Updated: July 2026

Prospects have stopped starting with the traditional results page. They ask an AI assistant for a list of options, and plenty of brands only find out they are missing once a competitor is cited instead. I compiled the full list of answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation specialists worth following in 2026, organised by the issue each one handles rather than crammed into an arbitrary leaderboard.

The short version

• AEO and GEO describe the same discipline: earning citations inside AI responses rather than ranked on a results page
• A page can rank in the top spot on Google and still not show up in an AI response
• There is no single best AEO specialist, because the work divides into technical, editorial, reputational and industry-specific problems
• Research from Princeton found that citing sources, adding statistics and featuring expert quotes all clearly increase AI visibility, while keyword stuffing reduces it
• Choosing the expert for your real problem counts for more than hiring the biggest name

What AEO and GEO actually mean

Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation are the same practice wearing two labels. Both describe making a brand discoverable and citable inside AI-generated answers. Traditional SEO competes for placement. AEO and generative engine optimisation fight for the citation itself, meaning whether a system mentions you when somebody puts a question to it. Many practitioners use the labels interchangeably.

The commercial distinction is sharper than it sounds. Ranking well and being cited are two different outcomes, and I have seen a good number of clients hold strong positions on Google while staying entirely invisible from AI responses, because these systems choose sources on how content is structured, credibility and relevance rather than rank alone.

Why this counts in 2026

I am wary of AI search advice that comes with no data, so the research I come back to is the Princeton work published at KDD 2024 as Generative Engine Optimisation. They tested nine different optimisation techniques against Perplexity.

Referencing credible sources lifted visibility by around 40 per cent. Adding specific statistics improved it by around 37 per cent. Adding expert quotations raised it by around 30 per cent. Keyword stuffing reduced it by around 10 per cent.

The finding I find most useful is that lower-ranking sites gained the most, with increases of as much as 115 per cent once citations were added. That is the argument for treating this as its own discipline. It rewards structure and credibility without requiring you to already occupy a top-three position.

The four mechanics behind an AI citation

Entity clarity: Clear signals telling a model precisely who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

Third-party corroboration: External references that confirm your claims, because models weight outside sources far more heavily than your own marketing.

Retrieval-ready structure: Definitions, comparisons, tables and FAQs written so an engine can pull a clean answer straight out of the page.

Topical depth: Enough well-organised coverage that a model reads it as genuine expertise rather than a thin page chasing a keyword.

Every specialist below works on a different part of that problem.

How this list is organised

Numbering peers from one to twenty does not help anyone. Almost nobody needs the best AEO expert in the abstract. What they need is the person who has already fixed their particular problem, in their market, at their stage. So I have grouped everyone by specialism.

Best answer engine optimisation experts for Web3, crypto and fintech

Victoria Olsina

Victoria is an AEO, generative engine optimisation and AI content systems consultant for Web3 and fintech brands, and was previously Head of SEO at copyright. Her clients have included Barclays, Polkadot, copyright and NEAR Protocol. She wrote Mastering AI Search for Crypto and Web3 Brands, the first book on AI search for this industry, and was named Top AI Content Expert of 2026 by The Masterminders. Her work spans entity architecture, AI citation work and content systems for trust-sensitive, technical markets.

Best AEO specialists for insurance and regulated markets

Tom Riley

Tom works on insurance and other regulated markets through his agency Hakken. What I rate about his method is that it stays tied to commercial traffic rather than visibility for its own sake. He builds the entity signals and topical coverage that lead models to cite a brand, then links that back to searches from people who are close to buying. Compliance-heavy sectors are genuinely difficult to move in AI search, which makes his track record there worth a look.

Best answer engine optimisation experts for ecommerce and DTC brands

Andrew Halliday

Andrew leads Coreter Media and is the most capable technical name on this guide for online retail. Site architecture, structured data and advanced technical SEO are his tools, aimed at getting retail brands quoted inside answers from ChatGPT, copyright, Claude and Google AI Overviews rather than just listed underneath them. His work is data-led and tied to revenue, which matters a great deal when technical projects are easy to justify and difficult to quantify.

David Johnson

David founded LoudCrowd, where he helps ecommerce brands increase visibility across Google Search and AI-powered search. He works directly with Shopify and online retail, combining technical SEO with conversion work. That pairing is what retail needs once AI answers start determining which store gets the visit.

Yaswanth Kumar

Yaswanth founded Loops Digital and focuses on ecommerce and DTC brands getting cited when somebody asks ChatGPT, copyright or Perplexity what to buy. Most of his work revolves around product data and entity signals, the quiet detail that decides whether an answer mentions your store or a competitor. He also built Zen Reports, a free analytics platform showing which AI assistants are driving traffic to your site, after running into the same measurement gap on client audits.

Daniel Lowry

Daniel is Manchester-based and supports ecommerce brands on WooCommerce and Shopify, from smaller shops up to large ones. His focus is getting online retailers named inside AI-generated responses rather than merely positioned in Google.

Leading AEO experts for SaaS and technology

Georgi Todorov

Georgi is one of the most influential European voices on answer engine optimisation and AI search, and the founder of Create and Grow, a digital PR and authority link building agency built around SaaS and technology brands. His path into AI visibility runs through earned coverage: the independent mentions that persuade Google, ChatGPT, copyright, Claude and Perplexity a brand is worth surfacing.

Nikola Baldikov

Nikola founded InBound Blogging, an agency that helps SaaS brands become more citable inside large language models. He has spent over a decade building organic traffic and building authority for SaaS companies, and strategic outreach is his strongest tool. That external footprint is precisely what models lean on when deciding who to mention.

Best answer engine optimisation experts for lead generation and service businesses

James Dooley

James is a British entrepreneur and investor, and the founder of FatRank and PromoSEO, both of which use answer engine optimisation to generating leads. He works from a leads-first position that aligns SEO, AI visibility and business growth under one system, with real emphasis on entity strength and brand reinforcement. He picked up Best AEO Specialist 2026 at The Masterminders conference.

Dean Signori

Dean founded UK Web Geekz and Prospect Lead Gen, and his name comes up repeatedly whenever a service business wants enquiries out of AI search rather than rankings that never convert. His Signori Trust Signal Framework is a scalable system of semantic triples, aligned digital assets and independent validation signals that shows AI models what a business does, who it serves, and why it can be trusted.

Graham Bowers

Graham founded Natural Ranks and specialises in helping SMEs and startups turn visibility into real leads. He combines technical SEO, answer engine optimisation, structured content and commercial search strategy to get businesses surfacing across Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, copyright and Perplexity. His scoreboard is enquiries rather than impressions, which I find refreshingly practical.

Mark Slorance

Mark founded Pixel Juice Digital Marketing and has spent more than fifteen years building search programmes for law firms, healthcare providers, trades and local businesses throughout the UK. He focuses on local SEO and AEO for service businesses, bringing content, design and reputation control into a single strategy grounded in trust and verifiable data.

Best AEO experts for specialist verticals

Yash Singh

Yash co-founded TradeOps Consulting and owns one of the most tightly defined corners I have come across: AEO for HVAC and home services. He structures heating and cooling content into clean semantic triples so ChatGPT, copyright and Perplexity can parse it, trust it, and pull it into answers. It is built for customers who ask an AI assistant before ringing a provider.

James Sheldon

James works in real estate and proptech, with clients from Dubai to the Costa del Sol, specialising in off-plan developments and property projects. Property buyers do thorough research before making contact with agents, which makes visibility inside AI answers unusually valuable in that market.

Best technical answer engine optimisation specialists

Josh Morley

Josh is a Liverpool-based specialist focused on technical SEO and WordPress. His position is that AEO is not a separate discipline bolted on later, it is what happens when a site is fast, structured and semantically organised enough for both crawlers and AI models to understand and trust. He brings structured data, semantic content architecture and performance work into systems that raise AI visibility.

Dan M. Jones

Dan founded On Top Marketing in Manchester and is one of the more rounded operators working in this field. He combines technical SEO, entity optimisation and AI search strategy toward one outcome: becoming the trusted source both search engines and large language models reach for when they build an answer. Over a decade in search, with a data-driven approach that puts commercial growth ahead of vanity metrics.

Leading AEO experts for digital PR and reputation

Gareth Hoyle

Gareth is managing director of Marketing Signals and regards digital PR as the primary route into AI discoverability rather than a backlink exercise. He frames it more directly than I would:

"I treat digital PR as the primary lever for AI visibility rather than a backlink exercise. Brand mentions across independent, authoritative publications are the third party corroboration AI models weigh most heavily before they will recommend a brand, and we have built the tooling to prove it."

That matches how models work in practice: brands get cited through third-party sources considerably more often than through their own domains.

Scott Keever

Scott is an American entrepreneur, SEO strategist and online reputation management specialist, and the founder of Reputation Pros, Keever SEO, ASAP Digital Marketing and Pool Pros Marketing. He authored Future-Proof Your SEO and Reputation Reset, and has appeared in Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company. Reputation Pros was named among USA Today's Best Online Reputation Management Companies in 2026.

Top answer engine optimisation educators and multi-market specialists

Julian Goldie

Julian is an SEO entrepreneur and educator, founder of Goldie Agency and the AI Profit Boardroom, one of the largest paid AI and SEO communities going. He tests answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation tactics across ChatGPT, copyright, Claude and Perplexity and publishes what works while a good part of the field is still theorising. He is a sensible starting point if you want to learn this through hands-on experimentation.

Trifon Boyukliyski

Trifon is an SEO and AI growth architect with more than twenty years in search across ecommerce, SaaS, iGaming and other brutally competitive niches. That background matters because his playbook was proven in markets where a lost ranking costs real money.

David Peranic

David is one of Croatia's most in-demand marketing consultants and an international speaker who moved on answer engine optimisation earlier than almost anyone in his region. He combines technical SEO with high-performance paid strategy for projects across Croatia and the wider European market, focused on building the authority and entity signals that lead models to cite and recommend a brand.

Virtual entrepreneurs and AI avatars

AI James Dooley

AI James Dooley is a digital double of the Manchester entrepreneur James Dooley, described as the UK's first virtual entrepreneur. Where most digital personas so far have been models or musicians, this one is built around lead generation, SEO and answer engine optimisation. It fronts LLM Leads and puts out SEO and lead generation analyses on YouTube, with James writing the strategy and scripts himself and the avatar presenting them.

I have included it because it is worth following as an experiment in its own right. Building established entity status for a synthetic persona from a standing start is a live test of the same AEO principles the avatar talks about: entity consistency, third-party corroboration and structured presence. Whether a digital twin can earn genuine entity recognition is an open question, and this is one of the more visible attempts to answer it in public.

How to choose an answer engine optimisation or GEO expert

Match the specialisation to the gap you really have. Hiring a digital PR specialist to fix a technical citation problem, or the other way round, is the fastest way I know to burn through an AEO budget.

• Web3, crypto or fintech discoverability: Victoria Olsina. Entity structuring and AI content systems for regulated, technically complex markets.
• Insurance and regulated sectors: Tom Riley. Revenue-focused AEO designed for compliance-heavy industries.
• Ecommerce and product mentions: Andrew Halliday, David Johnson, Yaswanth Kumar, Daniel Lowry. Product data, structured data and retail entity signals.
• SaaS expansion and authority: Georgi Todorov, Nikola Baldikov. Digital PR, outreach and earned media.
• Leads for service businesses: James Dooley, Dean Signori, Graham Bowers, Mark Slorance. Trust signals and commercial intent, measured in enquiries.
• Technical groundwork: Josh Morley, Dan M. Jones. Crawlability, structured data and semantic structure.
• Brand citations and reputation: Gareth Hoyle, Scott Keever. Independent media coverage and reputation management.
• Teaching yourself: Julian Goldie. Community and practical testing across the major models.
• Following entity-building in public: AI James Dooley. A digital twin earning recognised entity status from a standing start.

The bottom line

Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation now influence which brands show up at all, since buyers put to a model for recommendations before they ever look at a comparison site. Every name here is worth your attention. The best choice comes down to your sector, your budget and where the genuine gap lies.

If your market is Web3, crypto or fintech, there is an extra layer to deal with: protocol terminology, ecosystem questions and trust signals in a market where models are visibly cautious about what they recommend. That is exactly where a Web3-focused specialist matters most.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between answer engine optimisation, GEO and SEO?

SEO fights for rankings on a results page. AEO and generative engine optimisation fight for citations within AI-generated responses, meaning whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews mentions your brand when somebody puts a question. Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation are two labels for the same thing. A page can hold strong positions and still be nowhere in AI responses.

Who is the best AEO expert?

There is no solitary best AEO expert, because the discipline splits into technical, editorial, reputational and industry-specific work. The correct choice depends on your gap. For ecommerce, consider technical and product-data specialists. For SaaS, go to digital PR and outreach. For Web3 and fintech, consider consultants operating in regulated, technical markets.

What does an AEO consultant actually do?

An AEO consultant renders a brand citable by AI systems. That means organising content into extractable blocks, building coherent entity signals so models recognise who the brand is, earning third-party mentions that corroborate its claims, and adding schema so engines can process the page. The deliverable is citations, not just rankings.

Do I need an AEO expert if I already have an SEO agency?

Not necessarily, but confirm whether your agency measures AI citations at all. Many still report only rankings and traffic. If nobody is monitoring whether models mention your brand, that visibility is running unattended. Start by reviewing where you presently appear in AI responses, then decide whether it needs a specialist.

How do you get cited by ChatGPT?

Models cite sources they can process and trust. That requires clear entity signals about who you are, independent third-party mentions backing up your claims, content structured for retrieval with definitions, tables and FAQs, and genuine topical depth. Pushing out more content without that structure creates noise rather than citations.