Agencies that get businesses cited by AI search engines: who they are, what they cost and what to ask (2026)

25 September 2026 · Gary Affron

The short answer. The agencies named most often on the 2026 lists of generative engine optimisation (GEO) agencies are iPullRank and Siege Media, each on three of the six lists we read, followed by Animalz, First Page Sage, Go Fish Digital, Directive and Thrive on two each. In the UK, Burst Digital's list names ClickSlice and Marketing Signals as GEO specialists. The retainers those lists quote run from about $3,000 to more than $20,000 a month, or £3,000 to £7,000 a month for a UK small business. If you would rather not pay a retainer, The Ranking Factory runs the repeatable core of the same work as software, from $49 a month: it measures whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek name and cite you, finds the gaps, writes and publishes the missing evidence on your own site, and checks again.

Below: how the published lists were made, what a GEO agency actually does, what it costs, the questions to ask before you sign, and the part of the work software can take off your hands.

Read the lists for the shortlist, not the order

We read the six pages Google's Gemini cited when asked this question in September 2026 [1–6]. Four of them were published by an agency that placed itself first, which is normal for the format; one ranks individual experts rather than firms; and one, from a rank-tracking company, ranks agencies it does not compete with. So the useful signal is repetition: a firm that appears on several lists written by different people.

Every other firm, about thirty of them, appears on one list only.

Why businesses are hiring for this now

In G2's survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers in March 2026, 51% said they now begin software research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% in April 2025, and 69% said AI chatbot guidance led them to a different vendor than they had planned [7]. Being left out of the answer now costs you places on shortlists you never hear about.

What a GEO agency actually does

Across the six lists, the same services come up again and again:

• Measuring AI visibility: asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews the questions your buyers ask, and recording who is named and which pages are cited.
• Technical access: making sure search and AI crawlers can fetch and read your pages.
• Structured data and entity clarity: making it unambiguous what your business is, what it sells and who stands behind it.
• Content that answers buyer questions: new pages, and old ones restructured so each answers one question directly.
• Digital PR and third-party mentions: getting you named in the places engines trust that you do not control.
• Reporting: ideally tied to leads and revenue as well as visibility.

Most of that is good search practice. Google says so directly: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO", and "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities)" [8]. Other engines choose their sources in their own ways, which is why each one is measured separately.

What it costs

Seven questions to ask before you sign

1. Which engines will you measure, and how often? Get the list by name. "AI search" can mean four engines or fourteen.
2. Will you show answers from live search separately from answers from the model's memory? Only the first can reflect anything published recently.
3. How many times is each question asked, and will that number sit beside every rate? AI answers vary between runs; Semrush's own help centre says AI responses are "fast-changing and highly personalized, which means no platform can provide exact numbers on visibility" [9]. A visibility score without its sample size cannot tell you whether anything changed.
4. What will you publish, where, and from what? Pages on your own site, written from your own facts, are an asset you keep. Ask who checks that every claim is true.
5. Will you re-ask the same questions after each change, and report "no change" as well as change?
6. What will you do beyond our own site? Reviews, trade press, community discussion. Ask how you will see that it happened.
7. What stays ours if we stop? The pages, the data and the question set should all be yours.

Red flags

• Guaranteed rankings, guaranteed citations or a promised date.
• A single "AI visibility score" with no sample size behind it.
• A plan built mainly on AI-specific files, which Google says it does not need [8].
• Mass-produced pages. Google defines scaled content abuse as "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users" [10].

When software does the job instead

Half of an agency's GEO work is repeatable: ask the engines the same questions, find where you are missing, write the page that fills the gap, publish it, and ask again. That half is what The Ranking Factory does, continuously and at software prices.

• It measures ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek on your own AI keys, with Google's AI Overviews read as shown on the results page. Named, cited and recommended are counted separately, every rate carries its sample size and a 95% confidence range, and answers from live search are reported apart from answers from memory.
• It finds the gaps: topics where a competitor is named or cited and you are not, ranked by likely impact.
• It writes the missing evidence only from your own pages, videos and confirmed words, and holds a rewrite for you if it claims something your material does not support.
• It publishes on your own site (WordPress, Wix, Ghost or a signed webhook) and records the live address against the gap it closed.
• It asks again. Once you are measuring a set of questions, a closed gap's topic joins that watchlist and the next run reports the change either way.

On our own site, the share of Gemini's live-search answers that cited therankingfactory.com went from 32% to 84% in nine days: 6 of 19 answers on 15 August 2026 and 16 of 19 on 24 August, on the same model and the same questions, some of which carry our name.

What software does not do is the relationship half: pitching journalists, winning reviews on other people's sites, taking part in the communities your buyers read. The Ranking Factory shows you which third-party sites and threads the engines draw on for your questions; getting your business onto them is still work for your team or an agency.

If you are the agency, the Agency plan ($249 a month) runs 20 client campaigns with the Evidence Engine every four hours and white-label reports, so the measuring and the drafting are done before your team starts on the work only people can do. See /use-cases/agencies.

To see where your own site stands first, the free site check reads it the way search engines and AI crawlers do and emails you every finding in the order to fix it: /audit. Plans are at /pricing.

Questions people ask

How much does a GEO agency cost?

The 2026 lists quote $3,000–10,000 a month for mid-market retainers and $10,000 or more for enterprise, with UK small-business retainers at £3,000–7,000 a month [2, 4]. Software that runs the measuring, writing and publishing starts at $49 a month, plus the AI calls on your own keys.

Is GEO different from SEO?

For Google, Google says it is still SEO [8]. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity choose their sources in their own ways, so the only way to know where you stand in each is to ask each one the questions your buyers ask, and keep asking.

How long before AI engines cite us?

Nobody can honestly promise a date. You can measure each step instead: whether AI crawlers have fetched a new page, and whether the next runs of the same questions cite it.

Can we do this in-house?

Yes, if someone owns the measuring and the writing. The hard part is doing it every week without letting the numbers drift, which is where a tool earns its place, whether or not you also hire an agency.

Sources

1. Optimist, "The 7 Best GEO Agencies Driving Real Revenue from AI in 2026", 19 June 2026. yesoptimist.com
2. Sequence Commerce, "Top GEO Agencies of 2026", updated 16 September 2026. sequencecommerce.com
3. Thrive, "10 Top Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Agencies in 2026", updated 31 August 2026. thriveagency.com
4. Burst Digital, "Best Digital Marketing Agencies in the UK", 24 July 2026. burstdgtl.com
5. Kopp Online Marketing, "Top Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Experts for AI Search / LLMO in 2026". kopp-online-marketing.com
6. SERPWatch, "The Top SaaS GEO Agencies of 2026", 12 August 2026. serpwatch.io
7. G2, "New G2 Research: Half of B2B Software Buyers Now Start Their Research With AI Chatbots", 15 April 2026. prnewswire.com
8. Google Search Central, "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", updated 10 July 2026. developers.google.com
9. Semrush Knowledge Base, "Where does the data in Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit come from?" semrush.com/kb/1607
10. Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search", updated 28 August 2026. developers.google.com