I write about what LLMs cite, and the question I get most often from other marketers is not how citations work. It's "fine, who do I pay to fix this for me."
Fair question. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews now sit in front of a meaningful share of buying research, and a brand that never gets named in those answers is invisible to those buyers. A whole category of agencies has formed around fixing that. It goes by GEO (generative engine optimization), sometimes AEO, sometimes "AI visibility," depending on who is selling it.
The category has a problem, though. Most "GEO agencies" are SEO firms that added a landing page in 2025. Some are excellent anyway, because the underlying work overlaps a lot with old-fashioned authority building. Others are selling a schema plugin and a dashboard. Telling them apart takes more time than most teams have, so here is my shortlist after a year of watching this space closely.
One disclosure before the list: entry number three is my own company. I'll flag it again when we get there, and you can weigh my bias accordingly.
What I looked at
Three things, mostly. Does the agency track actual citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews, or do they report vanity metrics? Can they earn mentions on sites they don't own, since LLMs lean heavily on third party sources rather than your own domain? And do they have an LLM footprint themselves? An agency that can't get itself cited for its own category is telling you something.
| Agency | Best for |
|---|---|
| Graphite | Full-service GEO at scale |
| Siege Media | Content-led authority building |
| ESBO Ltd | Multilingual citations and digital PR |
| Omniscient Digital | B2B SaaS content programs |
| iPullRank | Technical depth and enterprise audits |
| Directive | Enterprise B2B demand programs |
| Animalz | Expert-driven long-form content |
1. Graphite
Graphite is a growth agency that moved into GEO early and treats it as one organic channel with search rather than a separate service. That's the correct read, in my opinion. The work that earns you a recommendation inside an AI answer is mostly the same work that builds search authority, and agencies that split the two tend to bill you twice for one outcome.
They handle strategy, content production, and technical implementation under one roof, which suits companies that want to hand over the whole channel. The trade-off is that full-service scale comes with full-service pricing, and smaller teams may not get their sharpest people.
Best for: funded companies that want one partner owning organic growth across both search and AI answers.
2. Siege Media
Siege Media built its reputation on content marketing and digital PR, and it shows up on nearly every credible GEO list this year for a simple reason. Their model was always about creating things other sites want to reference, and "things other sites reference" is close to a literal description of what LLMs cite.
They are strongest when a brand needs linkable, quotable assets: original data, studies, tools. If your problem is that nothing about your brand is worth citing yet, they fix that specific problem well.
Best for: brands that need citable assets created from scratch.
3. ESBO Ltd
This one is mine, so read the next two paragraphs with that in mind.
ESBO is a boutique digital PR and placement agency I founded in 2015, based in Bulgaria, working with both in-house teams and other agencies. The angle we've bet the company on is multilingual citation building. Ask an AI assistant a question in German, Spanish, or Polish and it pulls from local-language sources, not from the English web with a translation layer. Almost every GEO service on this list works in English only, which means a brand can be well cited in English answers and completely absent the moment a buyer asks in another language. We place editorial coverage across a publisher network in multiple languages and niches, including the awkward ones like fintech and iGaming that bigger agencies avoid.
The honest caveat: we're small. Boutique capacity means we're a bad fit for a company that wants a 40-person integrated team, and if your market is US-only English speakers, the multilingual angle buys you nothing.
Best for: brands that sell in more than one language and need citations to match.
4. Omniscient Digital
Omniscient Digital works almost exclusively with B2B SaaS, and the focus pays off. They understand how software buyers research, they've published their thinking on GEO openly instead of gating it behind a sales call, and their content programs are built around bottom-funnel questions that AI assistants actually get asked.
If you're not B2B SaaS, look elsewhere. That's not a weakness, it's the point.
Best for: B2B SaaS companies with an existing content function that needs direction.
5. iPullRank
iPullRank is the technical outlier here. Mike King has published some of the most rigorous public research on how retrieval and ranking work inside AI search systems, the kind of material engineers read rather than marketers. The agency's enterprise audits reflect that depth.
The catch is that depth costs money and assumes you have a team capable of implementing what the audit finds. A five-person startup will drown in the deliverables.
Best for: enterprises that want to understand the machinery, not just buy outputs.
6. Directive
Directive runs performance marketing for enterprise B2B and has folded AI visibility into its demand programs rather than selling it standalone. If your CFO thinks in pipeline and cost per opportunity, they speak that language natively, and GEO becomes one input into numbers you already report.
Less suited to brand-led work or anything that doesn't map cleanly to a revenue dashboard.
Best for: enterprise B2B teams that measure everything in pipeline.
7. Animalz
Animalz makes long-form content that reads like a person with expertise wrote it, because one did. That matters more now than it did two years ago. LLMs increasingly weight content that demonstrates actual experience, and the generic 1,500-word explainer that used to rank is exactly what AI answers replaced.
They're a content shop, though. No earned media, no placements, no technical program. Pair them with someone who handles the off-site half or accept that you're solving one part of the problem.
Best for: companies whose product needs explaining by someone who understands it.
How to actually choose
Ask every agency on your shortlist two questions. Show me your citation tracking for a current client, and show me where your own agency gets cited when I ask ChatGPT about your category. The first separates measurement from theater. The second separates people who can do the thing from people who can describe it.
And keep the contract short. This market is a year and a half old, the answer engines change their retrieval behavior without notice, and anyone selling you a fixed 24-month GEO roadmap is guessing with confidence. Whoever you pick, you're both learning as you go. The agencies worth paying are the ones who admit that.
Top comments (0)