Demand for Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) services is continuing to rapidly grow month-on-month, with many businesses prioritising LLM-related marketing strategies over other more conventional channels.
Speaking to iBusiness.News, Suliman Mulhem, the founder of PR and SEO agency Imperium Comms, said the opening quarter of 2026 saw demand for AEO/GEO services rapidly grow.
“Businesses of all sizes are showing a strong interest in AEO and GEO services, particularly those operating in competitive markets where AI search visibility can directly influence purchase decisions,” Mulhem said.
“For many businesses, securing LLM mentions for relevant, commercial queries has become their core marketing strategy, helping them with lead generation and brand positioning.”
Mulhem noted that Imperium Comms was among the agencies that moved early, proactively developing and offering AEO packages to clients in 2025 before demand had fully crystallised.
Other PR and SEO agencies, he said, took a more reactive approach, building out AEO offerings in response to direct requests from clients who had already identified AI search visibility as a priority.
In practice, AEO and GEO packages share a lot of similarities with more conventional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services, Suliman Mulhem added.
“Many agencies offering AEO/GEO services are misguidedly focusing on creating and optimising LLMs.txt files for clients. This does not improve AI visibility. The most effective way to secure coverage in LLMs, like ChatGPT and Claude, is to organically earn or publish mentions and features in high-quality news sites,” Mulhem concluded.
AEO Expansion Across PR and SEO Agencies
Some of the industry’s largest and most established players have moved decisively into AEO territory, either building dedicated practices from scratch or repackaging and upgrading existing SEO and PR capabilities to address what clients are increasingly asking for.
NP Digital, the performance marketing agency co-founded by Neil Patel, rolled out a dedicated AI Search Optimization practice focused on entity consolidation, helping finance, e-commerce, and SaaS brands position themselves as high-confidence sources inside ChatGPT and Gemini responses.
The firm has been explicit in framing AEO as the missing link between traditional SEO and conversion rate optimisation, a framing that has resonated with larger clients looking for a coherent story to bring to their boards.
UK-based agency Found invested £1 million in its proprietary Luminr platform, designed to map the searchable web including AI assistants and social search feeds. Its Everysearch approach crosses conventional SEO with AI visibility analytics, and the agency has been among the more vocal in the British market about repositioning itself around AI-era search rather than simply bolting on an AEO offering.
Meanwhile, New York-based iPullRank, which has generated over $4 billion in documented results for clients including American Express, Nordstrom, and HSBC, developed what it calls Relevance Engineering, treating SEO as a technical discipline grounded in language modelling and query understanding.
Its founder Mike King was named AI Search Marketer of the Year by Search Engine Land in 2025, and the agency has become a go-to for Fortune 50 companies requiring technically sophisticated AEO implementation.
The Road Ahead: AEO’s Growth Trajectory
If the current pace of adoption is any guide, the AEO services market is still in its early chapters. The structural forces pushing brands toward AI search optimisation are not slowing down, and the forecasts for the years ahead suggest the discipline is set to become considerably larger and more complex than it is today.
The headline numbers are striking. AI-assisted search queries across all platforms are now estimated at more than 2.5 billion per day, and the AEO tooling market alone is already valued at roughly $2 billion. Between 35% and 45% of Fortune 1000 companies have now adopted some form of AEO strategy, a figure that was negligible just two years ago.
The global AI content marketing industry, which encompasses AEO as a core component, is projected to grow from around $5 billion in 2026 to over $17.6 billion by 2033, representing more than a threefold increase over seven years.
Perhaps the most consequential forecast for brands and agencies alike comes from Gartner, which estimates that by 2028, around 60% of AI-generated answers will be terminal, meaning users get what they need from the AI response without clicking through to any source. That shift fundamentally alters the logic of digital marketing.
