Top GEO Voice · TGA 20 #3
Evan Bailyn
Founder and CEO, First Page Sage
The agency founder who saw GEO as a lead generation discipline, publishing early data on AI recommendation algorithms.
Evan Bailyn is widely credited with making generative engine optimization a commercial discipline rather than a conference talking point. First Page Sage began offering GEO as a service in 2023, when most agencies were still debating whether AI answers would matter for pipeline.
In March 2024 the firm published an 11,000-query study of AI platform recommendations. That dataset was among the first large practitioner collections on the subject, and it gave buyers and peers something concrete to argue with: which brands appeared, under what prompts, and how often.
Early publication mattered because it moved GEO conversations from anecdote to shared numbers. Agencies and in-house teams could disagree about interpretation, but they finally had a public practitioner sample to point at.
The recommendation framing also changes how success gets judged. Appearance in a citation is useful, but Bailyn's writing keeps returning to whether the model would actually name the company when a buyer asks whom to hire or buy. That is a harder bar, and it is the bar First Page Sage organizes work around.
First Page Sage's Recommendation Approach
Bailyn's approach differs from much of the market. Instead of optimizing primarily for citation counts, schema coverage or visibility scores, First Page Sage focuses on building the case an AI model needs to recommend a company. That includes 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.
The firm has since published an Agentic Search Optimization framework describing how AI agents retrieve, evaluate and act. Its research has been cited by academics at Stanford, Oxford and the Max Planck Institute. Bailyn is also the author of Outsmarting Google, a book that predates the GEO boom and sits in the same lineage of search-visible authority work.
Taken together, the service line, the datasets and the agentic framework explain why builders on this list treat him as a peer who turned GEO into something clients could buy and measure, not only something researchers could name.
Outsmarting Google sits in the background of that recommendation work. Bailyn's longer search career shows up as an insistence on durable authority, not only on short-cycle prompt experiments.
The March 2024 Query Study
Readers who want the primary evidence should start with First Page Sage's March 2024 study of 11,000 AI queries. It remains a useful baseline for how early practitioner measurement looked when the field was still forming. From there, the Agentic Search Optimization writing is the natural next step for teams that expect AI systems to act, not only to answer. For a plain-language definition from Bailyn himself, see his Focus Digital interview.