The Agency Gold Rush

Between 2023 and 2026, several kinds of companies began selling the same service. Digital agencies added GEO and AEO to their SEO work, holding companies built practices and bought specialists, software vendors raised venture capital for platforms that measure how AI systems describe a brand, and the largest marketing software companies acquired some of those vendors outright. The first recorded GEO service, launched in May 2023, is covered in The Origins of GEO. The sections below follow what came after, in the order the deals and launches happened.

June 2023 to December 2024: Jellyfish Joins Brandtech and Studies Model Perception

On June 1, 2023, The Brandtech Group announced that it had acquired 100 percent of Jellyfish, a digital marketing agency founded in 2005 by Rob Pierre. The combined group had more than $1 billion in revenue and more than 7,000 employees, and Jellyfish accounted for more than 2,000 of them across 38 offices.¹

On December 5, 2024, Jellyfish announced the Share of Model Platform, an interface that lets a company analyze how different large language models perceive its brands, products, and services. Jellyfish said that in beta trials the platform helped brands adjust their keyword strategy and the text and image assets on their websites.³

February 2024: Gartner Forecasts a Drop in Search Volume

On February 19, 2024, Gartner published a prediction that traditional search engine volume would fall 25 percent by 2026, because of AI chatbots and other virtual agents.² Data on how people used Google and how often they clicked in 2025 and 2026 appears in Google Answers Back.

2024 to 2026: Venture Capital Reaches the Tools

Profound was founded in August 2024 in New York City by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs.¹¹ In June 2025 it announced a $20 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins.¹² Scrunch followed on July 22, 2025, with a $15 million Series A led by Decibel, with participation from Mayfield and Homebrew.[^scrunchA] On August 12, 2025, Profound announced a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia, bringing its total funding to $58.5 million, and said that more than 2,000 marketers from over 500 organizations used the platform daily.⁷ The same day, Evertune announced a $15 million Series A led by Felicis Ventures.¹³

Peec AI, based in Berlin, announced a $21 million Series A led by Singular on November 17, 2025, four months after a seed round. Its chief executive, Marius Meiners, said the company's valuation had tripled and was above $100 million.[^peecA] On February 24, 2026, Profound announced a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a valuation of $1 billion, which brought its total funding to more than $155 million. The company said that more than 700 enterprises used the platform.¹⁰

July 2025: Agencies Combine

Three agency transactions were announced in the first ten days of July 2025. On July 1, Adogy and Relevance announced a merger to form a company specializing in GEO, which combined Adogy's AI visibility technology with Relevance's public relations practice.⁴ On July 9, SEO consulting firm Previsible, founded in 2021 by Jordan Koene, Tyson Stockton, and David Bell, announced that it had acquired Internet Marketing Ninjas, an SEO agency founded in 1999 by Jim Boykin.⁵ On July 10, the French performance marketing group Labelium announced the acquisition of reegen.ai, a GEO firm, and appointed its founder, Ben Gibson, as UK chief executive.⁶

In two of the three, an established agency bought a smaller specialist, and in the third two specialists combined. Previsible's announcement described the purchase as uniting two firms that provide traditional and AI SEO strategy.⁵

October 2025 to September 2026: Holding Companies Build Practices

On October 7, 2025, Omnicom Media Group published a report called Generative Engine Optimization: The New Paradigm for Discovery in the GenAI Era, which said GEO had become the baseline for discoverability and described consumers who expect their answers from AI overviews without clicking through.⁸ On November 26, 2025, Omnicom completed its acquisition of Interpublic, with a combined pro forma revenue above $25 billion.¹⁴

On February 4, 2026, Taylor Herring announced Cite:d with Performics, the performance marketing arm of Publicis Groupe. The UK offer gives Taylor Herring's Newsroom division access to data on more than 46 million UK consumers and builds campaigns intended to raise citation rates in AI search. The announcement reported early tests with easyJet and easyJet holidays on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Meta AI, and Copilot.¹⁵ On September 30, 2026, Dentsu India announced an expanded GEO practice built on dentsu Search Intelligence and the dentsu AI Search Suite.¹⁶

Publicis Groupe Announces Cite:d

October 2025 to April 2026: HubSpot and Adobe Buy Into the Category

In October 2025, HubSpot announced an agreement to acquire XFunnel, a platform that monitors how a business appears in AI answers, with the intention of building it into its marketing products. The announcement did not disclose a price and described the buyer's own AEO strategy and AEO referral features.¹⁷

On November 19, 2025, Adobe and Semrush announced a definitive agreement under which Adobe would acquire Semrush in an all-cash transaction at $12.00 per share, a total equity value of approximately $1.9 billion. The release described Semrush as a brand visibility platform and said that organizations investing in GEO alongside SEO were positioned to keep their brands represented as consumers turn to large language models.⁹ Adobe completed the acquisition on April 28, 2026. In that release Adobe reported that AI traffic to U.S. retail sites had increased 269 percent year over year in March 2026, and described solutions for SEO, GEO, and agentic search optimization to close gaps in brand visibility.¹⁸

Adobe Announces It Will Acquire Semrush

October 2026: Who Owns the Agencies

By October 2026 the agencies selling GEO and AEO covered the full range of ownership. TGA's ownership map sorts 61 agencies into 14 owned by corporate parents or holding companies, 16 backed by private equity, 30 independent, and one venture-backed.¹⁹ TGA also ranks agencies by public evidence of ChatGPT ads work.²⁰ That advertising is covered in Advertising Inside the Answer.

Key Organizations