LiamVi

← All articles  ·  02 September 2026

A single list page standing upright on a pale background, its contents drawn as five identical unlabelled entry rows of equal length, with one orange source chip docked to its lower-right edge; the word Companies stands to its left and the word Cited beside the chip.

Generative engine optimization companies: a verified list, and why this page shape gets cited at all

Generative engine optimization companies come in two forms — software platforms that measure whether AI assistants mention or cite your brand, and agencies that do the optimization work as a service — and the market is young enough that the two get listed side by side as if they were the same business. Most of these companies grew out of SEO — search engine optimization — and all of them now sell some version of AI visibility. We build one of the platforms, so read this page knowing that. What we can add that a directory cannot: we track who actually holds the AI citations for generative engine optimization queries, and what we found is odd enough to change how you should read any list of companies in this market, including ours.

What does a generative engine optimization company actually do?

A GEO company works to get a brand named, mentioned or cited inside AI-generated answers — in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode — rather than ranked on a traditional search engine results page. That is the whole job. In classic search engine optimization, success is a position on a page of links; in AI search the answer comes first and the links sit inside it — an answer that either names your brand and cites your website or does not. GEO is the work of making that inclusion more likely, and of measuring whether it happened.

The term has an unusually precise origin for a digital marketing category: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization is an academic paper, posted to arXiv in November 2023 by Aggarwal and co-authors and accepted at the KDD 2024 conference, which framed the problem as improving "content visibility in generative engine responses". The SEO industry then did what it does with every new acronym: multiplied it. The same work is sold as GEO, AEO (answer engine optimization), AI SEO, LLM optimization and AI visibility. The labels differ more than the work does, and no company should be excluded from your shortlist for picking a different acronym.

Under the label sit two different businesses:

  • Platforms. Software that tracks whether each AI assistant mentions or cites your brand and your website, which competitor holds the citations you want, and how each mention count moves week to week. We went through what these tools measure and how to judge one separately; the question on this page is who sells them. You do the content work; the platform measures it.
  • Agencies. Service companies that restructure your content, entities and technical setup for AI search — usually on top of an existing search engine optimization practice. They do the work; you still need a way to check it moved anything.

The units both kinds of company report are mentions and citations, and they are not the same thing. A mention is your brand named in the answer text; a citation is your website linked as a source for that answer. A vendor that counts mentions but cannot show citations cannot tell you which page earned each mention, or which competitor's website to study when you lose one. An assistant can also name a brand from what it already knows, without fetching a source at all, in which case no page earned the mention and no citation exists to find — which is exactly what our framing tests returned on the conceptual questions. A serious platform reports a mention rate per assistant and shows the URL behind every citation: which website, which page, which passage.

The platform/agency split matters because the two fix different failures. Platforms focus on measurement; agencies focus on execution. If nobody can tell you whether AI answers include your brand, you are missing a platform. If you know you are absent and nobody in-house can act on it, you are missing an agency — or a different content strategy.

Do you need a GEO company, or your existing SEO agency?

You need a dedicated generative engine optimization company when nobody can show you per-assistant evidence — because most of the underlying work still looks like good search engine optimization, but the measurement is new. Before adding a line to the digital marketing budget, it is worth being precise about which part is actually new.

Two columns of identical bars: Same work runs four rows deep — Structure, Entities, Liftable passages, Crawlable site — while New work holds only Measurement and Topic selection, stopping halfway down, with an orange bracket marking those two rows.
Clean structure, real entities, liftable passages and a crawlable site serve traditional search engines and generative engines alike. What is genuinely new is the measurement layer and the topic selection.

The overlap is real. Clean structure, real entities, liftable passages and a website that crawlers can read serve traditional search engines and generative engines alike. Technical SEO has not been replaced: an AI assistant cannot cite a website it cannot fetch, any more than Google can rank one it cannot crawl. The search engine optimization playbook for content structure — headings, clean markup, self-contained passages — is also the generative engine playbook. Rankings and organic search still matter wherever your buyers still type into search engines like Google. An SEO agency that has spent years doing disciplined content and technical work is not suddenly obsolete because the acronym changed.

What is genuinely new is the measurement layer and the topic selection. Classic search engine optimization tools report rankings; they say nothing about AI visibility — whether ChatGPT mentions your brand — and the two turn out to be surprisingly independent: in our matched checks, pages that get cited by assistants are mostly not the pages at the top of the search engine results. And, as the next two sections show, whole families of queries drew no source retrieval in our tracking — a fact no SEO report will ever surface.

Most digital marketing agencies now advertise some AI visibility or GEO service next to their search engine optimization offer, so for a digital marketing team the practical test is not the acronym on the service page. Ask your current SEO agency for per-assistant evidence on your own brand: mentions and citations in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, per week, against named competitors. If they can produce that, the gap may already be covered — a separate generative engine optimization company buys you little. If the answer is an SEO ranking report and a confident tone, the gap is real, and it is a measurement gap before it is a services gap. Search engine optimization earned its budget by being measurable; generative engine optimization will have to earn it the same way.

Which companies work on generative engine optimization today?

Five companies cleared our live check on 4 August 2026: Semrush and Ahrefs (traditional SEO platforms that added AI visibility products), Profound (a dedicated AI search platform), The Digital Elevator (a digital marketing agency), and LiamVi (our own platform). The list is grouped and deliberately unranked — we have not measured these products against each other, and we appear on it ourselves, so read it as a snapshot assembled by one vendor in it, not a league table. The candidates came from our own citation tracking for this query plus platforms we had already verified on an adjacent one — a set derived from citations, not a survey of the market, and it makes no claim to cover it.

Traditional SEO platforms that added AI visibility products:

  • Semrush AI Visibility. The SEO platform's move "from traditional SEO to AI discovery", with a published AI Visibility Index. Its page does not enumerate which surfaces it tracks, so we will not either.
  • Ahrefs Brand Radar. Ahrefs' AI visibility product — "make AI recommend your brand" — tracking brand presence across AI answers plus social media surfaces such as YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, framed as turning SEO into AEO. It names AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity as surfaces.

Dedicated AI search platforms:

  • Profound. A company built for AI search visibility rather than adapted to it. Its house vocabulary is answer engine optimization — answer engine insights, AEO reporting — and it names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews among the surfaces it covers.

Agencies:

  • The Digital Elevator. A digital marketing agency selling productized SEO and AI visibility work — in its own words, "AI visibility, SEO, PR, and marketing products for in-house teams", describing itself as fifteen years of productized SEO built for the AI search era. Method disclosure: this is the agency we verified because our tracking found its website holding one of the citations for this exact query. That is a fact about visibility, not an endorsement of the service — we have not used it.

Us:

  • LiamVi. Our own platform, and the reason this page exists: it measures what AI assistants actually cite, scores draft content on the properties cited pages share, flags topics where no assistant cites anyone, and tracks whether your brand is being cited over time. We are small and new, and we publish our methods and samples so you can judge us with the same questions we suggest below for everyone else.

There are more companies than this — dedicated trackers in particular keep multiplying — but a vendor appears here only if we opened its website on the date above and it claims what we report it claims. That rule did real work on this very page: the list we started from did not survive verification, as the next section shows.

Why do "GEO companies" pages get cited when "what is GEO" pages are not?

Pages that list generative engine optimization companies get cited because in our tests retrieval tracked the shape of the question more than the quality of the website — across five topics on one assistant, market-shaped questions triggered it and concept questions mostly did not. A search engine results page appears whatever you ask; a generative engine decides, question by question, whether to fetch sources at all. Search results and generated answers are less separate than they were: AI Overviews are now a core Google Search feature, so one query can return a page of links and a generated answer together. The retrieval decision is the new variable, and our framing test covered five topics with four framings each, all of them pre-registered before the test ran. None of the conceptual "what is X" framings drew source retrieval on the assistant we measured, while the recommendation-shaped framings — best X, X companies, X in 2026 — drew it consistently. Assistants differ, and some, like Perplexity, cite far more freely than others, but the direction was unambiguous. We publish the method, the samples and the limits.

Two identical answer blocks, one above the other: the block headed GEO companies has a solid blue source strip running beneath it, while the block headed What is GEO has an empty band in exactly the same place, marked by an orange rule.
Our framing test covered five topics with four framings each, all pre-registered before the test ran. On the one assistant we measured, none of the conceptual "what is GEO" framings drew source retrieval, while the recommendation-shaped framings drew it consistently.

Our planning data shows the same split at cluster level. The conceptual generative engine optimization cluster — "what is generative engine optimization", "generative engine optimization strategies" — drew no citations at all in our tracking: assistants answered those questions from memory and cited nobody, so there was no citation to win. The companies cluster did draw them: at our 3 August 2026 check, three sources held AI citations for this query.

Who held them is the most instructive fact on this page. One was arxiv.org — the preprint server hosting the paper that named the field, cited as the primary source it is. One was The Digital Elevator, the SEO and AI visibility agency above. And one was miniloop.ai — a custom-CRM software agency whose website, when we checked it, says nothing about generative engine optimization at all. Its blog is CRM comparisons and pricing guides. We think those comparison-shaped pages are exactly what lifted it into an answer about a market it never claimed to be in — which would be consistent with our other findings: assistants select passages for shape and specificity, not for the website's authority or even, apparently, its category.

The working conclusions, with their limits stated — our dataset is small and early, one assistant dominates it, and we re-measure weekly:

  • Domain size did not decide who holds these citations. In our matched tests — 21 pairs of pages on the same keyword, split by domain authority — the higher-authority page won 11 and lost 10, and the holders above fit that result: a preprint server, a productized agency, a CRM shop. No enterprise brand among them. For any small company in this market, that is the most hopeful measured fact in AI search.
  • Market-shaped pages hold the citations for market queries. A list with named companies, dates and checkable specifics can be quoted; a definition cannot. The mention you want to win sits inside an answer about companies, so the content that earns it has to be about companies.

What to do with this: choose the market-shaped topics before you write. A "what is GEO" explainer can be genuinely good for human readers and still be invisible on the assistants where that question did not trigger retrieval in our tests. That is the first real GEO decision — a content strategy call, not a writing-quality one — and it is the decision this article itself is built on.

How do you choose between generative engine optimization companies?

Choose by asking every candidate questions that have measurable answers. We built our own product around what we chose to measure, so read these six as our view of what matters — not a neutral standard:

A vertical orange dashed rule divides Vendor from AI company; a navy connector leaves Your page, crosses the rule in front of it, runs into a box marked Assistant decides, and continues to a blue chip marked Citation.
Your page sits on the vendor's side of the line; the deciding classifier belongs to the AI company. That is why no generative engine optimization company can promise a citation.
  • Platform or agency — and who does the work? A platform without in-house content capacity to act on it changes nothing; an agency without independent measurement cannot show you what changed. Decide which gap you are filling before comparing prices.
  • Per-assistant numbers, or one blended score? ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews behave differently — our framing tests showed retrieval itself varies by assistant. A single blended visibility score hides which surface you are losing.
  • Do they check whether retrieval even fires for your topics? Our tracking found whole query families where no assistant cited anyone at the time we checked — the answer came from memory. A topic that cites nobody has no citation for anyone to win while that lasts, whatever the invoice says — and whether it lasts is a question about when the assistants change, not a fixed property of the query. Ask how the vendor detects that before it bills for it.
  • Do they publish their method? Any visibility number whose method is secret is an opinion with a dashboard. This applies to us as much as anyone — our methods and samples are public, including the results that contradicted our own assumptions.
  • What do they show you when the answer is unflattering? The honest version of this work regularly returns "your brand was not mentioned anywhere this week". A vendor whose reporting cannot say that plainly is selling reassurance, not measurement.
  • The red flag: a promised citation. Retrieval thresholds move, the assistants change weekly, and the deciding classifier belongs to the AI company, not the GEO vendor. Nobody can promise a citation or a mention — our own editorial rules forbid us from making that promise, and we would apply the same suspicion to anyone who makes it to you.

How fast does this market change?

The generative engine optimization market moves fast enough that any list of companies — this one included — should carry its check date. Our weekly tracking keeps surfacing vendors we had not seen the month before — small trackers and digital agencies alike — and the citation holders for this query are already strange: three websites with almost nothing in common. Meanwhile some generative engine optimization sub-queries drew no citations from anyone at our last check — "generative engine optimization service" had no cited source at all on 3 August 2026, so on that date there was nothing to hold and nothing to win. One query on one date is not a permanent verdict, and we re-run these checks weekly: a query that cites nobody this month can cite somebody next month. The market is in constant development at every layer at once: the vendors, the assistants, the surfaces, and the holders of the citations themselves.

So treat every list of generative engine optimization companies as a dated snapshot. Before you shortlist anyone: open the company's website and confirm it exists and still claims what the list says it claims; ask the six questions above; and check the list's date. We re-run our checks weekly, the dataset grows, and we will publish what changes — including the parts that make this page wrong.

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