 of those cases, Google cited the brand's own page and then recommended somebody else. That is 69% of the time.

Search Engine Land's write-up puts the mechanism plainly: a citation is not a recommendation. Your page can be the source an AI answer is built from while your competitor is the name the buyer writes down. Ray also tracked organic declines across dozens of sites leaning on the format, starting around 20 January and accelerating through Google's May 2026 core update.

So here is a "best AI SEO agencies" article written by an AI SEO agency, which is exactly the format the data says backfires. We have handled that in the only way that seemed defensible: the nine numbered entries below are other people's agencies, scored against criteria you can verify without talking to any of us. Our own position is set out separately and labelled as what it is.

What the research actually says about AI visibility

Before the list, the evidence — because it determines what you should be shopping for.

The founding academic work is the GEO paper from Princeton, IIT Delhi, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute, presented at KDD 2024. It tested nine content modifications across 10,000 queries and found that adding statistics, credible quotations and citations to reliable sources lifted visibility by roughly 30–40% on its primary metric. That number has since been detached from its context and sold as a promise of ranking in ChatGPT. A 2026 critical survey of the GEO literature points out the obvious limit: the figure describes a relative gain inside a simulator where five documents had already been placed in the model's context. It says nothing about how a document gets into that context in the first place.

The follow-up work is less flattering still. C-SEO Bench, published at NeurIPS 2025 by Puerto and colleagues, is the first benchmark to test conversational-SEO tactics across multiple tasks, domains and competing actors at once. Its finding is blunt. Most current methods are largely ineffective, several push documents down rather than up, and the best conversational tactics still trail behind conventional SEO methods. As more brands adopt the same tricks, the marginal gain shrinks further — the same dynamic SEO has lived through for twenty years.

Then the field data. In February 2026, Ray published an analysis of what happens to AI citations when organic rankings fall. They fall too — not only in Google's own AI Mode and Gemini, but in ChatGPT. ChatGPT turned out to be more tightly coupled to Google's organic results than Gemini was, which is a strange result for a non-Google product and a strong hint about how its retrieval works.

Put together, the picture is consistent. Formatting your page for extraction helps a little, once the page is already in the retrieved set. Getting into the retrieved set is a search visibility problem, and that is where the money should go. We have written this up in more depth in GEO vs SEO and SEO vs AEO vs GEO.

Which reframes the buying decision. You are not shopping for a GEO agency. You are shopping for a search agency that can prove it ranks clients, and that reports on AI surfaces as part of the same programme.

The scorecard: seven checks you can run yourself

Every listicle has an evaluation framework. Most keep it vague enough that the publisher wins. Here is one built so that you can run it without us, on any agency including this one.

Two of these are close to unfixable by an agency that wants to fake them. Live ranking proof and competitor disclosure both require giving you something checkable. Lead with those.

The nine agencies

Ordered by buyer profile, not by quality. Each of these is a real, credible firm; the trade-off lines are the honest limitations, not criticisms.

1. iPullRank — enterprise buyers who need the technical depth

Mike King's New York agency built the Relevance Engineering framework, which brings information retrieval, content strategy, digital PR and UX under one method rather than treating AI search as a content-formatting exercise. In July 2026 iPullRank became a named Profound agency partner, which means they turn the enterprise measurement data into programmes rather than just reselling a dashboard. If you want the firm most likely to be right about the mechanics, it is this one.

Best for: Fortune 500 and mid-market brands with internal search teams to coordinate with.
Trade-off: Enterprise scope and enterprise pricing. A Series A company will be buying more coordination than it needs.

2. Amsive — research-led programmes and algorithm recovery

Amsive is where Lily Ray runs SEO and AI search, and much of the research quoted in this article came out of that work. That matters commercially: an agency publishing original studies on its own category is being tested in public. Ray also runs a separate selective consultancy, Algorythmic, and routes larger team-based projects to Amsive.

Best for: Brands recovering from a core update, or anyone whose problem is credibility and content quality rather than volume.
Trade-off: A broad agency with many practices. You are buying access to a research culture, not necessarily to the researcher.

3. Omniscient Digital — revenue-led organic for growth-stage SaaS

Omniscient works with software companies and frames organic as an acquisition channel tied to product adoption rather than a traffic line. Their "surround sound" approach deliberately builds third-party mentions and earned coverage rather than only on-site pages — which happens to be the thing Ray's data says drives AI recommendations, not just citations.

Best for: B2B SaaS in the roughly $2m–$30m ARR band with a real content operation to plug into.
Trade-off: Entry pricing is high, commonly quoted from around $10,000 a month. The public review trail is thin relative to the client roster.

4. Siege Media — content and digital PR at volume

Founded in 2012, Siege produces original research, data studies and visual assets designed to earn editorial links. In an AI search context that model is more useful than it first appears: the third-party coverage it generates is precisely the source pool AI engines draw on for "best" queries, where Ray found Forbes, Reddit and YouTube among the most-cited domains.

Best for: Companies with budget for asset production that need authority built quickly.
Trade-off: The centre of gravity is top-of-funnel. If your gap is bottom-funnel comparison and decision content, you will need to direct that explicitly.

5. Directive — search inside a wider performance programme

Directive positions itself as a performance marketing agency for B2B tech, pairing SEO with paid media and conversion work, and reporting against revenue metrics rather than sessions. For enterprise buyers with complex attribution, having one team across organic and paid removes a genuine measurement problem.

Best for: Enterprise B2B software with long cycles and multiple channels to reconcile.
Trade-off: Breadth. AI visibility is one workstream among several rather than the organising idea.

6. Foundation Inc — distribution beyond your own website

Foundation focuses on getting B2B brands visible across search, AI platforms, communities and distribution channels, with notable emphasis on Reddit. That emphasis has aged well. Reddit citations in AI answers have climbed sharply, and community threads now shape both buyer research and generated answers — a point we expand on in our piece on Reddit and the sources buyers trust.

Best for: B2B and "boring industry" brands already publishing but invisible outside their own domain.
Trade-off: Less suited to companies whose foundational technical SEO is still broken.

7. SimpleTiger — a first structured programme for SaaS

SimpleTiger has worked with software companies for over a decade and leans on structured data and concise, answer-ready content, with dashboards covering both organic rankings and AI citations. For a company buying its first serious search partner, the process discipline is the product.

Best for: Early and growth-stage SaaS establishing search visibility from a low base.
Trade-off: Best-practice execution rather than a contrarian position. If your category is already saturated, that may not be enough on its own.

8. Onely — technical SEO and crawlability

Onely's specialism is the layer everything else depends on: indexing, rendering, JavaScript, site architecture. This is unglamorous and frequently decisive. A page that models cannot retrieve cannot be cited, however well it is written, and JavaScript-dependent links remain a common way to make pages invisible to AI crawlers.

Best for: Large or JavaScript-heavy sites where the constraint is access rather than content.
Trade-off: Technical remediation is a diagnosis, not a growth programme. You will still need content and authority work afterwards.

9. Grow and Convert — bottom-of-funnel content

Grow and Convert built its reputation on writing for the searches closest to a purchase decision and reporting on conversions rather than traffic. In a market where most content programmes drift upward into awareness topics, that discipline is scarce and it maps cleanly onto the comparison and "best tool for X" prompts buyers now type into ChatGPT.

Best for: Companies with traffic and no pipeline from it.
Trade-off: Narrow by design. Technical work and authority building sit outside the core offer.

The tools are not agencies, and the pricing gap will tempt you

Somewhere in this decision you will be shown a dashboard costing a fraction of a retainer, and the comparison will feel like it settles the question. It does not, and it is worth being precise about why.

Profound, Peec, Otterly, Scrunch and the AI modules inside Semrush and Ahrefs all do the same core job. They run a set of buyer questions through AI engines on a schedule and report whether you were named, who was named instead, and which sources the answer drew on. Entry-level monitoring starts around $29 a month, mid-market platforms sit roughly in the $95–500 range, and enterprise deployments run into four figures monthly and beyond.

What none of them do is change the answer. They are measurement instruments. They will tell you, in a well-designed chart, that ChatGPT recommends your competitor — and then wait for someone to go and fix the underlying visibility, entity data and third-party coverage that produced the result.

So the honest rule: if you have a team that can act on the report, buy the tool. A dashboard plus an internal content and technical function is a genuinely good purchase, and cheaper than any agency. If you do not have that team, a subscription buys you a monthly record of losing.

Where Optimitor fits, stated plainly

Three things separate us from the nine agencies above. All three are verifiable before you sign anything.

One category, one client. We work with a single company per competitive category and we will not take a direct competitor while you are a client. This is the only differentiator on this page that is a contractual fact rather than a claim about skill. Every other agency listed can, and reasonably will, sell to your closest rival next quarter. Ask each of them the competitor-disclosure question from the scorecard and watch what happens to the conversation.

One programme, not two retainers. The evidence in this article is our operating thesis, and it has commercial consequences we absorb rather than bill for. AI citations are downstream of search visibility, so we run one integrated programme — technical foundations, decision-stage content, independent authority, and AI prompt tracking as a reporting layer over the top. We do not sell a GEO retainer alongside an SEO retainer, because we do not think the second one is a separate piece of work. Our method sets out the sequence.

We show the ranking work. The deliverable is that you get found on Google and named by AI engines, measured together. If organic visibility is flat, we have not done the job, whatever the prompt dashboard says that month.

Who we are wrong for. If you need a large team coordinating across many markets, iPullRank or Directive will serve you better. If your entire problem is a broken JavaScript render, hire Onely and be done in a quarter. If you have an in-house content team and just need measurement, buy Peec or Otterly and keep your money. And if your category is already taken by an existing client, we will tell you on the first call rather than at the proposal stage.

What a serious programme costs in 2026

The failure mode is not paying too little. It is paying a small retainer while expecting senior strategy, technical execution, editorial capacity, authority development and meaningful measurement simultaneously. Something is being quietly dropped, and you will find out which in month seven.

Five things that should end the conversation

• Guaranteed AI citations. No one controls what a model outputs on a given day. Anyone promising otherwise is describing a tactic that will not survive contact with a model update.
• Prompt injection, cloaking or hidden text. These carry real organic risk for a temporary AI gain. Ray has been consistent on this since AI search entered the conversation, and the downside is a ranking problem you then have to pay someone else to fix.
• Percentage growth with no baseline. A 3,000% increase from a base of two is two hundred somethings. Ask for absolute commercial figures.
• A GEO retainer priced separately from SEO. Ask which specific deliverables sit in the second invoice that are not in the first. The answer is instructive.
• Scaled self-ranking listicles as the strategy. Search Engine Land has reported that some B2B brands lost 30–50% of visibility after leaning on self-ranked "best" pages, and that presenting company-controlled content as independent review can create exposure under the FTC's Consumer Review Rule.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AI SEO agency?

An agency working to get your brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. The label covers two different jobs — using AI tools to run traditional SEO faster, and influencing what AI answers say about you. Establish which one a prospective partner means before comparing quotes. Our AI SEO page sets out how we scope it.

Is GEO different from SEO?

The measurement layer is different. The underlying work is largely the same. C-SEO Bench found that most conversational-SEO tactics produced close to no ranking gain and several reduced visibility, while conventional SEO methods kept working. Treat GEO and AEO as reporting surfaces on a search programme, not as separate retainers.

Do AI visibility tools replace an agency?

No. They measure whether AI engines name you and who they name instead. None of them changes the answer. Buy the tool if you already have a team able to act on what it reports.

How long before AI visibility moves?

Technical and structural fixes can show up within weeks. Authority and third-party coverage — the signals that drive recommendations rather than citations — run on a six to twelve month horizon. Any agency quoting faster than that on the second category is describing something fragile.

What should I ask before signing?

Ask for a live client ranking you can verify yourself. Ask which competitors in your category they already work with. Ask which prompts they will track and how often. Then ask what they would stop doing if AI citations rose and pipeline stayed flat. The last question separates the operators from the reporters.

Sources: Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024. Puerto et al., C-SEO Bench, NeurIPS 2025. Lily Ray, February 2026 and June 2026. Search Engine Land, 18 June 2026. Agency descriptions drawn from each firm's own published material, accessed August 2026. Tool pricing verified July–August 2026 and subject to change.