Insights · Agency landscape · July 2026
The 14 Best AEO & GEO Agencies in 2026 — Ranked by Someone Who Runs One
Full disclosure before anything else: I'm Fabian, founder of Shifter, an AEO agency for B2B SaaS. Shifter is on this list. I'm not going to pretend this is an independent review — no founder-written list is, including the ones that don't tell you. What I can do is show you the evaluation criteria, apply them to everyone including us, and let you judge. Every agency below is positioned for the buyer it genuinely fits, not ranked in a fake horse race.
Every SEO agency on earth became an "AI visibility agency" sometime in the last twelve months. Same team, same deliverables, new service page. Meanwhile the discipline itself — getting your brand cited when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Mode for recommendations — is real, young, and genuinely different from ranking pages on Google.
So before the list, here's how to separate the two. These are the three questions I'd ask any agency on this page, including mine.
How to evaluate any AEO / GEO agency
1. "Show me your citation tracking."
Real AEO teams maintain fixed prompt sets — the actual questions buyers ask — and re-run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews on a schedule, reporting mention share over time. If the answer to this question is a keyword rank-tracking screenshot, you're looking at SEO in a new coat.
2. "What specifically moved mentions for a client?"
The honest answer in 2026 involves third-party presence: review platforms, comparison pages, communities, and publications that the engines actually retrieve and cite. If everything the agency proposes lives on your own domain, that's an SEO scope with AEO branding.
3. "What don't you know yet?"
This discipline is barely two years old. Attribution is messy, the engines change retrieval behavior constantly, and results show up as directional mention share before they show up as clean pipeline numbers. The credible agencies will tell you that unprompted. Anyone guaranteeing AI visibility is selling harder than the data supports.
With that lens on, here's the landscape.
The list, organized by fit
1. Shifter — best for B2B SaaS at $1M–$10M ARR that needs AI visibility tied to pipeline
That's us, so apply maximum skepticism and the three questions above.
Shifter does one thing: AI answer visibility for B2B SaaS companies in the $1M–$10M ARR range — the stage where you're losing deals to competitors who show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, but you're too small to be a priority account at a large agency. Engagements start with a free AI Visibility Snapshot: where you currently appear across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode against a prompt set built from your actual buyer questions, and exactly which third-party sources are feeding the answers in your category. From there the work is third-party presence and entity consistency, not a content calendar.
What we won't claim: polished long-term case studies. The field is too young for anyone to honestly have them, and we'd rather tell you that than fake it.
- Services
- AI visibility audits, prompt-set citation tracking, third-party presence building, entity consistency
- Best for
- B2B SaaS, $1M–$10M ARR, losing AI-answer visibility to competitors
- Pricing
- Free AI Visibility Snapshot to start; monthly plan €3,500/month, cancel any time
2. iPullRank — best for enterprise teams that want technical depth
Mike King's agency is the one other agencies study. Their Relevance Engineering framework treats AI search as an information-retrieval problem rather than a content problem, and King was named Search Engine Land's AI Search Marketer of the Year in 2025. If you're an enterprise with an in-house team that wants to genuinely understand how retrieval and citation work under the hood, this is the technical ceiling of the market.
- Services
- Technical SEO, relevance engineering, AI search strategy, machine-learning-informed content
- Best for
- Enterprise brands with in-house teams that want the deepest technical partner available
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
3. Seer Interactive — best for analytics-heavy organizations
Seer built its reputation on marrying SEO with large-scale data analysis, and that DNA transfers well to AI search, where measurement is the hardest problem. A good fit for organizations that already run on dashboards and want AI visibility folded into a broader digital program with serious reporting infrastructure.
- Services
- SEO, paid media, analytics, AI search measurement
- Best for
- Data-driven mid-market and enterprise organizations
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
4. Omniscient Digital — best for extending existing content authority into AI answers
Omniscient's thesis is that topic authority built for Google is the same raw material LLMs use to reason about who's credible in a category, and their GEO work extends their established content-strategy practice rather than replacing it. Strong fit if you've already invested years in editorial content and want that equity to carry into AI answers.
- Services
- Content strategy, SEO, pipeline-driven editorial, GEO
- Best for
- B2B SaaS with an existing content program that should be earning AI citations
- Pricing
- Custom
5. Breaking B2B — best for bottom-funnel B2B SaaS content
Breaking B2B builds content programs around the searches buyers run during active evaluation — alternatives pages, comparisons, best-of formats — and argues that this same bottom-funnel architecture is what AI engines prefer to cite. They treat SEO and LLM visibility as one system, which is a defensible position for content-led SaaS brands.
- Services
- Bottom-funnel SEO content, LLM SEO, comparison and alternatives programs
- Best for
- B2B SaaS that wants buyer-evaluation content doing double duty in Google and AI answers
- Pricing
- Published on its site — plans from $4K/month, run as 90-day sprints
6. Grow and Convert — best for content tied to conversion tracking
Grow and Convert has spent years on a pain-point-first content methodology with unusually rigorous conversion attribution, and they publish original research on how LLMs source and cite content. Fit for teams that refuse to publish anything they can't measure.
- Services
- Conversion-focused SEO content, keyword validation, AI traffic attribution
- Best for
- Teams that measure content in demos and trials, not sessions
- Pricing
- Not published on the current site — scoped per engagement
7. Omnius — best for SaaS brands wanting a tooling-forward partner
Omnius works with SaaS and fintech brands and has invested in proprietary tooling for AI visibility work. A reasonable pick if you want an agency that's building its own measurement stack rather than reselling third-party dashboards.
- Services
- SaaS SEO, AI visibility, proprietary measurement tooling
- Best for
- SaaS and fintech brands that want a partner investing in its own stack
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
8. Animalz — best for original research that earns citations
Animalz is one of the most respected long-form B2B content shops in the industry, with a practice built around thought leadership and expert-driven editorial. The AEO-relevant part: original data and proprietary research are among the strongest inputs LLMs cite, and being the source of the numbers in your category is a durable citation moat. Animalz's research-driven content work maps directly onto that.
- Services
- Thought leadership, long-form editorial, research-driven content
- Best for
- Mid-market and enterprise brands that can invest in being the data source for their category
- Pricing
- Custom
9. Siege Media — best for content production at scale
Siege is one of the strongest pure content-marketing shops in the industry. If your AI visibility gap is fundamentally a "nobody links to or cites anything we publish" problem, high-quality content production at Siege's level is a legitimate fix, even if AEO isn't their native framing.
- Services
- SEO content, digital PR, link building, design-heavy assets
- Best for
- Competitive niches where content quality and earned links are the bottleneck
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
10. SimpleTiger — best for SaaS SEO foundations
SimpleTiger has run a focused SaaS SEO playbook for over a decade. If your fundamentals — technical health, keyword architecture, production cadence — aren't in place yet, fixing those with a specialist is a prerequisite to any serious AEO work, not a competitor to it.
- Services
- SaaS SEO, technical SEO, content production
- Best for
- SaaS companies whose organic foundations need building before AEO layers on top
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
11. Draft.dev — best for developer-tool brands
Draft.dev produces technical content for developer tools using a network of working engineers, founded by a former CTO. Technical credibility is hard to fake and increasingly detectable, and for dev-tool categories the content that gets cited by AI engines is the content practitioners would actually vouch for. If your buyers are developers, this is the specialist path.
- Services
- Technical tutorials, developer guides, documentation-adjacent content
- Best for
- Developer-focused brands where content accuracy is the citation signal
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
12. First Page Sage — best for thought-leadership-driven categories
First Page Sage centers on executive thought leadership as an SEO engine. In categories where AI engines lean on expert commentary and named authorities, that approach maps naturally onto answer visibility.
- Services
- Expert-written SEO content, thought leadership, demand generation
- Best for
- Regulated or complex B2B categories where named expertise is the trust signal
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
13. Avenue Z — best for combining PR with AI visibility
Avenue Z runs AI optimization as a standalone service alongside a PR practice, on the logic that earned media placements feed directly into the sources AI platforms cite. That's a genuinely AEO-native argument, and the PR combination is a real differentiator for brands that need authority built from scratch.
- Services
- PR, earned media, AI optimization
- Best for
- Brands that need third-party authority built through media rather than owned content
- Pricing
- Not published — scoped per engagement
14. DerivateX — best for founder-led B2B SaaS GEO sprints
DerivateX is a boutique founded by two SaaS operators, working on 90-day sprint cycles with a methodology they call citation engineering — visibility audits, content structured for AI extraction, and authority building on frequently retrieved sources. They're also among the most prolific publishers of agency rankings in this space — including lists featuring themselves — so pressure-test their case studies with the three questions like you would with anyone, us included.
- Services
- GEO, LLM SEO, entity optimization, citation tracking
- Best for
- B2B SaaS wanting a sprint-based boutique engagement
- Pricing
- Published on its site — AI visibility audits from $1,500; monthly packages by tier
Red flags, whoever you talk to
"Guaranteed AI visibility." Nobody controls what a model says. Directional mention share is the honest unit of progress.
A deck full of impressive GEO case studies. The measurement layer is too young. Ask for methodology: prompt sets, re-run cadence, how they separate their impact from noise.
Everything scoped on your own domain. On-site content matters, but AI engines lean heavily on third-party sources. A proposal with no off-site component isn't an AEO proposal.
"Independently reviewed" listicles that rank the author's agency near the top. This industry is drowning in them. Check the byline against the winners. (Yes, that's also why this article opens with a disclosure.)
FAQ
What's the difference between AEO, GEO, and LLM SEO?
Functionally nothing — they're competing labels for the same discipline: making your brand appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Vendors pick whichever acronym positions them best.
Can't my current SEO agency just do this?
Maybe — ask them the three questions above. The disciplines overlap, but AI engines cite a substantially different set of sources than Google's top results, and the measurement stack (prompt tracking, mention share) doesn't exist in a traditional SEO dashboard.
How fast does AEO work show results?
Third-party mentions can appear in answer engines within weeks because retrieval-based engines like Perplexity pull live sources. Becoming a consistent default recommendation in your category is a multi-month project, and anyone quoting days is selling.
How do I check my own AI visibility right now, for free?
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode the five questions your buyers actually ask before purchasing, and note who gets named. That's most of a baseline audit. If you're not in the answers and your competitors are, you have a visibility problem worth pricing out.
Fabian is the founder of Shifter (shifter.co), an AEO agency for B2B SaaS. If you want to know how your brand currently shows up across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, that's the first thing we audit.