By
Austin Coker
Reading time: 15 min
Last updated: September 22, 2026
A hiring manager with three open roles asks ChatGPT which recruitment agency to use, gets three or four firm names back, and starts the conversation with one of them. Either your firm is in that answer or your competitors are. There’s no page two to fight over. And because recruiters get paid on placements, a BD pipeline that goes quiet for a quarter shows up directly in billings.
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of getting your firm named and cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews when someone describes the hire they need. This page ranks the best GEO agencies for recruitment agencies in 2026. It also shows the five criteria we measured every agency against, compares pricing side by side, and explains what changes when the buyer is an employer with job orders rather than a typical B2B buyer.
Everything on this page was reviewed on September 21, 2026. Our sources:
Prices an agency doesn’t publish are labeled as estimates wherever they appear. Claims that come from a press release or an agency’s own case study are labeled self-reported. When a price, review count or case study figure changes, we re-review the page and update the date at the top.
We applied the same five criteria to every agency on this list, including our own.
Recruitment buys differently from software. Fee structures, terms of business and the difference between contingent and retained work all shape what your pages need to say. An agency that has never worked a recruitment account will be learning your commercial model on your retainer.
The strongest proof is a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT or Perplexity right now, with an enquiry or revenue outcome attached. Screenshots without prompts can’t be verified. And traffic charts without a business result don’t tell you whether the enquiries were actual job orders from employers.
Hiring managers don’t prompt for “recruitment agency.” They prompt for the role, the sector and the city. That takes a page per role and per specialism, plus supporting coverage on HR and industry publications so assistants have something to cite besides your own site. Agencies without in-house digital PR usually can’t deliver that second half.
Published pricing lets you qualify an agency in five minutes. Notice periods and minimum terms matter more in recruitment than in most sectors, because desk performance moves fast and you may need to reallocate spend mid-year.
Reviews on third-party platforms, award recognition and industry coverage carry more weight than a syndicated press release or a self-published case study. Where an agency’s proof comes only from its own announcements, we say so.
About this ranking: 95 Projects publishes this page and ranks itself first. We judged our own work against the same five criteria as everyone else. We rank first because we’re the only agency on this list with a named recruitment client, closed revenue attributed to AI assistant referrals, and the exact prompts published so you can run them yourself.
Constant Hire closed more than $70,000 in new business from ChatGPT-referred leads in four months, tracked on their side. That matters because it’s revenue from employer clients, not just traffic.
Constant Hire places creative strategists, TikTok Shop managers, media buyers and ecommerce marketing specialists into DTC brands. Its prospects had started asking ChatGPT which recruitment agency to use, and the assistant returned three or four names. Competitors were in the answer. Constant Hire wasn’t.
The fix was structural, in three parts:
Outside recruitment, another client went from zero visibility to the #1 ChatGPT recommendation for its category queries in three weeks, with attributable revenue in month one. Onrec, a recruitment industry publisher, also ranked 95 Projects first in its May 22, 2026 list of the best SEO agencies for recruitment companies.
On delivery, the founder sits on every account. Senior strategists carry capped account loads, and we take on only a small number of new engagements each quarter to keep it that way. Digital PR is in-house rather than subcontracted, which is what makes the off-site half of GEO possible.
$5,000 to $20,000 per month, published on the site.
Recruitment, staffing and executive search firms that want AI-sourced job orders and can name the roles or specialisms they want to own.
Algomizer is an AI search agency working across GEO and AEO, and its commercial model is the main reason to look at it:
Performance-triggered. Fee percentages and thresholds aren’t published, so get them in writing before you sign.
Recruitment firms that want the agency to carry the risk and are comfortable negotiating how “visibility” and “incremental business” are defined.
Go Up runs a dedicated recruitment practice for recruiters, headhunters and executive search firms, which gives it more sector fluency than most generalists. The agency is based in London, with a Los Angeles office per a third-party listing, and has been operating for over a decade.
Its services now include AI SEO, GEO and AEO, alongside a genuinely strong digital PR capability. That PR work is the part that feeds assistant citations.
Its published recruitment case study reports a 210% increase in organic traffic in the first 12 months. That’s organic search, not AI search, so treat it as evidence that the team can execute, not proof that it can win AI assistant recommendations. Its awards include:
Bespoke. A February 2026 third-party comparison of London agencies estimates £3,000 to £10,000+ per month. Contracts carry two working months’ notice.
UK recruitment and executive search firms that want digital PR and GEO handled by a team that already knows the sector.
NoGood is a New York growth agency with an early claim to this category. CEO Mostafa ElBermawy publicly coined the term “AEO” at SXSW in 2023, and in January 2025 the agency launched its Goodie AEO platform, which tracks visibility across 11+ AI engines.
Goodie case studies include:
Several of those are self-published.
The platform is the draw. If you run multiple desks across several markets and need to see where you appear across engines, not just in one, NoGood’s tracking is more developed than most.
Not published. Industry reporting puts retainers at $15,000 to $25,000 per month, and directory listings show a $50,000+ minimum project size. Both are estimates.
Large staffing groups with top-of-market budgets that want engine-by-engine tracking built into the engagement.
Siege Media was founded in 2012 and is based in Austin. It now positions itself as a full-service GEO agency, covering:
Its measurement is among the most rigorous on this list. Siege reports LLM share of voice, citations per asset, AI-referral traffic and branded search lift. It also has 4.9 on Clutch across 48 reviews.
A $5,000 minimum and $100 to $149 per hour, with retainers reported at about $8,000 to $20,000 per month as of June 2026. Twelve-month commitments are common.
Recruitment firms that need content across many specialisms and want measurement they can audit.
Directive built its reputation on a B2B “Customer Generation” methodology that ties spend to pipeline and revenue, with reporting built for CFOs. AEO and GEO sit inside that model, so AI visibility is reported next to paid media and pipeline rather than in a separate deck. For a managing director who already runs paid search and wants one number instead of two reports, that’s the appeal.
Directive has 4.8 on Clutch across 56 reviews, the most on this list. Its most common project cost is listed at $10,000 to $49,000.
A published Startup Package at $6,500 per month.
Larger recruitment firms already spending on paid media that want AI visibility folded into their existing revenue reporting.
Kaizen SEO is a UK recruitment SEO specialist, and its published price list is the most transparent on this page. AI visibility across Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity is included in its SEO retainers rather than sold as a separate GEO practice, which sets expectations correctly. For a small desk testing whether AI-sourced enquiries are real before committing budget, it has the lowest entry price here by a wide margin.
Small UK recruitment desks with one or two specialisms and a limited monthly budget.
Most GEO advice is written for software companies. Recruitment changes the mechanics in ways that affect what an agency should actually build.
Search gives you ten blue links, paid placements and a second page. An assistant gives a hiring manager a short list of three or four recruiters, with a sentence on each, and there is no position eleven. Constant Hire’s prospects were running exactly that kind of prompt and getting competitor names. The list felt complete to them, and Constant Hire wasn’t on it.
Nobody types “recruitment agency.” They type the hire: a TikTok Shop manager for a DTC brand, a creative strategist, a media buyer. A page saying the firm recruits across multiple sectors matches none of those prompts, because it gives the assistant nothing specific to match against. Constant Hire’s program built one page per role, written in the exact phrasing of the prompt, with FAQs answering the follow-up questions a hiring manager would ask next.
A prompt for, say, an interim finance lead at a PE-backed manufacturer has far fewer credible answers than a prompt for a generalist recruiter. Fewer firms compete for it, the specificity makes matching easier, and a single retained assignment carries a large fee. That makes specialism pages for retained work some of the highest-return pages a search firm can build.
Assistants look for corroboration. When they recommend a service provider, they lean on HR publications, industry press and directories rather than your own marketing copy. The Princeton-led GEO research presented at KDD 2024 found that optimization methods lifted visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%. Adding citations, quotations and statistics did the most work of any tactic tested.
That’s why the Constant Hire program paired role pages with guest posts on HR and ecommerce publications and placements on career and marketing sites. On its own, the on-site half would have stalled.
Assistants summarize what they can find. If your site clearly states the basics of how you work, the assistant has something concrete to put in its summary:
Firms that hide all of this behind a contact form give the assistant nothing to say beyond the company name.
Placement revenue depends on the speed of the BD cycle, not just the volume of enquiries. Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey found that 94% of business buyers now use AI somewhere in the buying process. Twice as many named generative AI and conversational search as a more meaningful source than any other channel.
Constant Hire saw the practical version of that. Its leads arrived already knowing the specialisms, the model and the fit, so the first conversation was about the job order rather than about credentials.
Assistants cross-reference sources. Your firm name, trading name, locations, specialisms and contact details need to match across your site, LinkedIn, Companies House or state registration records, Clutch, and any directories you appear in. Mismatched details make it harder for an assistant to identify your firm as a single entity, and it’s less likely to name a firm it isn’t sure about.
The right agency depends on what you’re trying to fix. Here’s where each one wins.
GEO pricing on this list runs from £1,495 per month at the entry level to a reported $25,000 per month at the top. The main cost drivers are how much digital PR is included and how many pages get produced, since off-site coverage is the most labor-intensive part of the work. Where an agency doesn’t publish a price, the figure above comes from third-party reporting, so confirm it in writing before you commit.
If hiring managers in your sector ask an assistant which recruiter to use and your firm isn’t among the three or four names that come back, that’s a fixable problem with a measurable outcome. We fixed it for a recruitment agency, and it turned into more than $70,000 in closed business in four months. Read the full Constant Hire case study.
Book a strategy call with 95 Projects below. We’ll look at the prompts your buyers are running, what the assistants currently return, and what it would take to get your firm named. Pricing is published at $5,000 to $20,000 per month, so you’ll know before the call whether we’re in your range.
Have questions about working with us? Book a 30-minute strategy call to discuss your goals and see if we’re a good fit.
No-pressure conversation
Clear next steps (if we’re a fit)
Talk directly to an expert
GEO is the work of getting your firm named and cited when a hiring manager asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google AI Overviews which recruiter to use for a specific role. In practice, that means role and specialism pages written against real prompts, plus third-party coverage on HR and industry publications that assistants can cite when they build the short list.
SEO competes for a position on a page of results. GEO competes for a spot on a short list of three or four firms inside a single answer. The page work overlaps, which is why Constant Hire’s role pages earned ChatGPT recommendations and page-one Google positions at the same time. But GEO puts far more weight on off-site citations, and on stating your terms of business clearly enough for an assistant to summarize them.
Constant Hire closed more than $70,000 in new business from ChatGPT-referred leads within four months. In a separate, non-recruitment engagement, we took a client from zero to the top ChatGPT recommendation for its category queries in three weeks, with attributable revenue in month one. Timelines depend on how competitive the specialism is and how much third-party coverage already exists for your firm.
Algomizer describes a model that works this way: the fee starts after a visibility threshold is met, or is based on a share of the incremental new business from AI discovery. Get the definitions in writing first, specifically how visibility is measured, which AI engines count, and how AI-sourced business is attributed.
For the roles you actually want job orders for, yes. Hiring managers prompt by role, sector, seniority and location, and a page covering several sectors at once matches none of those prompts well. Constant Hire ran one page per role, each with comprehensive FAQs, rather than one broad services page.
Often it works better. Retained search prompts are more specific, fewer firms are credible answers, and a single assignment carries a large fee. The trade-off is lower prompt volume, so measure success in assignments won rather than the number of enquiries.
Budget by scope rather than picking a price band. The main cost drivers are how many roles and specialisms you want to own and how much third-party coverage you need to build from scratch. Pricing on this list runs from £1,495 per month at the low end to a reported $25,000 per month at the top. A firm with two specialisms and existing press coverage needs a fraction of what a multi-desk group entering a new market does.
Ask for the prompts, and run them yourself in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ask whether the outcome was traffic, enquiries or closed fees, and who tracked it. Check whether the proof comes from independent reviews and industry coverage, or only from the agency’s own press releases and case studies. Apply the same checks to us, which is why the Constant Hire prompts are published.
