WHICH GEO AGENCIES
DOES AI RECOMMEND?

Erik Bagdasarian, founder of BAGDAER · published 5 October 2026

We asked ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Yandex Alice and Perplexity 30 questions a business asks when it chooses a provider for visibility in AI answers — in English, Hebrew and Russian. We analysed 103 answers: who AI recommends, which sources it relies on, and what it knows about a young brand.

HOW WE MEASURED

The measurement was taken on 4 October 2026. 30 questions — 10 each in English, Hebrew and Russian. In every language, eight buyer questions and two brand questions:

• choosing an agency: “Which GEO agency should I choose…”, “Top GEO agencies 2026”, “Best GEO agency for a small business”;
• doing it yourself: “How do I get my business into ChatGPT answers?”, “How do I check what AI says about my company?”;
• price and concepts: “How much does GEO cost?”, “What is the difference between GEO and SEO?”;
• brand: “What is Bagdaer GEO?” and “Who is Erik Bagdasarian?”.

Every question was asked in a new chat. We recorded whether the brand was mentioned, whether its website was linked, which companies were named, and which sources the system cited.

103 answers in total, 83 of them to buyer questions.

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MARKET: NO CLEAR LEADER

For “best GEO agency for a small business” and “Top GEO agencies 2026”, no agency appeared in more than three systems:

When there is no accepted ranking, each system builds its answer from its own set of articles. Agencies that publish about GEO themselves — firstpagesage.com is the clearest example — show up twice: as a recommendation and as a source.

ISRAEL: EVERY AI HAS ITS OWN LIST

Only three agencies were named by three of the five systems:

For a new player this is good news: in Israel, two or three visible mentions are enough to stand next to the leaders.

RUSSIA: SIX AGENCIES SHARE THE ANSWERS

Six agencies share almost all recommendations, and all of them have long been in industry rankings. Google and Alice cite a “ranking of 50 GEO agencies” directly — which is a post in a corporate blog on sostav.ru dated 29 September 2026, not an editorial ranking.

Alice also quotes prices — from 80,000 to 300,000 roubles a month depending on the agency. These are retellings of public articles, not price lists, but this is what a buyer sees.

One detail about ChatGPT: asked “Top GEO agencies 2026” in Russian, it named Israeli and international agencies. The measurement was taken from Israel, and ChatGPT appears to weigh the user’s location more than the language of the question.

WHERE AI GETS ITS ANSWERS

AI systems retell rankings, industry media and agencies’ own blogs; agency websites with price lists and case studies are rarely cited. The most frequent sources:

SELF-EXPERIMENT: WHAT AI KNOWS ABOUT A YOUNG BRAND

Knowing a brand and recommending it are different things. Asked “What is Bagdaer GEO?”:

• Yandex Alice describes the agency correctly and links to bagdaer.com;
• Gemini describes the agency correctly in English and Hebrew;
• Google in English knows the BAGDAER studio but not the agency; in Russian it confuses us with a similarly named company, in Hebrew with a GeoGuessr player;
• ChatGPT does not know us in any language.

Our GEO pages exist in three languages, and Yandex already shows them for the brand name. The lesson: a website answers “who are you”, while “who should I choose” is answered by other people’s rankings and articles.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR A BUSINESS

1. Test yourself with buyer questions, not your brand name. Revenue comes from answers to “who should I choose” and “how much does it cost”.
2. Get into the rankings and directories AI cites. In English that means “top agencies” round-ups and directories; in Israel, guides in news media; in Russia, sostav.ru and workspace.ru.
3. Publish where AI reads. Every market has its own set of sites that keep appearing in citations.
4. Use one company name everywhere. When there is little data about you, AI substitutes a similar name.
5. Publish your own prices. Otherwise AI takes them from someone else’s article.
6. Account for geography. Test from the country where your customers are.

LIMITATIONS

This is a one-day snapshot, not statistics. Each question was asked once, the measurement was taken from Israel, some systems ran in the author’s account, and Perplexity was tested on 13 of 30 questions. We did not assess the quality of the agencies named — only who AI systems name and how often.

We will publish the full question list and answers together with the repeat measurement in mid-November 2026.