Which SEO agencies does AI recommend? AI Visibility Index, September 2026
We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews 20 buyer questions about SEO agencies, five times each. Searchbloom was cited most, in 29% of answers. Only 9 of 41 agencies were cited by all three engines.
This is the first issue of the AI Visibility Index: a public measurement of which brands AI engines cite when buyers ask for a recommendation.
It starts with the category that should know best. If anyone has solved being cited by AI, it ought to be the people who sell that service.
Twenty fixed buyer questions, asked of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, five times each. 300 answers, 276 measurable. Every question is published, and the method is frozen between runs, so when a number moves it means something.
Which SEO agencies does AI recommend most?
Searchbloom was cited most, in 81 of 276 answers (29%). First Page Sage (25%), Loopex Digital (25%), 6S Marketers (24%) and Thrive Internet Marketing Agency (22%) complete the top five. 41 agencies were cited at least once.
| # | Agency | All engines | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Searchbloom | 29% | 10% | 50% | 28% |
| 2 | First Page Sage | 25% | 0% | 60% | 12% |
| 3 | Loopex Digital | 25% | 13% | 55% | 0% |
| 4 | 6S Marketers | 24% | 0% | 55% | 16% |
| 5 | Thrive Internet Marketing Agency | 22% | 1% | 45% | 20% |
| 6 | SEO.com | 21% | 4% | 50% | 5% |
| 7 | SEOProfy | 20% | 0% | 50% | 7% |
| 8 | WebTonic | 17% | 0% | 40% | 9% |
| 9 | Siege Media | 16% | 3% | 40% | 0% |
| 10 | One Little Web | 15% | 1% | 35% | 8% |
The full table of all 41 agencies, with counts per engine and a CSV download: citeagent.ai/ai-visibility-index/seo-agencies/us/2026-09.
The index publishes who was cited. It does not publish zeros.
Do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews agree?
No. Only 9 of the 41 agencies were cited by all three engines.
Perplexity's most cited was First Page Sage, in 60 of 100 answers. Google's was OuterBox, in 24 of 76. ChatGPT's were Marketing LTB and Tiny Lever Marketing, in 14 of 100 each.
And the gap that matters most: across the same 20 questions, ChatGPT linked to agency websites 140 times. Perplexity did it 930 times. Six and a half times more.
A lot of what ChatGPT linked instead was "best SEO agencies for X" list articles, written by somebody else.
What this means for agencies
One or two big names could have owned this category. None do. The top agency appears in about 3 of 10 answers, and the spot is still open.
That ChatGPT number is the one I keep thinking about. SEO isn't dead. AI reads the same web Google does. But it doesn't rank pages, it picks sources, and a lot of the time the source it picks for you isn't you.
The people who do this for a living are cited in under a third of answers. Most of their clients probably haven't checked at all. That's a conversation worth having.
How the AI Visibility Index is measured
Five samples per question, because the same question asked three times in a row returned three different lists. One answer tells you nothing. Better to publish something slower and true.
An agency counts as cited only when an engine links its own domain or its exact official social profiles. A directory listing it does not count as the agency. No question contains a brand name. The metric is defined in full at AI Citation Rate.
Google showed no AI Overview for 24 of the 300 answers. Those are excluded from every rate rather than counted as zero. An answer that never existed is not the same as not being cited.
Next month asks the same 20 questions of the same three engines. If a number moves, it moved. The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link back.
What comes next
A new category every week, and each one measured again every month from there. This is the first issue, so there is nothing yet to compare it against. October's SEO agency numbers will be the first that can move.
To get each issue when it publishes, subscribe to The AI Visibility Index on LinkedIn.
Rakesh Yadav, founder of citeagent.ai