Top GEO Academics • 2026
Top GEO Academics
Twenty faculty and curriculum builders putting generative engine optimization into marketing classrooms and executive programs
By TGA EditorsSeptember 28, 202618 min read
Updated September 28, 2026
Agencies and brands already hire for generative engine optimization. Universities are slower. This ranking looks at faculty and curriculum builders who have put GEO, answer-engine visibility, or information-search marketing into technical notes, peer-reviewed pedagogy, named courses, or classroom simulations students can run.
We scored each person on a Research Impact Score from 0 to 100: GEO centrality 30, novelty 25, recency 20, practitioner usability 15, and trajectory 10. Here centrality means teaching or curriculum artifacts about visibility inside generative engines, not only general AI marketing.
Hard gates: a real photograph, GEO-visible teaching or curriculum work, a verifiable identity, and a People profile. Established faculty are eligible. Paper and lab authors whose main contribution is research are ranked on the researchers list.
Curriculum authors
Technical notes and school reports that other faculty can assign.
Marketing education
Peer-reviewed pedagogy for putting GEO beside SEO in marketing courses.
Executive education
MBA and executive programs that name GEO or LLMO for working marketers.
Course leads
Named GEO or AI-search courses in continuing and degree programs.
Simulation labs
Teaching platforms and benchmarks students can run in class.
Guest faculty
Practitioners lecturing GEO inside university programs.
The list
Twenty academics ranked overall from 1 to 20. Use the bar above to jump to the first person in each role band.
Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor, University of Virginia Darden School of Business
Whitler co-authored the Darden technical note AI-Based Search: Information-Search Marketing and Generative Engine Optimization with Michael Pettiette, published May 2026.
The note introduces the Information Search Marketing framework that places GEO and generative engine marketing beside classic SEO and SEM, giving MBA classrooms a shared vocabulary for brand visibility when AI answers replace result lists.
Profile: Kimberly A. Whitler on People
Senior Lecturer, University of Houston-Downtown Marilyn Davies College of Business
Pettiette co-wrote the Darden ISM/GEO technical note with Whitler and co-authored Marketing Education Review papers that argue for putting GEO next to SEO in marketing curricula.
At UHD he turns that research into classroom practice, including award-winning work on student self-efficacy across SEO, GEO, and generative engine marketing.
Profile: Michael Pettiette on People
Associate Professor of Integrated Marketing and Communication, Pepperdine University
Fischbach co-authored From SEO to GEO: The Pedagogical Imperative for Integrating Generative Engine Optimization into Marketing Education and a companion paper on hybrid SEO/GEO instruction across generations.
Pepperdine podcast and CEOWORLD pieces extend the classroom claim: marketing students need GEO self-efficacy before they enter a job market that already treats AI answers as a discovery surface.
Profile: Sarah Fischbach on People
Clinical Professor of Marketing, Northwestern Kellogg School of Management
Lecinski teaches AI Foundations for Managers and related Kellogg courses that put AI visibility, including GEO concepts, in front of MBA and executive audiences.
His public teaching notes warn students that anonymous share-of-model scores miss logged-in user state, and that inbox and loyalty channels are now part of AI discovery literacy.
Profile: Jim Lecinski on People
Instructor, Harvard Division of Continuing Education; Northeastern University
Inge built Harvard DCE's AI Marketing micro-certificate and course track that explicitly lists Content and SEO/GEO Optimization beside agentic AI and AI-mediated discovery.
A Fussa Award winner for teaching excellence, she is one of the few Harvard-branded instructors whose published syllabus names GEO as a curriculum component rather than only a side example.
Profile: Christina Inge on People
Associate Professor, University of Houston-Downtown
Conde co-authored the Marketing Education Review GEO pedagogy papers with Pettiette and Fischbach, including work on hybrid SEO/GEO instruction across generations.
His UHD teaching sits in marketing and sales analytics while the published papers give other schools assignment-ready frames for adding GEO to digital marketing courses.
Profile: Richard Conde on People
Associate Professor, Northwestern Medill; Spiegel Research Center
Cutler is on record in Spiegel and ANA-amplified work arguing that GEO is the new SEO and that authentic thought leadership sends signals generative engines use when they choose sources.
Medill's IMC and AI-driven digital marketing programs give her a teaching pipeline where consumer-research findings on AI search can land in graduate classrooms.
Profile: Kelly Cutler on People
Professor, Wharton School; Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative
Hosanagar's Wharton AI in Marketing executive program is among the few top-MBA offerings that names large language model optimization next to brand strategy for paying CMO audiences.
Wharton's Generative AI Adoption Report and AI for Business MBA major sit behind that executive track, putting LLMO language in front of leaders who already feel AI search pressure.
Profile: Kartik Hosanagar on People
Digital marketing faculty, Brigham Young University-Idaho
Lundin publishes open GEO teaching modules that define generative engine optimization as structuring content so models can retrieve, understand, and cite it.
His AI Co-Creation Method and module pages give undergraduate marketing students a practice loop that goes beyond keyword SEO checklists.
Profile: Kent Lundin on People
Maître de conférences HDR, IAE Paris-Sorbonne Business School
Mercanti-Guérin teaches digital marketing and generative AI at IAE Paris-Sorbonne and publishes open GEO teaching tools, including audit guides and a visibility calculator for ChatGPT and Perplexity.
INDEXÉ Studio, her multi-quarter team simulation, lets students manage budgets across SEO, GEO, and advertising channels inside a course setting.
Profile: Maria Mercanti-Guérin on People
Guest professor, SKEMA Business School and ISCTE; trainer, Leiria Business School
Maio runs Generative Engine Optimization courses for Leiria Business School and teaches SEO and AI marketing as a guest professor at SKEMA and ISCTE.
Students leave with a site diagnosis and a 30-day roadmap aimed at being cited and recommended by assistants, not only ranked in classic results.
Profile: Miguel Maio on People
Instructor, University of Richmond School of Professional & Continuing Studies
Melton teaches Building Brand Authority in an AI-Driven Search World at Richmond's School of Professional and Continuing Studies, with GEO and AI search strategy as explicit course outcomes.
Completers earn an AI Search Strategy digital badge, which is rare among U.S. continuing-education catalogs that still only mention generative AI as a writing tool.
Profile: Will Melton on People
Faculty, Northwestern Medill IMC
Viswanathan teaches on Medill's AI-Driven Digital Marketing short course and related IMC offerings that sit next to Spiegel research on GEO as the new SEO.
The Medill pipeline is one of the few U.S. communications schools where AI marketing teaching and GEO research press share the same faculty neighborhood.
Profile: Vijay Viswanathan on People
Instructor II, Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong
Lau is principal investigator on CityUHK's Generative Engine Optimization simulation platform project, built to update the IS4340 curriculum for generative visibility strategies.
Students practice content choices and see how agents such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity interpret brand narratives, which turns GEO from a lecture slide into a lab loop.
Profile: Man Kit Lau on People
Instructor, Formation Continue Sorbonne Université / CELSA
Lachnitt leads Sorbonne Université's continuing-education Generative Engine Optimization program, a named GEO course for professionals at Campus Jussieu.
The syllabus focuses on how AI search mechanisms work, how content is selected, and how organizations plan visibility when assistants mediate discovery.
Profile: Christophe Lachnitt on People
Senior Professor of Practice in Marketing, University of Houston Bauer College of Business
Novak teaches professional selling, personal branding, and business communications at Bauer, and scaled Second Nature AI role-play practice across MARK 3337 for roughly 1,350 undergraduates a semester.
Her Business Horizons personal-branding paper and 2024 experiential-learning awards put Bauer's sales classroom on the map for AI practice at mass-section scale, adjacent to Houston peers publishing on teaching GEO beside SEO.
Profile: Amy Vandaveer Novak on People
Director, USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations
Cook's center co-published Message vs. The Machine with WE Communications, a GEO-titled report surveying hundreds of U.S. communicators and publishing a practical playbook for AI brand visibility.
Annenberg's Relevance Report and classroom pipeline make the center the clearest U.S. PR-school home for GEO curriculum materials students can cite.
Profile: Fred Cook on People
Founder and CEO, First Page Sage; guest lecturer, Stanford and Haas
Bailyn lectures on commercial generative engine optimization at universities including Stanford and Haas, bringing practitioner measurement into classrooms that still treat GEO as a reading assignment.
His teaching emphasis on whether a model would recommend a company, rather than only cite it, gives marketing students a hiring-facing definition they can use in case work.
Profile: Evan Bailyn on People
Assistant Professor, Columbia Business School
Peng teaches in Columbia Business School's Decision, Risk, and Operations division while co-authoring E-GEO, the e-commerce GEO testbed built for ranking objectives sellers can measure.
Business-school classrooms that need a dataset for AI shopping agents and rewrite experiments now have a named benchmark from a sitting faculty member.
Profile: Tianyi Peng on People
Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
Farias brings E-GEO into the MIT Sloan research and teaching orbit around decision systems and large-scale ranking, giving MBA and PhD students a commercial GEO problem with clear rank-change metrics.
The red-team and meta-optimization chapters of E-GEO also give ethics and analytics courses a concrete case where manipulation defenses matter.
Profile: Vivek Farias on People
Where this list goes next
Later editions will add faculty who publish new GEO syllabi, simulations, and executive programs as more schools name the discipline in catalogs. The same gates stay: a real photo, curriculum-visible work, and a People page.
Affiliations are as of September 2026.