By
Austin Coker
Reading time: 15 min
Last updated: September 23, 2026
This page ranks the best GEO agencies for ecommerce brands in 2026. GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of getting your products named and cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Below you’ll find the five criteria we measured every agency against, pricing side by side, and what changes when the buyer is a shopper comparing products rather than a B2B buyer comparing vendors.
Everything here was reviewed on September 23, 2026:
Prices an agency doesn’t publish are labeled as estimates. Claims from an agency’s own case studies or platform are labeled self-reported. We re-review this page and update the date when figures change.
The same five criteria were applied to every agency here, including us.
Nearly every agency added GEO to its menu in the last two years. We looked for a published result where a brand became a cited recommendation inside an AI answer, with a date and a business outcome attached. Traffic charts don’t count.
Shoppers prompt differently from B2B buyers. They ask about price bands, ingredients, materials, sizing, occasions and alternatives to a brand they already know. An agency that has only done SaaS GEO will learn your category on your budget.
Getting cited in a product answer takes work on collection and product pages, structured data, review content and third-party coverage in the publications AI engines pull from. Agencies without in-house PR usually can’t do the off-site half.
Published pricing lets you qualify an agency before a sales call. Minimum terms and notice periods matter when your Q4 reallocates the budget.
Citation counts and share of voice are diagnostics. We gave credit to agencies that report against non-branded organic revenue, new-customer revenue, contribution margin and MER.
About this ranking: 95 Projects publishes this page and ranks itself first. We held our own work to the same five criteria. We rank first because we’re the only agency on this list with a dated ecommerce AI search result tied to revenue on a named client, alongside published pricing. Several agencies here are better choices in specific situations, which is why they top parts of the use-case table below. Verify our claims the same way you’d verify theirs.
Buoy, a hydration drops brand on Shopify, went from no presence in AI answers to the #1 ChatGPT recommendation for its category-defining buyer queries in three weeks, with attributable revenue in month one. Across the same catalog, organic revenue rose 1,200% over twelve months.
That combination is the point. AI citations moved quickly because the underlying catalog work was done properly, and the same pages that earned the citations earned organic rankings.
Other results across consumer catalogs:
The working method runs in three phases, and the sequence matters more than the labels.
First, citation surface. We audit where the brand does and doesn’t appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini for the prompts your buyers actually use, then build the comparison, ingredient, occasion and alternative-to content those answers can cite. This is where the first 30 to 60 days go.
Second, catalog and content depth. Once AI engines have something to cite, the same content compounds in organic rankings on collection and product pages.
Third, paid acceleration. Meta, Google Shopping, TikTok and Amazon run against topical clusters that already convert, at a known cost per acquisition, instead of paying to acquire customers the brand could earn organically.
Digital PR runs in-house rather than through a link vendor, which is what makes the off-site half of GEO possible. The founder sits on every account, senior strategists carry capped account loads, and we take a small number of new engagements each quarter.
$5,000 to $20,000 per month, published. Scope depends on catalog size, how many categories you want to own, and how much third-party coverage has to be built from scratch.
Ecommerce and DTC brands at $1M to $50M that want AI-sourced revenue and can name the categories they want to own.
NoGood has the strongest measurement infrastructure on this list. CEO Mostafa ElBermawy publicly coined “AEO” at SXSW in 2023, and the agency’s Goodie platform, launched in January 2025, tracks visibility across 11 or more AI engines. Critically for ecommerce, that includes Amazon Rufus, so brands with meaningful marketplace revenue can see both surfaces in one view.
Published Goodie case studies include Dermalogica at +127% AI conversions, SteelSeries at 3.2x AI search conversions over six months, and Rathbones at +106% AI citations. Several are self-published.
Not published. Industry reporting puts retainers at $15,000 to $25,000 per month, with directories listing a $50,000+ minimum project.
Funded consumer brands with marketplace revenue and budget for top-of-market retainers.
Eric Siu’s agency has put real public weight behind GEO, publishing methodology work and framing its offer as “search everywhere optimization.” It runs SEO, PPC, content and GEO together, which is the right shape for this problem, and it holds 4.8 on Clutch across 12 reviews. Named clients include Amazon, Uber, Salesforce and Nextiva.
The trade-off is category depth. Single Grain is a multi-vertical generalist, so you’ll be supplying the ecommerce context: how your margins work, what your AOV supports, and how your catalog is structured.
Not published. Clutch lists a $10,000 minimum, with engagements running $10,000 to $50,000+ per month.
Brands wanting one partner across paid and organic, with GEO included rather than bolted on.
CTC is the agency to call when the real problem is that nobody can say what your media is returning. The whole practice is built on forecasting, contribution-margin reporting and incrementality testing, with a single “Prophit Engineer” owning forecast, media and creative rather than splitting them across pods.
It sits fourth on a GEO list for one reason: as of September 2026, its service menu covers growth strategy, Meta ad buying, Google ad buying, ad creative and incrementality, with no dedicated GEO or AEO service. You’d hire CTC for measurement rigor and solve AI visibility elsewhere.
Published. Seven-figure brands run $5,000 to $15,000 per month, eight-figure brands $15,000 to $50,000. PE Lite, for sub-seven-figure brands, is $1,500 onboarding plus $500 per month, month to month.
DTC brands whose paid program needs financial discipline, with GEO handled by a second partner.
Inflow is ecommerce-focused and structured differently from most: clients work directly with senior specialists, with no account manager layer. It covers SEO, PPC including Google Shopping and Amazon Advertising, paid social and CRO, and it holds Google Premier Partner, Meta Business Partner and Buy With Prime Agency Partner status.
Its Clutch profile shows 4.9 across 12 reviews, with a $1,000 minimum project and $150 to $199 per hour. Third-party reviews cite monthly pricing starting around $3,500 to $4,000, the most accessible on this list.
GEO is the gap. AI search isn’t a documented standalone service line, so treat Inflow as strong ecommerce search fundamentals rather than a dedicated AI visibility practice.
From about $3,500 to $4,000 per month, with a $1,000 minimum project and $150 to $199 hourly.
Brands just past $1M that need ecommerce search fundamentals before investing in a dedicated GEO program.
Pilothouse, founded in Victoria, BC in 2019, is built for creative volume. It has in-house media buyers across Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon and YouTube, plus teams producing UGC, ad creative and email and SMS design. Clients include Benchmade, Hestan Culinary, Big Blanket Co, Chamberlain Coffee and General Mills.
For GEO, it’s a weak fit. Third-party reviewers report AI search is not a current focus, and SEO and content are not core. It earns its place here as the paid-social partner many brands on this list are actually shopping for.
Not published. Third-party estimates put base retainers at $10,000 to $25,000+ per month, sometimes with a hybrid structure tied to revenue or ad spend.
Paid-social-led brands that need creative throughput, with AI visibility handled elsewhere.
Power Digital, founded in San Diego in 2012, is the largest agency here and runs on its proprietary nova platform. It covers SEO, content, paid, social, programmatic and CTV, PR, influencer, email and SMS, CRO, retail marketing and creative. Named clients include Honest, Bob’s Red Mill, Casper and MyFitnessPal, so the consumer and CPG experience is real, and the retail marketing capability matters if you’re moving into wholesale.
As of April 2026, independent reviewers noted AI search optimization is not documented as a distinct service line.
Not published. Clutch lists a $5,000 minimum project and $100 to $149 per hour. Omnichannel engagements are custom-quoted and scale with channel count and media spend.
Brands at the top of the $50M range consolidating DTC, Amazon and retail with one vendor.
A search results page gives a shopper ten options and a set of ads. An AI answer gives three or four products with a line of reasoning on each. Brands outside that set aren’t ranked lower, they’re absent.
The behavior is now mainstream. According to Alchemer’s 2026 Retail Report, 48.5% of shoppers used an AI tool to research a purchase in the past year, and 21.8% do it often enough to call it a habit. Almost 23% now reach for an LLM like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, putting those tools close to social media and review sites as research channels. Trust lags well behind usage, with only 35.4% of shoppers saying they trust AI recommendations completely or mostly.
That gap between usage and trust is the opportunity. Shoppers use AI to build the shortlist, then verify it elsewhere. Brands that appear in the shortlist and hold up under verification win twice.
Nobody types “running shoes.” They type a price ceiling, a use case, a material, an ingredient, a sizing problem or a brand they want an alternative to. Every one of those constraints is a page that either exists on your site or doesn’t. The catalog pages that win AI citations are the ones that name the constraint in the shopper’s words and answer it in the first paragraph.
Engines cite what they can verify, and shoppers check what engines tell them. Ingredients and materials with quantities, sizing and fit detail, care instructions, certifications and third-party testing, shipping and returns terms: this is the content that gets quoted into an answer and survives a second look.
Gartner’s research shows why accuracy is a brand problem rather than a platform problem. In a survey of 846 US consumers run from November through December 2025, 54% of shoppers who used AI for a recent purchase said they had to double-check every piece of information the tool gave them, and 62% said the information ended up wasting their time. Gartner’s Kate Muhl frames accuracy as a brand issue: if AI shopping tools create more work by forcing verification of every recommendation, consumers stop finding them valuable, which puts the burden on marketers to publish transparent, reliable detail on price, product fit and recommendations.
The same research explains where GEO pays off. In a January 2026 survey of 322 US consumers, willingness to let AI actually make the purchase decision peaked at 11%, even in low-stakes categories like personal care and household supplies, while 31% were happy to let AI narrow the choices for household supplies and 28% for personal electronics. Muhl’s summary is that consumers want AI to find better information, compare prices, surface deals and narrow the field, while keeping the final call themselves.
For a brand, that means the fight is over the shortlist, not the checkout. A product page written as marketing copy gives an engine nothing to repeat and gives a verifying shopper nothing to confirm.
In a category with ten credible brands, corroboration breaks the tie. Editorial roundups, review sites, community threads and publications your buyers already read are what an engine leans on when deciding which three names to give. That’s why digital PR belongs inside a GEO program rather than next to it.
If Amazon is a meaningful share of revenue, Rufus is answering the same shopper questions inside the marketplace. The inputs overlap with your DTC work: specific attributes, clear titles, review volume and quality. Brands treating these as one program get compounding returns; brands treating them as two get neither.
Shoppers who get a recommendation in an assistant often arrive as direct or branded traffic later, so last-click reporting undercounts the channel. Add an AI assistant option to your post-purchase “how did you hear about us” survey, and read it alongside branded search volume. Imperfect attribution you act on beats a clean report measuring the wrong thing.
A ranked list is useful, but the right agency depends on what you’re trying to fix this year. Where another agency is the better fit, we say so.
Only 95 Projects and Common Thread Collective publish pricing. The main cost drivers are catalog size, how many categories you want cited, and how much third-party coverage has to be earned from scratch, since off-site work is the most labor-intensive part.
For most brands at $1M to $50M, an agency is the right call for the first 12 to 18 months. Three reasons: the methodology is still moving fast and an agency sees patterns across accounts before an in-house hire will; the tracking and attribution tooling has a real learning curve; and citation authority builds faster with a focused push than with one fractional hire.
After that, the strongest setup is usually an in-house owner with the agency in a consulting or audit role. By then you have the playbooks, the citation surface and the reporting. The marginal value of agency execution falls, and the value of someone embedded in the business rises.
If shoppers in your category are asking an assistant what to buy and your products aren’t among the names that come back, that’s fixable and measurable. We took a hydration brand from invisible to the #1 ChatGPT recommendation in three weeks, with revenue attributed in month one.
Book a call with 95 Projects. We’ll look at the prompts your buyers are running, what the assistants return today, and what it would take to get your products named. Pricing is published at $5,000 to $20,000 per month.
Beyond GEO, here are the integrated services 95 Projects runs for ecommerce brands:
Have questions about working with us? Book a 30-minute strategy call to discuss your goals and see if we’re a good fit.
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GEO is the work of getting your products named and cited when a shopper asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google AI Overviews what to buy. In practice that means collection and product pages written against real shopper prompts, product facts an engine can quote, and third-party coverage in the sources those engines pull from.
SEO competes for a position on a results page. GEO competes for a place on a short list of three or four products inside one answer. The work overlaps because engines draw on search results, so the same pages often do both jobs. GEO puts more weight on verifiable product facts and off-site corroboration.
It depends on category competitiveness, your existing content footprint and how fast pages ship. AI visibility can move faster than organic rankings: Buoy reached #1 on ChatGPT in three weeks with revenue attributed in month one. Any agency promising a specific date is guessing.
No, and nobody can. What an agency can commit to is the scope, the pages and coverage produced, the tracking, and reporting against revenue. Treat a guarantee as a reason to walk.
Yes, and Rufus is why. Marketplace AI answers draw on attributes, titles, reviews and off-site mentions, much of which overlaps with the DTC work. Brands running both surfaces as one program get compounding returns.
Add an AI assistant option to your post-purchase survey, track branded search volume and direct traffic alongside it, and watch non-branded organic revenue by page type. Channel reports alone will undercount it.
Budget by scope, not by picking a band. Catalog size, the number of categories you want cited and the amount of off-site coverage needed drive the number. Pricing on this list runs from about $3,500 to $50,000 per month.
