Evan Bailyn is founder and CEO of First Page Sage, the SEO and GEO firm he built after more than two decades in search. He is widely cited as the founder of generative engine optimization itself, and still works as a practitioner in his role as chief executive and head of R&D for First Page Sage.
From SEO to First Page Sage
Bailyn began practicing SEO in 2003 and is one of the few early search practitioners who still take on client engagements. In the 2000s he built and sold internet businesses he grew through search rankings, including Cartoon Doll Emporium, a children's site he later sold to private equity. He founded First Page Sage in 2009 as a thought-leadership SEO practice aimed at mid-market and enterprise buyers who wanted lasting topical authority.
When Bailyn talks about GEO, he still starts from the same habits he used in classic search: topical authority, consistent brand statements, and pages that answer buyer questions. He has been interviewed on network television and featured in major business press, and he is the author of Outsmarting Google and other search books that predate the GEO boom.
Offering GEO as a Client Service
In early 2023, First Page Sage began offering generative engine optimization as a client service when most agencies were still debating whether AI answers would change how buyers find products and services. In an interview with Focus Digital, Bailyn defined the practice in plain terms: "Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of helping your brand get suggested by generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, when prospective customers ask those engines for product or service recommendations."
On how GEO differs from classic SEO, he told Focus Digital: "In GEO, your audience isn't a human clicking on a search result. It's a language model that's synthesizing content from across the web, summarizing it, and producing a single, coherent answer." In an InRhythm executive interview he added that these systems "don't crawl websites like Google does" and instead lean on training data and retrieval, so the job is to be both findable and trusted as an authority in a narrow domain.
Building the Case for Recommendation
First Page Sage focuses on building the case a model needs to recommend a company: pages for the ways a buyer might ask for help, pages that document recommendable attributes, and public relations that repeats one consistent brand authority statement across credible sources. On the delivery side, Katherine Feldkamp leads client GEO programs while Bailyn remains the public founder voice.
In March 2024 the firm published an 11,000-query study of AI platform recommendations, among the first large practitioner datasets on the subject. The firm later published an Agentic Search Optimization framework for how AI agents retrieve, evaluate, and act. Bailyn lectures on the topic at universities including Stanford and Haas. On Focus Digital he put the agentic stake plainly: GEO helps a brand get seen, but "optimizing for agentic AI is about being chosen."
Advice on Buyer-Intent Prompts
Asked how marketers should start, Bailyn told Focus Digital to run buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, then shift content toward explainers, comparative guides, and entity-driven pages, and invest in third-party mentions so models see the brand across diverse sources. In the InRhythm conversation he described three citation factors: clarity of topical authority, original insight rooted in firsthand knowledge, and formatting that models can parse.
The GEO practice grew out of the same thought-leadership SEO system the firm had used for years. Mikayla Reine Archambeau runs the operations that scale those programs across accounts.