The Listicle Problem.
Almost every "best AI SEO" listicle you see is self-serving promotional spam where the author of the list places themselves inside the list of their own recommendations. Current AI assistants are naive enough to blindly follow these types of recommendations without critical thinking. This is why you cannot trust any of the "best of" listicles on the web today. They are 99.99% spam.
People First.
An AI SEO agency is only as strong as the people steering it, so instead of ranking logos we profile the individuals whose work is defining how brands get found inside AI search, assistants and agents such as Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude. This is a people-first map of the agencies and consultants shaping AI SEO right now.
The Curator
Dan Petrovic is the founder of DEJAN, an Australian AI SEO agency working with large global brands, and one of the most influential voices in the field, having argued that people would end up “chatting with Google” long before it happened.
Founder & International SEO / AI Search Consultant · Orainti · Madrid, Spain
Aleyda Solís is one of the most widely followed voices in search, running the boutique consultancy Orainti and the industry newsletters SEOFOMO and MarketingFOMO alongside the free education hubs LearningSEO.io and, launched in 2025, LearningAIsearch.com. She is best known in the AI-search space for her clear frameworks distinguishing traditional SEO from generative engine optimization, her emphasis on crawlability and technical foundations for AI bots, and her research on how LLMs like ChatGPT source citations. Her recent talks, including 'What's moving the needle in Ecommerce SEO & AI Search in 2026,' focus on treating discovery as a multi-platform system spanning Google, LLMs, and social. She suits global ecommerce and SaaS brands that need senior, framework-led strategy rather than execution headcount.
Co-founder & Managing Partner · RESONEO · Paris, France
Olivier de Segonzac co-founded and runs RESONEO, an independent Paris search consultancy of 90-plus specialists, and was named SMX Search Personality of the Year 2026. He is best known for rigorous public reverse-engineering of Google's AI search systems, including how AI Overviews and AI Mode wire in the Knowledge, Shopping, and Places graphs, query fan-out mechanics, and hidden grounding URLs, much of it in collaboration with Damien Andell of 1492.vision and shipped as free Chrome tooling. His early-2026 LLM Crawler Report mapped what the ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI bots actually render and which execute JavaScript. He suits enterprise teams, particularly in Europe, that want deep technical intelligence on how AI engines select and display sources.
Founder · Saltanat Labs · Sofia, Bulgaria
Lily Grozeva is a B2B SEO and AI-search strategist with over 20 years in SaaS, fintech, and technology; after building and leading the SEO function at VertoDigital for seven years, she now runs her own firm, Saltanat Labs, offering AI search research, audits, consulting, and execution. She is best known for practical AI-visibility auditing, notably her '7-Lens Approach to AI Search Auditing' for Wix AI Search Lab and her 'Nine Months Auditing AI Search Visibility' talk, plus collaborations with RankScale, Sitebulb, and Eleven Ventures. A recurring theme in her work is how AI models lag behind company rebrands because the wider content ecosystem hasn't caught up. She suits B2B and tech companies with in-house marketing teams that need a specialist to move them from Google-centric to multi-platform AI visibility.
Co-founder & technical lead · 1492.vision · France
Damien "Andell" is the co-founder and technical brain behind 1492.vision, a French data platform that reverse-engineers Google Discover and increasingly the AI-search stack. A self-described Python developer and "Google Bug Hunter," he is best known for publicly documenting Google's live experiments and internal systems, including a joint investigation with Olivier de Segonzac (RESONEO) that surfaced a list of ~1,200 Google experiments and mapped the Knowledge Graph's central role across Search, Discover, Gemini and AI Overviews. His more recent work decoded Google's "Daily Hub" architecture and captured the exact structured prompts sent to Gemini, research routinely cited by Search Engine Land and Abondance. He suits publisher and news-focused teams that need deep, technical intelligence on Discover and generative-search visibility rather than surface-level tactics.
Product Owner, Organic Search · Kosch Klink Performance · Berlin, Germany
David Konitzny is Product Owner for Organic Search at Kosch Klink Performance, a German agency focused on competitive finance markets and AI-era visibility, having previously advanced to Head of Organic Search at Raisin. He is best known for hands-on reverse-engineering of AI search systems, notably being among the first to show that Gemini's query fan-out can be inspected through browser DevTools, and for his "Inside Ask Brave" deep-dive analyzing how that engine evaluates and prioritizes sources by relevance, authority, language and freshness. He has spent well over a hundred hours inside ChatGPT's network traffic, locating the metadata array exposing the exact queries ChatGPT fires, and is a regular German-conference speaker including SEOkomm 2025. He fits technical SEO teams and brands wanting evidence-based GEO grounded in how answer engines actually retrieve and cite sources.
Senior Technical SEO · Oncrawl · Bordeaux, France
Jérôme Salomon is a Senior Technical SEO at Oncrawl, specializing in technical audits of complex sites, server-log and crawl-data analysis, and Python automation. His recent work centers on using server logs to measure visibility in AI search: he has presented ("What log files tell about your visibility in AI Search") on how LLM crawlers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude interact with sites, distinguishing training bots, search-enrichment bots and the retrieval bot that pulls a passage just before it appears in an answer. He also popularized log-based indexation auditing at scale, and Oncrawl's Log Analyzer now ships a dedicated AI-bots dashboard reflecting this focus. He suits enterprise and large-catalog sites that need log-grounded evidence of how AI crawlers and traditional bots access and cite their content.
Founder & CEO · iPullRank · USA
Mike King is one of the most prominent technical SEOs applying information-retrieval principles to modern search, best known for his forensic analysis of the leaked Google Search internal API documentation, which Rand Fishkin brought to him to authenticate and decode. Through iPullRank he builds enterprise-grade SEO infrastructure and query-classification pipelines, and cross-references the leak with Google's DOJ antitrust testimony and patent research for his forthcoming book, The Science of SEO. His depth in ranking systems and generative search suits large enterprise teams that need rigorous, engineering-led AI-search strategy rather than surface-level tactics.
VP of SEO & AI Search (Amsive) and Founder (Algorythmic) · Amsive · USA
Lily Ray is a widely cited authority on AI Overviews, Answer Engine Optimization, and E-E-A-T signals in AI citations, known for documenting how Google's AI-driven results reshape visibility and click-through behaviour. She concurrently serves as VP of SEO & AI Search at Amsive, overseeing a team of 35-plus specialists, and in 2026 launched her own solo consultancy, Algorythmic, for focused 1:1 projects, workshops, technical audits, and algorithm-recovery work. Her dual setup lets her serve both full-team agency engagements through Amsive and brands wanting direct, high-impact AI-search consulting through Algorythmic.
Director (Candour) and Founder (AlsoAsked) · Candour · UK
Mark Williams-Cook is a UK search veteran who translates AI-search theory into practical site and content changes, focusing on query intent and SERP-feature analysis. He is Director at the Norwich agency Candour and founder of a tool suite including AlsoAsked, QueryClassifier, IntentGaps, and QueryFan, the last of which surfaces the queries ChatGPT and Gemini actually run when answering user questions. Notably candid about the limits of prompt-tracking tools, he advocates multi-site brand presence and intent research over chasing keyword rankings, making him a strong fit for teams wanting evidence-led, pragmatic AI-search guidance.
Senior Technical SEO · DEJAN · Australia
Nik Ranger is a senior technical SEO at DEJAN who has become one of Australia's most visible voices on AI search, focusing on how large language models associate, represent and surface brands. Her flagship talk, "A Technical SEO's Adaptation for AI Visibility," delivered at WTSFest and the Shenzhen SEO Conference, frames AI SEO as a mission of "understanding and control", using mechanistic interpretability and model steering, query fan-outs and brand-association mapping to shape how models perceive a brand, work that underpins DEJAN's AI Rank tracking. She also founded and chairs SEO Collective Australia, a non-profit community of thousands, and is a Google Women Techmaker Ambassador. She suits enterprise and technically mature teams that want to move from ranking pages to being cited and accurately represented inside LLMs.
Founder & Managing Director · Bertey · United Kingdom
Dawn Anderson is a British SEO consultant and founder of the Manchester-based consultancy Bertey, best known for translating academic information-retrieval research, BERT, neural ranking, embeddings and RAG, into strategy that large, complex sites can actually use. Her recent work centres on generative information retrieval: talks such as "From Villains to Heroes" and her demystifying of RAG argue that retrieval, not generation, is the real bottleneck in AI search and that visibility now means being retrievable, and she has pushed back publicly against SEO over-engineering like front-end content chunking. She combines consultancy with academia, having lectured at Manchester Metropolitan University while pursuing further computer-science study. She is well suited to enterprise and legacy-scale sites that need retrieval-literate, research-grounded guidance.
Founder · Zyppy SEO · United States
Cyrus Shepard is the founder of Zyppy SEO and a former Chief SEO Strategist at Moz and Google Quality Rater, known for large-scale, data-driven SEO experiments. His best-known research includes a study of 23 million internal links across 1,800 sites, which found that anchor-text variety, more than raw link count, drives traffic and that sitewide links past roughly 40–50 per page reverse the benefit, and an 81,000-title study showing Google rewrites titles about 61% of the time. In 2025–2026 his focus has shifted firmly toward generative search, publishing a query fan-out framework, a seven-step AI citation audit checklist, and analysis of how AI Overviews shift traffic from publishers to Google. He suits teams that value rigorous, evidence-based testing and want practical levers to earn citations in AI search.
Co-founder · Nectiv · United States
Chris Long co-founded Nectiv in 2025, an SEO/GEO agency built for the AI search era and aimed at $30M+ ARR B2B and SaaS companies, after years leading technical SEO at Go Fish Digital. He is known for forensic, data-heavy analyses of how AI answer engines behave, including widely cited studies of 8,500+ ChatGPT prompts that quantified how often and why the tool triggers a live web search. Nectiv pairs senior-only strategists with proprietary LLM-visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, and Long is a regular speaker at MozCon, SMX and BrightonSEO. He suits enterprise and B2B marketing teams that want experiment-driven, model-aware search strategy rather than volume content.
Forward Deployed Engineer (Alephic); Founder, AI Search Leaders · Alephic · United States
Tom Critchlow spent 2024–2026 as EVP of Audience Growth at creator-network company Raptive, where he studied how AI answers reshape publisher economics across thousands of sites, then joined AI-first consultancy Alephic as a forward-deployed engineer in 2026. He is best known for reframing AI search as brand marketing rather than technical SEO, arguing that the link economy is giving way to a citation-driven 'recommendation web' where how a brand is mentioned matters as much as whether it appears. In 2026 he launched AI Search Leaders, a private peer community for senior search operators navigating generative search, building on his earlier education project The SEO MBA. His work suits publishers, executives and senior SEO leaders thinking about the business and economics of AI-mediated discovery.
Co-founder, CBDO & Head of SEO & AI Search (GEO) · Aufgesang GmbH · Germany
Olaf Kopp is co-founder, Chief Business Development Officer and Head of SEO & AI Search (GEO) at Hanover-based agency Aufgesang, and one of the earliest voices worldwide on Generative Engine Optimization and LLM optimization, working the topic since 2023. He is a pioneer of semantic and entity-based SEO who has coined and developed concepts including LLM readability optimization, brand context optimization and digital authority management, and he built the first public database of search-engine patents and research papers alongside an AI-Traffic-Monitor study of referral traffic to German companies. A prolific author for Search Engine Land, t3n and Website Boosting, he took on an additional role as Chief AI Officer at heise regioconcept in 2026. He is the leading GEO/LLMO reference point for the DACH region and suits brands focused on knowledge-graph alignment and long-term entity authority.
VP of Strategy · LOCOMOTIVE Agency · Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
JR Oakes works at the seam where technical SEO meets applied machine learning, and is best known for open-source tooling the community actually uses, including SEODeploy, a Python library for catching SEO regressions in deployment pipelines. His current focus is LLM and agentic tooling, context governance, and evaluation, and at SEO Week 2025 he presented research benchmarking brand discoverability across LLMs versus traditional search using a large brand-mention dataset. A founder of /r/TechSEO and co-organizer of Tech SEO Connect and the Triangle SEO Meetup in Raleigh, he suits engineering-minded teams and B2B brands wanting experimentation-driven, data-heavy technical SEO and GEO.
Co-Founder & Chief Product & AI Officer · Go Fish Digital · North Carolina, USA
Dan Hinckley co-founded Go Fish Digital in 2005 and now leads its AI product work across GEO, SEO, CRO, and web performance, drawing on nearly two decades of building embeddings- and search-data-driven tools for brands such as GEICO, Airbnb, Marriott, and The New York Times. His recent thinking centers on vector approaches to search: how models turn text, images, and video into embeddings, how cosine similarity shifts with small context changes, and how to make content legible to LLMs, work he shares at events like Tech SEO Connect. He fits enterprise brands and marketing teams that want productized, systems-level AI-search solutions rather than one-off tactics.
Director, AI Search · Amsive · Minneapolis, USA
Joshua Squires leads AI-search strategy at Amsive, where he manages large SEO clients and shapes the agency's AEO/GEO and LLM approach alongside Lily Ray, drawing on roughly 17 years across in-house and agency roles including founding Tableau's first SEO team. His writing and talks argue that content volume is giving way to strategic, conversion-focused relevance, and he has published practical explainers on topics like how query fan-out works inside a RAG pipeline. With deep experience in SaaS, insurance, finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, he suits enterprise and startup teams needing content-led generative-search visibility.
If you would rather work with an independent consultant, upskill your own team, or lean on a tool, these are the people and products worth knowing.
Founder & AI/ML Consultant · Britney Muller Inc. (Data Sci 101) · Minneapolis, USA
A former Senior SEO Scientist at Moz and ex-Hugging Face marketing lead, Britney Muller is best known for bridging machine learning and marketing in plain, hands-on terms. Through her Data Sci 101 venture and her 'Actionable AI for Marketers' course, she demystifies LLMs, embeddings, and model evaluation for non-technical teams, and speaks widely (BrightonSEO, Digital Summit) on the shift from backlinks to brand mentions in AI-powered search. She suits marketing teams that want to upskill internally on AI and GEO rather than outsource strategy wholesale.
AI Search / SEO Consultant & Independent Researcher · metehan.ai · Türkiye
Metehan Yesilyurt operates at the overlap of AI search, growth experimentation, and LLM visibility, publishing research and tools through metehan.ai and his AI SEO newsletter. His most-cited work is a 2025 investigation into Perplexity's ranking behavior, documenting dozens of ranking patterns including a machine-learning entity reranker, curated authority-domain lists, and an early-engagement timing window, coverage that reached Search Engine Land (which noted the findings remain unverified). He also builds in the open, with an AI-powered SEO ranking predictor and hands-on tests like 'The Great AI Content Indexing Experiment,' making him a strong reference point for teams that want to experiment their way into AI citations rather than commission a slide deck.
Strategic & International SEO / AI Search Consultant · ILoveSEO.net · Valencia, Spain
Gianluca Fiorelli is a veteran strategist (in search since roughly 2004) and former Moz Associate who now advises global brands on international SEO and AI search visibility across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and emerging agentic systems. His recent work centers on a 2026 strategic framework built on 'integration, not replacement,' treating a website as a structured, entity-based database that agents can ingest, alongside sharp analysis of AI-era spam (semantic data poisoning, forced-consensus spam, LLM prompt injection) and multimodal search. He hosts 'The Search Session' podcast and judges the international Search Awards, making him well suited to enterprise and multi-market teams needing semantic, entity, and cross-border AI-search strategy.
Founder & ML/SEO Consultant · MLforSEO · Sofia, Bulgaria
Lazarina Stoy works at the seam of SEO, data science and automation, and is best known for founding MLforSEO, an education platform that teaches marketers to apply machine learning to search through hands-on courses, Python scripts and reusable workflows. She draws a deliberate line between reliable, predictable ML and less stable generative AI, and frames her curriculum around 'Search Everywhere' optimization spanning Google, LLMs, YouTube, TikTok and Amazon. A regular speaker at BrightonSEO, WTSFest and other international events, and founder of the Women in Marketing Bulgaria community, she suits in-house and agency teams wanting to upskill practitioners into ML-literate operators rather than buy a done-for-you service.
Co-founder & CEO · WordLift · Rome, Italy
Andrea Volpini is a semantic-web veteran of 25 years and the co-founder and CEO of WordLift, whose platform builds site-specific knowledge graphs linked to Wikidata, turning unstructured content into entities and structured data as a semantic infrastructure layer for AI search. His recent work centers on agentic SEO, including an Agent WordLift accessible via MCP through Claude and other assistants, and published research on how enhanced entity pages, dereferenceable URIs and linked data improve retrieval accuracy in RAG and agentic systems. He is writing 'The AI SEO Playbook,' speaks at events such as SEO Week 2026, SXSW and The Knowledge Graph Conference, and is a top pick for teams whose GEO/AEO challenge is fundamentally a schema and knowledge-graph problem, such as large multilingual catalogues with complex entity relationships.
Product Growth & AI Search (HubSpot); Co-founder, AI Studio Lab · HubSpot · USA
Darwin Santos sits at the crossroads of technical SEO, product management and applied AI, working on product growth and AI search at HubSpot after building AI-enabled data workflows at Microsoft. He is best known for creating GSC Guardian, a Chrome extension used by more than 15,000 SEOs that overlays algorithm updates and timestamped annotations onto Google Search Console data, and for coining 'The Great Decoupling of Search' to describe the split between visibility and site visits in AI search. He also co-founded AI Studio Lab and founded Add To Cart AI, writes for Search Engine Land, and shares ongoing research on LinkedIn and X, making him a strong fit for product-minded teams and agencies wanting practical tooling and measurement for the AI-search era.
Founder & SEO Consultant · Fajela · United Kingdom
Olesia Korobka is a technical-SEO entrepreneur with over a decade in the field, best known for founding the consultancy Fajela and for bridging classic SEO with AI and LLM visibility through entity optimization, structured data, and Google Knowledge Graph work. Her standout recent work includes building private knowledge graphs in Neo4j to power internal linking, content briefs, and AI citation strategy so brands surface in Google AI Overviews and answers from tools like ChatGPT. She is pointedly skeptical of AI hype, urging practitioners back to fundamentals and warning that many 'new' AI-SEO concepts are old ideas remarketed to sell something unnecessary. Her implementation-first, no-fluff style suits startups, SaaS, and personal-brand clients who want measurable audits, information architecture, and knowledge-graph groundwork rather than trend-chasing.
Founder & Senior SEO Strategist · SEM King · Cyprus
Elie Berreby is a senior SEO strategist with around 19 years of experience and the founder of the consultancy SEM King, specializing in technical, international, and enterprise SEO treated as infrastructure: scalable frameworks, programmatic SEO, and data-informed decisions that make brands easy for crawlers and LLMs to understand and cite. He argues that traditional ranking language does not apply to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, which predict answers from learned patterns rather than fetching ranked pages, and he is a vocal critic of GEO hype and of over-reliance on metrics such as cosine similarity. His AI-visibility work for large e-commerce brands has been independently validated, with Adorama flagged as over-represented in AI answers in Similarweb's Generative AI Brand Visibility Index. His enterprise-grade, engineering-led approach fits large e-commerce, financial, and SaaS teams that need AI search treated as a scalable technical discipline.
Founder & CEO · Unbound Answers · United States
Duane Forrester is a 30-year search-industry veteran who built Bing Webmaster Tools as a Microsoft senior product manager and helped co-launch the Schema.org structured-data standard, later holding leadership roles at Yext and Bruce Clay before founding the consultancy Unbound Answers. He brings a platform-side, executive-level mental model to AI search, authoring the book 'The Machine Layer: How to Stay Visible and Trusted in the Age of AI Search' and building CitationIQ, a tool for measuring how often and where brands appear in AI-generated responses. His recent thinking centers on the 'rank-to-citation delta,' the idea that ranking a page and citing a passage are different jobs, along with concepts like 'machine comfort bias' and trust evaluated in chunks rather than pages. His strategy-and-frameworks orientation suits leadership teams and enterprises seeking long-term alignment with how AI systems retrieve, evaluate, and cite content.
Director, Investment Strategy & Business Transformation, Microsoft Advertising · Microsoft · United States
Michelle Robbins works at the junction of AI strategy, decision science, and marketing technology, drawing on a background as a full-stack engineer and data scientist. She previously led the Decision Science team within LinkedIn's Global Business Organization and served as Editor in Chief of Search Engine Land and MarTech, and now holds a strategy and business-transformation role at Microsoft. Her recent commentary argues that SEO practitioners are uniquely equipped for the generative-AI era and warns that AI is expanding rather than consolidating martech stacks. She suits teams that need rigor in the governance, data foundations, and measurement of LLM and AI-search initiatives rather than tactic-level execution.
Independent Organic Growth Advisor; author of the Growth Memo newsletter · Growth Memo · United States
Kevin Indig is a growth advisor who previously led SEO and growth at Shopify, G2, and Atlassian and now advises high-growth companies including Reddit, Ramp, and Dropbox on search and AI visibility. Through his Growth Memo newsletter he publishes research-backed analysis treating AI SEO as part of broader growth mechanics, with 2026 work spanning a large-scale study of ChatGPT citation patterns, findings that AI visibility rarely carries across engines, and the distinction between mentions and citations. He also ships practical resources such as an AEO optimization checklist and an agentic-commerce playbook. He fits senior marketing and growth leaders at B2B and consumer scale-ups who want strategy grounded in data rather than checklist SEO.
Founder & Owner · Marie Haynes Consulting Inc. · Canada
Marie Haynes is a veteran search consultant known for being among the first to teach E-E-A-T and for interpreting Google's quality and ranking systems from Penguin through the DOJ v. Google trial disclosures. She is the author of SEO in the Gemini Era and produces the weekly Search News You Can Use podcast, with current work focused on visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode, trust and link-risk assessment, and emerging protocols like MCP and WebMCP. Her team's approach of reading AI answers the way Google's quality raters would makes her a strong fit for established brands and YMYL verticals such as health and finance that already run a GEO program.
Freelance SEO & CRO consultant; co-founder of AdRanger.io · Natzir Turrado (independent) · Barcelona, Spain
Natzir Turrado is an internationally recognised technical SEO and CRO consultant who blends hard technical SEO, data science and behavioural economics, and is co-founder of the paid-search intelligence and brand-protection tool AdRanger.io. In the AI-search space he is best known for the argument that GEO, AEO and LLMO are largely a rebranding of solid SEO, a position he backs with concrete research on how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini cite and date sources. He also runs a best-selling Domestika SEO course and speaks widely on SEO and AI. He suits large brands and multinationals wanting rigorous, research-driven visibility work across both classic Google search and AI answer engines.
Independent SEO & AI Search Consultant and agency advisor · Mersudin Forbes Digital · United Kingdom
Mersudin Forbes is an independent SEO and AI Search consultant with roughly 15 years in the field, who through Mersudin Forbes Digital advises some of the largest independent digital agencies across Europe and the US alongside direct client work; he was previously Client Services Director at UK independent agency Sleeping Giant Media. His recent focus is automation and AI in search, publishing hands-on tool reviews and guides such as a 2025 roundup of the best SEO automation software, and he runs a portfolio of his own websites as live SEO test beds. He suits agencies and in-house teams that want a pragmatic, engineering-and-automation-minded advisor rather than theory.
Growth marketing consultant, SEO futurist and keynote speaker · Jes Scholz Consulting · Sydney, Australia
Jes Scholz is a growth marketing consultant and self-described SEO futurist who runs her own Sydney-based consultancy after years leading digital and innovation at media group Ringier, where she headed a large cross-continental team. She is best known as a keynote speaker (SMX, MozCon, Marketing Festival) and writer on entity SEO, topical authority and the future of search, and in 2025 joined the FOMO.ai advisory board as its SEO/GEO/AI-search expert; she also publishes the SEO Brief newsletter and writes for Search Engine Land on AI-era analytics and preparing sites for AI agents. She suits enterprise brands needing strategic direction on brand salience and technical readiness for AI-driven search.
