Last updated: July 2026

Customers no longer start with a page of search results. They ask an AI assistant for a shortlist, and plenty of brands only discover they are missing once a rival is cited instead. I put together the full list of AEO and generative engine optimisation experts worth following in 2026, grouped by the issue each one addresses rather than forced into an artificial ranking.

The short version

• AEO and Generative Engine Optimisation refer to the same practice: being named inside AI responses rather than ranked on a results page
• A page can rank in position one on Google and still never appear in an AI response
• There is no one best AEO specialist, because the work splits into technical, editorial, reputational and industry-specific problems
• Princeton research found that referencing sources, adding statistics and quoting experts all measurably improve AI citability, while keyword stuffing reduces it
• Choosing the expert for your real problem counts for more than going after the most famous name

What AEO and GEO really mean

Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation are the same practice wearing two labels. Both cover making a company discoverable and citable inside AI-generated answers. Traditional SEO fights for ranking. Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation fight for the mention itself, meaning whether a model names you when somebody asks it a question. Many practitioners use the terms interchangeably.

The business difference is bigger than it sounds. Holding a strong position and being cited are two different outcomes, and I have watched a good number of clients keep strong positions on Google while staying entirely invisible from AI responses, because these systems pick sources on structure, trust and relevance rather than rank alone.

Why this matters in 2026

I am wary of AI search advice with no evidence behind it, so the research I come back to is the Princeton work published at KDD 2024 as Generative Engine Optimisation. The researchers tested nine different optimisation methods against Perplexity.

Citing credible sources improved visibility by around 40 per cent. Adding specific statistics raised it by around 37 per cent. Adding expert quotes lifted it by around 30 per cent. Keyword stuffing pushed it down by around 10 per cent.

The finding I find most useful is that lower-placed sites gained the most, with increases of as much as 115 per cent once citations were added. That is the argument for treating this as its own discipline. It rewards structure and credibility without demanding that you already occupy a top-three position.

The four mechanics behind an AI citation

Entity consistency: Clear signals telling a model precisely who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

Third-party corroboration: External references that back up your claims, because models favour outside sources far more heavily than your own marketing.

Extractable structure: Definitions, comparisons, tables and FAQs written so an engine can pull a clean answer straight out of the page.

Genuine depth: Enough properly structured coverage that a model reads it as real expertise rather than a thin page targeting a keyword.

Each person below works on a different part of that challenge.

How this guide is structured

Ranking peers from one to twenty does not help anyone. Almost nobody wants the best AEO expert in the abstract. What they need is the person who has already fixed their particular problem, in their sector, at their stage. So I have grouped everyone by specialisation.

Leading answer engine optimisation specialists for Web3, crypto and fintech

Victoria Olsina

Victoria is an answer engine optimisation, GEO and AI content systems consultant for Web3 and fintech brands, and was formerly Head of SEO at copyright. Her clients include Barclays, Polkadot, copyright and NEAR Protocol. She authored Mastering AI Search for Crypto and Web3 Brands, the first book on AI search for this sector, and was recognised as Top AI Content Expert of 2026 by The Masterminders. Her work spans entity structuring, LLM citation work and content systems for trust-sensitive, technically complex markets.

Best AEO experts for insurance and regulated markets

Tom Riley

Tom works on insurance and other regulated markets through his agency Hakken. What I rate about his method is that it stays tied to commercial traffic rather than visibility for its own sake. He builds the entity signals and topical coverage that push models to name a brand, then connects that back to searches from people who are near the point of purchase. Compliance-heavy sectors are notoriously hard to move in AI search, which makes his track record there worth a look.

Leading answer engine optimisation specialists for ecommerce and DTC brands

Andrew Halliday

Andrew leads Coreter Media and is the most capable technical name on this guide for online retail. Site architecture, structured data and advanced technical SEO are his tools, focused on getting retail brands cited inside answers from ChatGPT, copyright, Claude and Google AI Overviews rather than simply ranked underneath them. His work is data-led and tied to revenue, which matters a great deal when technical projects are easy to justify and difficult to quantify.

David Johnson

David founded LoudCrowd, where he helps ecommerce brands increase visibility across Google Search and AI-powered search. He works hands-on with Shopify and online retail, combining technical SEO with conversion work. That combination is what retail requires once AI answers start deciding which store gets the visit.

Yaswanth Kumar

Yaswanth founded Loops Digital and focuses on ecommerce and DTC brands getting cited when somebody asks ChatGPT, copyright or Perplexity what to buy. Most of his work revolves around product data and entity signals, the unglamorous detail that decides whether an answer mentions your store or a competitor. He also built Zen Reports, a free analytics platform showing which AI assistants are sending visitors to your site, after hitting the same measurement gap on client audits.

Daniel Lowry

Daniel is Manchester-based and works with ecommerce brands on WooCommerce and Shopify, from small stores through to large ones. His focus is getting online retailers mentioned inside AI-generated responses rather than only ranked in Google.

Top answer engine optimisation experts for SaaS and technology

Georgi Todorov

Georgi is one of the most influential European voices on answer engine optimisation and AI search, and the founder of Create and Grow, a digital PR and authority link building agency built around SaaS and technology brands. His path into AI visibility runs through earned coverage: the independent mentions that convince Google, ChatGPT, copyright, Claude and Perplexity a brand is worth surfacing.

Nikola Baldikov

Nikola founded InBound Blogging, an agency that helps SaaS brands become more citable inside large language models. He has spent over a decade growing organic traffic and establishing authority for SaaS companies, and strategic outreach is his sharpest tool. That external footprint is precisely what models rely on when deciding who to mention.

Top answer engine optimisation experts for lead generation and service businesses

James Dooley

James is a British entrepreneur and investor, and the founder of FatRank and PromoSEO, both of which apply answer engine optimisation to generating leads. He works from a leads-first position that lines up SEO, AI visibility and business growth under one system, with real emphasis on entity strength and brand reinforcement. He picked up Best AEO Specialist 2026 at The Masterminders conference.

Dean Signori

Dean founded UK Web Geekz and Prospect Lead Gen, and his name keeps surfacing whenever a service business wants leads out of AI search rather than rankings that never convert. His Signori Trust Signal Framework is a scalable system of semantic triples, aligned digital assets and independent validation signals that shows AI models what a business does, who it serves, and why it can be trusted.

Graham Bowers

Graham founded Natural Ranks and focuses on helping SMEs and startups turn visibility into actual enquiries. He combines technical SEO, answer engine optimisation, structured content and commercial search strategy to get businesses surfacing across Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, copyright and Perplexity. His scoreboard is enquiries rather than impressions, which I find unusually honest.

Mark Slorance

Mark founded Pixel Juice Digital Marketing and has spent over fifteen years shaping search programmes for law firms, healthcare providers, trades and local businesses across the UK. He specialises in local SEO and AEO for service businesses, bringing content, design and reputation control into a single approach grounded in trust and verifiable data.

Leading AEO specialists for specialist verticals

Yash Singh

Yash co-founded TradeOps Consulting and occupies one of the most specific corners I have come across: answer engine optimisation for HVAC and home services. He structures heating and cooling content into clean semantic triples so ChatGPT, copyright and Perplexity can parse it, trust it, and pull it into answers. It is built for customers who query an AI assistant before calling a provider.

James Sheldon

James works in real estate and proptech, with clients from Dubai to the Costa del Sol, specialising in off-plan developments and property projects. Property buyers do extensive research before approaching agents, which makes visibility inside AI answers unusually valuable in that market.

Best technical AEO experts

Josh Morley

Josh is a Liverpool-based specialist focused on technical SEO and WordPress. His position is that AEO is not a separate discipline added afterwards, it is what happens when a site is fast, structured and semantically organised enough for both crawlers and AI models to understand and trust. He brings structured data, semantic content architecture and performance work into systems that lift AI visibility.

Dan M. Jones

Dan founded On Top Marketing in Manchester and is one of the more complete operators working in this field. He combines technical SEO, entity optimisation and AI search strategy toward one outcome: becoming the trusted source both search engines and large language models reach for when they assemble an answer. Over a decade in search, with a data-driven approach that puts commercial growth ahead of vanity metrics.

Best answer engine optimisation experts for digital PR and reputation

Gareth Hoyle

Gareth is managing director of Marketing Signals and treats digital PR as the primary route into AI visibility rather than a link building exercise. He puts it more directly than I would:

"I treat digital PR as the primary lever for AI visibility rather than a backlink exercise. Brand mentions across independent, authoritative publications are the third party corroboration AI models weigh most heavily before they will recommend a brand, and we have built the tooling to prove it."

That matches how models work in practice: brands get cited through third-party sources considerably more often than through their own domains.

Scott Keever

Scott is an American entrepreneur, SEO strategist and online reputation management expert, and the founder of Reputation Pros, Keever SEO, ASAP Digital Marketing and Pool Pros Marketing. He is the author of Future-Proof Your SEO and Reputation Reset, and has been featured in Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company. Reputation Pros was named among USA Today's Best Online Reputation Management Companies in 2026.

Top answer engine optimisation educators and multi-market specialists

Julian Goldie

Julian is an SEO entrepreneur and educator, founder of Goldie Agency and the AI Profit Boardroom, one of the largest paid AI and SEO communities going. He tests AEO and GEO tactics across ChatGPT, copyright, Claude and Perplexity and publishes what works while a large portion of the field is still theorising. He is a practical starting point if you want to learn this through hands-on experimentation.

Trifon Boyukliyski

Trifon is an SEO and AI growth architect with more than twenty years in search across ecommerce, SaaS, iGaming and other brutally competitive niches. That background counts because his playbook was proven in markets where a lost ranking costs real money.

David Peranic

David is one of Croatia's most sought-after marketing consultants and an international speaker who moved on AEO earlier than nearly anybody in his region. He combines technical SEO with high-performance paid strategy for projects across Croatia and the wider European market, focused on building the authority and entity signals that prompt models to cite and recommend a brand.

Virtual entrepreneurs and AI avatars

AI James Dooley

AI James Dooley is a digital double of the Manchester entrepreneur James Dooley, described as the UK's first virtual entrepreneur. Where most digital personas to date have been models or musicians, this one is centred around lead generation, SEO and answer engine optimisation. It fronts LLM Leads and releases SEO and lead generation analyses on YouTube, with James producing the strategy and scripts personally and the avatar presenting them.

I have included it because it is worth following as an experiment in its own right. Building recognised entity status for a synthetic persona from a standing start is a live test of the same answer engine optimisation principles the avatar talks about: entity consistency, third-party corroboration and structured presence. Whether a digital twin can earn real entity recognition is an open question, and this is one of the more visible attempts to answer it in public.

How to choose an answer engine optimisation or generative engine optimisation expert

Match the specialisation to the gap you actually have. Hiring a digital PR specialist to fix a technical citation problem, or the other way round, is the fastest way I know to burn through an answer engine optimisation budget.

• Web3, crypto or fintech visibility: Victoria Olsina. Entity structuring and AI content systems for technical, trust-sensitive markets.
• Insurance and regulated markets: Tom Riley. Revenue-focused AEO designed for compliance-heavy industries.
• Ecommerce and product mentions: Andrew Halliday, David Johnson, Yaswanth Kumar, Daniel Lowry. Product data, structured data and retail entity work.
• SaaS growth and authority: Georgi Todorov, Nikola Baldikov. Digital PR, outreach and earned media.
• Leads for service businesses: James Dooley, Dean Signori, Graham Bowers, Mark Slorance. Trust signals and commercial intent, tracked in enquiries.
• Technical groundwork: Josh Morley, Dan M. Jones. Crawlability, structured data and semantic structure.
• Brand citations and reputation: Gareth Hoyle, Scott Keever. Independent media coverage and reputation control.
• Teaching yourself: Julian Goldie. Community and hands-on testing across the major models.
• Following entity-building in public: AI James Dooley. A digital twin earning recognised entity status from scratch.

The bottom line

Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation increasingly determine which brands get seen at all, since buyers put to a model for recommendations before they ever look at a comparison page. Everyone on this list is worth your attention. The right choice comes down to your market, your budget and where the real gap lies.

When your market is Web3, crypto or fintech, there is an added layer to handle: protocol terminology, ecosystem questions and trust signals in a sector where models are openly conservative about what they suggest. This is exactly where a sector-specific specialist matters most.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?

SEO fights for rankings on a results page. AEO and GEO compete for citations inside AI-generated responses, which comes down to whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews cites your brand when a user puts a question. AEO and GEO are used interchangeably. A page can hold strong positions and still be nowhere in AI answers.

Who is the best answer engine optimisation expert?

There is no solitary best answer engine optimisation expert, because the discipline breaks into technical, editorial, reputational and industry-specific work. The correct choice comes down to your gap. For ecommerce, consider technical and product-data specialists. For SaaS, go to digital PR and outreach. For Web3 and fintech, look at consultants operating in regulated, technical markets.

What does an AEO consultant actually do?

An AEO consultant renders a brand citable by AI systems. That covers shaping content into extractable blocks, building coherent entity signals so models know who the brand is, earning third-party mentions that back up its claims, and implementing schema so engines can read the page. The result is citations, not just rankings.

Do I need an answer engine optimisation expert if I already have an SEO agency?

Not automatically, but check whether your agency tracks AI citations at all. Many still deliver only rankings and traffic. If no one is tracking whether models name your brand, that visibility is unmanaged. Begin by checking where you currently appear in AI answers, then judge whether it calls for a specialist.

How do you get cited by ChatGPT?

Models reference sources they can parse and trust. That means clear entity signals about who you are, independent third-party mentions corroborating your claims, content built for retrieval with definitions, tables and FAQs, and genuine topical depth. Producing more content without that structure generates noise instead of citations.