GEO Agency Rankings Multiply as Google AI Overviews Cut Clicks

A crowded shortlist, written by the contestants

Anyone shopping for help with generative engine optimization (GEO) this fall will find no shortage of rankings. Over the past few months, lists of the "best GEO agencies" have come out at a steady clip. They promise to identify the firms that can get a brand cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. Read side by side, though, these lists say less about who is best and more about how heavily the marketing industry is betting that AI answers will replace the ten blue links.

The first thing a close reading shows is who publishes these lists. Thrive Internet Marketing Agency puts itself first on its own list of the top ten GEO agencies13. Minuttia does the same on its list12. GenOptima ranks itself first and points to what it calls 527% documented growth in AI citations14. Silverback Strategies names itself the best overall GEO agency16, Digital Elevator gives itself the top spot for small businesses and lean in-house teams11, and MacRAE'S opens its U.S. shortlist with its own name15. Strictly speaking, these are sales pages formatted as editorial content.

That matters because the format is aimed at a particular audience. A ranked list with tables, "best for" labels and FAQ sections is the kind of structured, answer-ready page that GEO practitioners say AI systems like to quote. Some of these pages even include machine-readable markup listing the agencies they rank14. In practice, then, the lists are also attempts to shape what an AI assistant says when someone asks it which GEO agency to hire. The industry is using its own methods on itself.

Where the rankings converge

Promotional lists can still carry some signal. When competing publishers who rank themselves first keep naming the same outside firms, those mentions likely mean something. A handful of names come up again and again.

Siege Media appears in nearly every ranking reviewed here. Different lists describe it as best for content-led GEO, enterprise content marketing, or link-building and graphics that earn citations1113141618. iPullRank, the New York firm founded by Michael King, is repeatedly singled out for technical depth. One list mentions its "AI Search Manual"11, and others call it the choice for entity mapping on complex enterprise sites1415. Go Fish Digital shows up as a data-driven or PR-integrated option111316, as does Intero Digital, usually recommended for large content libraries111214. Directive, Graphite, Omniscient Digital and Animalz make several lists too111416.

The common pattern is clear. Most of these firms are established SEO and content shops that added a GEO offering, not companies built from scratch for AI search. Siege Media was founded in 201213, Go Fish Digital in 200916, and Ignite Visibility announced a dedicated GEO service as early as May 202415. Taken together, the rankings support the view that GEO, for now, is mostly SEO done well: authoritative content, clean technical structure, and earned third-party mentions, sold under a new name.

The major review directories add to the confusion. Clutch's GEO category ranks WebFX first, and its profile there shows GEO as just 20% of the firm's service focus20. GoodFirms says it has reviewed only six GEO agencies, and a sponsored listing sits at the top of its page19. The category is new enough that no neutral way of measuring agencies has taken hold.

Why buyers are paying attention: the click squeeze

The reason for all this activity is well documented. Google's AI Overviews are reducing the traffic that organic search used to deliver. Ahrefs re-ran its study on December 2025 data and found that when an AI Overview appears, the top-ranking page's average click-through rate is 58% lower9. The same method had shown a 34.5% drop in April 2025, so the effect grew as the feature spread2. The losses reach further down the page as well: about 51% at position two and about 19% at position ten9.

Other research points the same way using different methods. Pew Research Center tracked real browsing and found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, compared with 15% when no summary appeared. Only 1% of visits involved clicking a link inside the summary itself8. A randomized field experiment with desktop Chrome users goes beyond correlation: it found that showing an AI Overview caused outbound organic clicks to fall 39.8%7. Chartbeat data show publishers worldwide receiving roughly a third fewer search referrals2. In a filing with the UK competition regulator, DMG Media reported a worst case in which desktop click-through fell from 25.23% to 2.79%1.

The figures differ, sometimes a lot, and careful analysts warn against treating them as interchangeable. Pew measures how likely a click is in a given session, Ahrefs measures click-through for top-ranked pages, and Seer Interactive tracks performance at the brand level2. The direction is not in dispute, however. Even trade publications that sell optimization services say plainly that AI Overviews reduce clicks3.

The case for chasing citations

The GEO pitch depends on one finding: brands cited inside an AI Overview do much better than brands left out. Seer's data put numbers on this. For informational queries, every million impressions produce about 33,500 clicks when no AI Overview appears, about 20,743 for brands cited in an Overview, and about 9,445 for brands that aren't cited10. Sistrix data from Germany show a 22% higher click-through rate for sites linked inside an AI Overview compared with a classic first-place result6. Branded queries that trigger an Overview reportedly see click-through rise by 18%7.

Those numbers explain why agencies push citations so hard. They also show the limits of what agencies can deliver. Being cited is better than being ignored, but in Seer's figures cited brands still get about 38% fewer clicks than they would if no AI Overview appeared at all10. The more defensible reading is that GEO limits the damage rather than reversing it. Agencies promising a return to the old traffic levels are promising something no one has shown they can do.

There are also early signs that the worst may be over. Seer found organic click-through on queries with AI Overviews rose from a low of 1.3% in December 2025 to about 2.4% in February 20263. Google is also feeling pressure to send more traffic out. On May 6 it announced five changes, including inline links, hover previews, a "Subscribed" label for news outlets a user pays for, and a section of further reading links. These came as Penske Media pursues an antitrust suit and the European Publishers Council presses a complaint in Brussels4. Google's own results show the tension: revenue from its network of partner sites fell 4% while Search revenue grew 19%2.

The tooling gold rush behind the agencies

The agency rankings sit on top of a fast-growing software market. Profound raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February. Sitecore acquired Scrunch. Total disclosed funding for AEO tools is reported to exceed $350 million21. Profound was also named a Representative Vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools25. That suggests the analyst firms now treat this as a distinct category.

Prices for basic visibility tracking have dropped fast. HubSpot sells a standalone AEO tracker covering ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for $50 a month29. Otterly offers entry plans at $29, and Profound's starter tier costs $99 for ChatGPT tracking only26. Agency retainers, by contrast, usually run $3,000 to $10,000 or more per month, according to one comparison14. As monitoring gets cheaper, agencies will need to show they produce citations, not just report on them. That may be why some now offer outcome-based pricing14.

Measurement is also less settled than the dashboards suggest. Tools differ in which engines they cover. HubSpot's product, for example, does not track Google AI Overviews26. One vendor runs more than a million prompts per brand each month to get statistically meaningful results, which implies that smaller samples produce rough indications rather than reliable data21.

The bottom line

The flood of GEO rankings shows a real market reacting to a real shift. Google's AI Overviews have cut organic clicks by amounts that range from about a third to nearly 90% depending on the query and how it is measured2. Marketers need a plan. Still, the rankings should be read as advertising. The names that keep showing up on lists their competitors wrote, Siege Media, iPullRank, Go Fish Digital and Intero Digital among them, deserve the closest look. Even then, buyers should expect damage control, not a return to past traffic. Being cited in AI answers now matters as much as ranking did. The economics have still shifted toward Google, and no agency can reverse that.