Ten UK agencies currently hold the first page of Google for “generative engine optimisation agency”. This is a ranked list of them, judged on one measurable thing: how often AI systems cite the agency’s own website.
That criterion is narrow and it does not prove who does the best client work. It is stated up front, applied to everyone equally. You can check every number yourself. Which is more than the existing lists offer.
If you are earlier in the decision than picking a supplier, buying AI search work covers the prices, the tools that do the same job yourself and whether to spend on any of it.
Why the existing lists are worthless
Four of the ten results on this query are lists of GEO agencies. Two of them are UK lists that rank the field. Both put their own publisher in first place.
Buried Agency’s “Top 12 GEO agencies in the UK” scores each entry out of 30 across GEO expertise, strategy, technical depth, thought leadership and UK market fit. Buried scores 29 out of 30 and is number one. Passion Digital’s “The 8 Best Generative Engine Optimisation Agencies in the UK” names Passion Digital as “best overall GEO agency in the UK”, at number one, on stated criteria with no comparative scoring behind them.
Neither is dishonest. Both are transparent about who wrote them. But a ranking where the author wins is a brochure with a table in it.
So here is a different test.
The test
Every agency here sells AI visibility. The obvious question is whether they have any.
The measure is Ahrefs’ AI citation index (site-explorer-ai-responses-count), queried on 10 August 2026 with mode=subdomains and no country filter. It counts the citation links pointing at a domain across the AI answers Ahrefs samples, split by platform. One method, one date, applied to all ten.
The table
| # | Agency | ChatGPT | Perplexity | AI Overviews | Gemini | Copilot | Grok | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Team Lewis | 92 | 85 | 141 | 56 | 30 | 34 | 438 |
| 2 | Impression | 18 | 37 | 35 | 11 | 12 | 30 | 143 |
| 3 | Reboot Online | 17 | 33 | 23 | 10 | 2 | 43 | 128 |
| 4 | MarGen | 30 | 2 | 24 | 11 | 1 | 0 | 68 |
| 5 | Catalyst | 14 | 10 | 16 | 8 | 0 | 3 | 51 |
| 6 | IDHL | 10 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 20 |
| 7 | Push Group | 5 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 17 |
| 8 | Quirky Digital | 0 | 3 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 17 |
| 9 | Havas Market | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 10 | Tilio | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Push Group and Quirky Digital tie on 17. Push is placed above it on spread: cited on five of the six platforms against Quirky’s three.
Four things the table says
Ranking position and citation count have nothing to do with each other. Quirky Digital holds organic position two on the money term and carries 17 citations. Team Lewis sits at position nine with 438. If you picked your agency by looking at the search results, you sorted the list by something unrelated to the thing you are buying.
Google’s own answer disagrees with Google’s own results. The AI Overview on this query names eight agencies. Three of them (Tilio, MarGen and Catalyst) do not appear in the organic top ten at all. Same query, same page, two different shortlists. That is the mechanism in one screenshot. It is also why a ranking report no longer describes what a buyer sees.
Two of the ten are effectively absent from the systems they sell access to. Havas Market carries a single citation across all six platforms. Tilio carries none.
Almost nobody publishes a price on the page you land on. Two of ten do. Tilio states four levels from £499 a month. Reboot Online states pricing starts at £2,500 a month. The other eight ask you to book a call to find out what a thing costs, which is a sales process rather than a service.
Correction, 10 August 2026. A wider check the same day found MarGen publishes a full audit price ladder (£2,950 to £8,500 and up) on a separate pricing page its GEO service page does not link to. So two of ten put a price where a buyer lands. At least three publish one somewhere on the site. The count above is a floor rather than a census. Every verified UK figure is now collected in what an AI search audit should cost.
What this test does not prove
Said plainly, because a number without its limits is the problem this article is about.
It counts every topic, not just GEO. A large agency publishing constantly on twenty subjects will collect citations across all of them. Team Lewis’s 438 is a fact about its whole content estate.
It is a sample, not a census. Ahrefs observes a large set of AI answers. It does not observe all of them. It cannot tell you whether the questions behind those citations resemble your buyers’.
Domain boundaries flatter some and punish others. Several of these agencies sit inside larger groups. Content published on a parent or sister domain is invisible to this count.
A builder can live in an ugly house. An agency can be excellent at client work and uninterested in marketing itself. The counter-argument is that this particular service is the one where that excuse is hardest to make.
Treat the column as one input. Ask about the rest.
The ten, in the order the table puts them
1. Team Lewis (438). Position nine organically, DR 71, one referring domain to the GEO page. Its page returned a 403 to our fetch on 10 August 2026, so nothing is claimed here about what it says. The citation count is the largest in the set by a factor of three.
2. Impression (143). Nottingham, London, Manchester and New York. Four named service pillars: digital PR and links, structured content and E-E-A-T, technical work covering crawlability, rendering and Core Web Vitals, then citation and share-of-voice reporting. Publishes a client result for Tensar of 1,793 AI Overview citations globally. Named clients on the page include Wizz Air, Specsavers, Topps Tiles and Cancer Research UK. No price.
3. Reboot Online (128). London. The most specific method statement of the ten: retrieval behaviour analysis, fan-out query testing, visibility mapping, AI readiness audits and citation-share benchmarking, plus a published GEO playbook and an SEO experiments library. States pricing “starts at £2,500 per month”. Named client references include TUI and BrokerChooser. One case study claims a 194.72% increase in LLM referral traffic.
4. MarGen (68). Sheffield, serving England, Scotland and Wales. A six-step branded framework covering entity mapping, directory and PR citations, answer-first page structure, third-party validation and competitor displacement. No named clients, no case study detail and no price on the page. The gap between a heavily branded method and zero published evidence is worth raising on the call.
5. Catalyst (51). Birmingham, London and Dubai. Content optimisation, intent-led keyword research, conversion work, digital PR, schema and topical authority. No named clients or figures on the GEO page. The offer reads as competent SEO relabelled, which is defensible given what Google says about the overlap but is not what the page claims to be selling.
6. IDHL (20). London, Manchester, Leeds, Southampton and New York. Audits, strategy, technical, content, digital PR and reporting. The page’s only quantified result (230,000 conversions, Milwaukee) is an EMEA case study with no GEO metric attached. Honest positioning though: it argues GEO work pays back through conventional SEO in the short term, which matches Google’s own guidance more closely than most of this list.
7. Push Group (17). London, plus USA, MENA and Greece. Content strategy, technical work, brand signals and citation monitoring, with a free GEO audit as the entry point. One anonymised case study: 64% more clicks, 111% more impressions and 149 new top-ten keywords for a pregnancy care client. Cited on five platforms despite a small total, which suggests breadth rather than depth.
8. Quirky Digital (17). Liverpool, with a second office in Paphos. Ranks second organically on the money term with five referring domains to the page, which makes it the cheapest position on this SERP by a distance. Combined SEO and GEO audits, content and AI Overview work, structured data, technical fixes and link building. Names SPF Private Clients, CEL Solicitors and Gladstones Clinic. Zero citations on ChatGPT and zero on Gemini, which is a strange result for the agency currently winning the query.
9. Havas Market (1). Leeds, London and Manchester. Four pillars (accessibility, discoverability, authority, awareness) and a proprietary tracking platform covering six or more AI models. Claims a 50% rise in AI-referred traffic for an unnamed automotive brand and six new citations from a single article for an unnamed footwear brand. One measured citation of its own domain across six platforms.
10. Tilio (0). Exeter, UK-focused, the only agency in the set to publish a full price ladder: four levels from £499 a month, starting with measurement alone. The method is the most concrete on the list. Prompt-set tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Answer-ready page structure. Factchecking what models say about you. Mapping the external pages models read for your category.
Its own page reports 27.1% visibility and 5.9% share of voice, ranking first among the AEO agencies it tracks, as of July 2026. Ahrefs records zero citations across all six platforms on 10 August 2026.
Both figures can be right. They measure different things: share of voice on a prompt set Tilio selected, against observed citations in a sample Ahrefs collected. There is no agreed unit in this field, which is the single most important thing to understand before you buy any of it. We wrote up why the measurements disagree and what each method can and cannot see.
Where we sit
Zero. Findable is not in the table. On this measure it would come last: findable.digital recorded no citations on any of the six platforms on 10 August 2026. The site had no articles on it until this month.
We publish that number every month from that baseline, whichever way it moves. And our prices are on the site rather than behind a call: £1,500, £3,500 and £6,000 a month for search management, with the limits printed next to them.
Judge the claim in twelve months against the published record. That is the only fair way to judge any of this, including ours.
Five questions to ask any of them
- What is your own citation count, on which index, measured on what date? Any agency selling AI visibility can answer this in under a minute. Watch what happens when they cannot.
- Which prompts will you report against? Who chose them? If the agency picks the prompt set, the agency picks the score. Insist on your buyers’ questions, written down before the work starts.
- What does it cost? What is the fixed scope at that price? Two of ten publish this. Ambiguity about price is what makes a salesperson necessary.
- Who does the work, you or my team? Most GEO work lands on content, technical and PR, which are usually three different people inside your business. Find out who is holding the pen before you find out in month two.
- What happens when the model changes? The correct answer involves a measurement plan and a re-read, not a guarantee. Anyone guaranteeing a citation is selling something they do not control.
If you want to grade any of them before you talk to them, run the afternoon check on your own brand first. You will know what you are buying. You will also know whether the agency’s version of the number matches yours.
Data in this article: Ahrefs site-explorer-ai-responses-count and serp-overview, GB, 10 August 2026. Agency claims, prices and locations are taken from each agency’s own page on the same date.