The best AEO and GEO agencies, judged on what they publish

How lists like this are actually compiled

Search best AEO agencies and you will find a page of ranked lists. We read the ones ranking on the first page in September 2026. Every single one was published by an agency that also appears on it, usually at or near the top, and in at least one case the agency's own "top pick" was itself.

This is not a scandal and it is not unusual. The commercial logic is obvious: a list ranking for a high-intent commercial query is an excellent way to sell agency services, and the agency writing it has no incentive to place a rival first. But it does mean the genre is close to worthless as neutral advice, and readers rarely notice because the conflict is almost never stated.

We could not write a neutral version of this page either. What we could do is change what is being measured. Everything below is a fact you can verify on the agency's own site in a few minutes, not a score we assigned. Where an agency publishes something, we say so and link it. Where it does not, we note the absence without treating it as a failing, because plenty of excellent firms do not publish research and plenty of poor ones do.

The six criteria, published first

Stated before the names, so you can disagree with the criteria rather than the conclusion.

• 1. Is the method public? Can you read how they work before a sales call, in enough detail to evaluate it, or is the method a trademarked name with a contact form attached?
• 2. Is there original research? Has the firm published data it gathered itself, with a sample size, rather than recycling figures from other agencies' blog posts?
• 3. Are clients named? Named case studies with the client identified, versus anonymous outcomes or a logo wall.
• 4. Is pricing public? Any real number before you enter a sales process — a starting retainer, a diagnostic fee, a range.
• 5. Are the limits stated? Does the firm say anywhere what it cannot do, or is everything upside? In a field where nobody controls what a model says, silence on limits is informative.
• 6. Is there a correction record? Anyone publishing for a year has been wrong. A public corrections log is rare and tells you how errors get handled.

Criteria one, two and three favour firms that publish. Four, five and six are unusual enough that almost nobody passes them, which is itself the finding.

The agencies, assessed

Listed alphabetically, not ranked. Every statement is taken from the agency's own site, checked September 2026, and linked at the foot of the page. Where something is described as their claim, that is because it is their claim rather than something we verified independently.

Other firms appearing repeatedly across the lists we read, which we have not assessed here because we did not verify them directly: Omniscient Digital, SimpleTiger, Marcel Digital, NP Digital, Hamster Garage, NoGood, Qoulomb and Lil Big Things. Their absence from the assessed section means we did not check them, not that we judged them.

Where we sit, on the same criteria

The thing none of them publish

Five agencies assessed, five with no pricing anywhere on the site. That is not evidence of anything sinister; agency work is genuinely variable and most firms quote after scoping. But it has a consequence worth naming: a buyer cannot compare cost across this field without entering five separate sales processes. We publish ours — $2,000 a month, three month minimum — which makes us the only firm on this page you can price without a call, and also the cheapest, a fact the pricing page explains rather than boasts about.

Figures do circulate. One of the ranked lists we read puts AEO retainers between $2,500 and $25,000 per month, with most B2B SaaS programmes at $5,000 to $10,000. We are repeating that as a published claim from a competitor's list rather than as a verified benchmark, because we have not seen the underlying data and neither has anyone else.

Treat any figure of that kind — including that one — as an anchor someone chose, until a source shows its working. That is the same standard we ask you to hold us to.

Run this assessment yourself

Ten minutes per agency, no list required.

• Search their site for a methodology page. If the method is a trademarked name and a contact form, you have learned something.
• Look for a number they gathered. Any study with a stated sample size. Then check whether the sample size is actually stated, because often it is not.
• Check whether clients are named, and whether the case study says what it is not claiming.
• Search the site for "we cannot" or "we do not". A firm with nothing it declines to promise, in a field where nobody controls the output, is telling you something.
• Look for a corrections page. Almost nobody has one. It takes seconds to check.
• Ask for the crawler audit before signing. If the first deliverable is a content calendar rather than an access check, the engagement may be measuring work rather than results.

Apply those six to us as readily as to anyone else. We fail one of them outright.

Questions people actually ask

Related reading

• Answer engine optimization: what the work actually is
• GEO is an entity problem, not a content problem
• The metrics, with formulas and sample sizes
• Our one named client, and what a correction cost it
• Our own corrections log
• A worked example of a statistic nobody can source
• The statistics behind this category, traced
• What a regulated vertical actually requires

Sources

Each agency assessed from its own website, checked September 2026. Descriptions reflect what each firm states about itself.

• Kalicube. Entity and Google Knowledge Panel work; the Kalicube Process; Kalicube Pro.
• iPullRank. Enterprise AI search; Relevance Engineering and Resonance Design; AI Search Manual and the Rank Report.
• Minuttia. AI search visibility study across 24,067 prompts and five platforms; named client case studies.
• Siege Media. GEO positioning; prompt and citation research; published data studies.
• First Page Sage. SEO and GEO for lead generation; stated position on contracts and KPI reporting.
• Hamster Garage. Answer engine optimization agency guide. Source of the circulating $2,500–$25,000 monthly retainer range, quoted here as a competitor's published claim rather than a verified benchmark.