Top 44 SEO Agencies in AI Answers — August 2026

Three agencies occupy the top rank tied at 9% named mentions: First Page Sage, Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, and WebFX. First Page Sage achieves prominence almost entirely through Perplexity, which names it on 27.5% of prompts compared to negligible mentions from other engines; it cites no sources from its own domain. Thrive Internet Marketing Agency spreads its mentions more evenly, with Perplexity at 17.5%, Google AI Overview at 15.4%, and Google Gemini at 11.1%; it too cites its own domain at 0%, though thriveagency.com appears as the third most-cited source overall. WebFX performs best on its own domain with 5.8% citations and strong showings on Claude (15%), Grok (22.5%), and Google AI Overview (12.8%), though it also records one negative mention.

Victorious ranks fourth at 8.3% named mentions despite carrying two negative mentions and citing its own domain never. It appears strongest on Grok (17.5%), Google Gemini (8.3%), and Perplexity (15%), but draws zero citations from victoriousseo.com. Ignite Visibility and Searchbloom tie at 5.1% named mentions; Ignite Visibility splits its presence across engines with Perplexity and Claude each at 7.5%, while Searchbloom concentrates on Google AI Overview (12.8%) and Perplexity (10%), backed by minimal citations from ignitevisibility.com. Below these, Focus Digital (3.8%), Funnel Boost Media (3.8%), and Directive (3.2%) form a small group where brand presence begins to fragment. Directive shows extreme engine divergence: absent from Google Gemini but appearing on Grok at 27.5%, one of the highest single-engine concentrations in the ranking.

Breaking B2B (1.9%), NisonCo (1.9%), OuterBox (1.9%), Straight North (1.9%), SEO Brand (0.6%), and Single Grain (0.6%) comprise a tail where individual engine selections become highly visible. OuterBox achieves 4.4% citations from its own domain despite 1.9% named mentions, the highest domain-citation rate among agencies below the top tier. Straight North records 1.9% citations from straightnorth.com to match its named mention rate. All six of these agencies appear in isolated engine selections: Breaking B2B reaches its best position at rank 1 on one engine but appears nowhere on three others. From ranks 16 through 44, 29 agencies record exactly 0% named mentions across all 235 answers. These include established names like Accelerate Agency, Brafton, Conductor, Digital Silk, Distilled, and KlientBoost, as well as Metric Theory, Portent (which carries one negative mention), Revenue River, Searchmetrics, and Wpromote. The absence is complete and consistent: no engine names them, and none cite their own domains.

KlientBoost represents a singular anomaly in the 0% named group: despite being named on 0% of prompts, it receives 0.6% citations from klientboost.com, indicating its domain was linked as a source in the single instance where no brand recommendation occurred. Portent similarly appears only as one negative mention on Grok. The remaining 27 agencies in this tier leave no trace in the data: Casjay, Element Three, G2 Hill, HubShout, Markitors, Optmyzr, Searchmetrics, SeoClarity, SERPhouse, Siteimprove, SparkPost, Station Two, ThinkSEM, Titan Growth, WSI, and Zazzle Media each register 0% across all engines and all metrics.

The six engines show radically different recommendation breadth and concentration. Claude named 12 distinct brands with WebFX leading at 15%, while ChatGPT named only 4 brands and tops out at WebFX again with 2.5%, making it the most concentrated recommender. Perplexity named 14 distinct brands (the most of any engine) but showed extreme concentration on First Page Sage at 27.5%; this represents the largest single-engine divergence from the overall average. Google Gemini and Google AI Overview each named 9 to 10 brands with less dramatic peaks: Google Gemini's highest is Thrive at 11.1% and Google AI Overview's is also Thrive at 15.4%. Grok named only 7 brands but created two violent spikes: Directive at 27.5% and Portent at 12.5% (as a negative mention), both of which barely register elsewhere.

Citation patterns diverge sharply by engine. Google AI Overview cites vendors' own domains most frequently at 0.9% of answers, followed by Perplexity at 0.7%, Google Gemini at 0.3%, and Claude at 0.2%. ChatGPT cites vendors' own domains at 0%, and Grok returns no citations at all. Across all engines, 84.5% of citations pointed to third-party sites: reddit.com led with 50 citations, clutch.co appeared in 42, and external review and comparison sites dominated the recommendation context. The most-cited vendor domains were thriveagency.com (37 citations), firstpagesage.com (31), coalitiontechnologies.com (21), and outerboxdesign.com (16), but even these appeared overwhelmingly as supporting sources within third-party pages rather than as standalone recommendations.