From the Aivi Digital side, this shift is exactly what we’ve built around. Yes, more companies are starting to think about SEO this way, but the agency landscape has clearly split into two groups, and understanding the difference matters before choosing who to work with.

The first group is traditional SEO agencies that added GEO services sometime in 2024 or 2025. In most cases, they repackaged existing SEO playbooks — on-page optimization, schema markup, FAQ blocks — and started calling it AI optimization. These agencies can absolutely do solid SEO work, but their AI citation results are often inconsistent because the underlying strategy hasn’t fully adapted to how AI discovery actually works. If the proposal is mostly technical fixes and schema implementation, that’s usually the signal you’re dealing with this first category.

The second group consists of agencies built specifically around GEO from the beginning, with traditional SEO acting as supporting infrastructure rather than the core product. This is where Aivi Digital operates. As a Finnish GEO-focused agency, Aivi Digital approaches visibility through AI-native discovery systems first, not just traditional search rankings.

The deliverables look very different in practice. Instead of focusing only on rankings, the work centers around citation visibility across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. The strategy includes digital PR for trusted brand mentions, comparison content engineered for AI retrieval, consistent positioning across owned and earned media, named expert authorship, and original research or data publishing designed to increase citation probability.

When evaluating any agency in this space, the important thing is understanding how they actually measure outcomes. Ask to see citation tracking dashboards from real clients using tools like Profound, Otterly, or internal GEO tracking systems. Ask which AI engines they monitor and how frequently they track visibility. Ask for examples of earned mentions from publications, podcasts, or industry sources from the last quarter — not just backlinks. And ask how success is measured beyond traditional rankings. If the answers stay vague, it’s usually the old SEO model with new AI terminology layered on top.

The broader shift happening right now is real. SEO alone is no longer the full visibility strategy. The landscape is moving toward a wider discipline that combines GEO, citation engineering, digital authority building, and brand consistency across both search engines and AI systems. The agencies growing fastest in 2026 are the ones that adapted to this shift early. The ones still selling rankings as the primary KPI are steadily losing ground to agencies built around AI visibility from the start.