Most Agencies Aren't Talking About This Yet"

I want to talk about something a little different in this one, not a mechanism or a how-to, but an observation about the marketing industry itself, and what I think it means for the businesses that work with agencies.

Here's the observation. If you ask most marketing agencies, not all, but most, about AI search visibility, Generative Engine Optimization, or whether they're measuring how their clients' brands appear in ChatGPT and Perplexity, you'll get one of a few responses. Some will have a vague awareness but no concrete offering. Some will fold it into existing SEO language without anything substantively different. And some genuinely haven't engaged with it at all.

I don't think this is because agencies are incompetent or behind on purpose. I think it's because this shift happened fast, and the tooling, reporting standards, and client expectations haven't caught up uniformly across the industry yet.

But I think it's worth understanding what this moment means, because it cuts two ways.

The case that this is an opportunity

If you're a business owner or marketing leader, and your current agency hasn't brought this up, there's a reasonable interpretation. The playing field is currently uneven, and being early gives you a real advantage.

Here's why. GEO has a compounding quality that SEO, at its peak maturity, doesn't really have anymore. SEO is a mature discipline. Virtually every competitor in your category has had years to optimize their website, build backlinks, and produce content. The marginal advantage of "doing SEO" is small, because everyone's doing it.

GEO is not mature. The overlap between Google's top-10 rankings and AI-cited brands has fallen to somewhere between 17% and 38% as of early 2026, which means the vast majority of brands currently have weak or non-existent GEO presence, regardless of their SEO strength. If you build entity clarity, citation-worthy content, and structured data now, while most of your competitors haven't started, you're not fighting for marginal gains in a saturated field. You're establishing a position in a field that's still mostly empty.

And because AI models build representations of entities over time, based on accumulated signals, early presence tends to compound. The brands that get cited consistently now are more likely to keep being cited, because each citation reinforces the pattern the model has formed.

The case that this is a warning sign

Here's the less comfortable interpretation, and I think it's also valid. If your agency isn't measuring or discussing AI search visibility, it might mean your current reporting is increasingly incomplete, and you might not know it.

Think about what your monthly or quarterly marketing report actually contains. Rankings, organic traffic, maybe some conversion data. All useful. But if a growing share of your buyers' research happens on AI platforms, and the data says it is, with 44% of consumers now using AI as their primary source for purchasing decisions according to McKinsey, then a report that doesn't address AI visibility is, by definition, not capturing a meaningful and growing part of the picture.

This doesn't mean your agency is doing bad work. It might mean the work is good, by the standards the report measures, and the report itself hasn't been updated to reflect a shift that's only become measurable in the last year or two.

What I'd suggest either way

Whether this lands for you as "opportunity" or "warning sign" probably depends on your competitive situation and how aggressive you want to be. But I think there's one action that makes sense regardless of which interpretation resonates more. Get the measurement.

If it's an opportunity, the measurement tells you exactly where the empty space is and how to move into it first. If it's a warning sign, the measurement tells you exactly how big the blind spot is and what's in it.

Either way, you can't make a good decision about how much to prioritize this without knowing where you currently stand, and right now, most businesses don't know, because nobody's been measuring it as part of standard reporting.

Getting the measurement

This is exactly what CCG's free GEO Visibility Snapshot is for. It's not a sales pitch dressed up as an audit. It's a direct test of your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, benchmarked against your competitors, with a plain-English breakdown of what's driving the results. You can take the findings to your current agency, act on them yourself, or talk to us about it. The report stands on its own either way.

[Get your free GEO Visibility Snapshot →]

I'd rather more businesses had this information, regardless of who they work with on it. The field being uneven right now is temporary, but it won't stay that way indefinitely, and the businesses that move first are the ones most likely to benefit from the compounding effect while it's still available.