Best AI SEO Consultants in the US (2026): Who You're Hiring

Every name below passed two checks on its own website: an AI search, GEO or AEO service I could read, and a stated US base, office or served region. Several well-known agencies didn't make it because their own pages showed one but not the other. The list is short on purpose; most of this page is about choosing well, because the wrong kind of hire costs you months, not just fees.

Specialists you hire as a person

Lily Ray

Brooklyn-based SEO and AI search professional and founder of the consultancy Algorythmic, for brands that want one experienced voice on how search is shifting.

Drew Garrett

A San Diego strategist working remotely on B2B SaaS, offering a fixed-scope SEO and GEO audit plus consulting on getting a brand named in AI answers.

Rodney Warner

Houston advisor and fractional CMO who lists AI SEO among several services, a fit when AI search should sit inside wider marketing leadership.

Agencies built around AI visibility

Siege Media

An Austin agency describing itself as full-service GEO, tying AI visibility to content production, digital PR and research reports.

Victorious

Covers classic rankings and AEO side by side, aimed at ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, with US location pages including San Francisco, Austin and Chicago.

Omniscient Digital

A B2B-focused team spread across several US states, pairing answer engine optimisation with SEO strategy, digital PR and programmatic SEO.

Growth agencies where AI search is one service

NoGood

A New York-headquartered growth agency that calls itself AI-native, with AEO sitting next to paid, social, creative and CRO in one team.

First Page Sage

Lead-generation firm listing GEO, AEO and agentic search optimisation among its organic services, with a locations page naming the US cities it serves.

From outside America

Lilach Bullock

That's me: a British AI SEO practitioner working remotely, included with full disclosure further down, for teams that want hands-on help plus training to carry it on.

What you're paying an AI SEO consultant to do

AI SEO goes by three names on these sites: AI search, GEO and AEO. They overlap heavily, and most firms sell them together. All three mean getting your brand named and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and the rest, not only ranked in the blue links. If the term is new to you, my plain-English guide to generative engine optimization covers it in a few minutes.

In practice the work falls into four buckets. Research: finding the questions your buyers ask AI assistants and checking who gets named today. On-site changes: pages that answer those questions directly, clear structure, and facts an assistant can lift and cite. Off-site work: getting mentioned on the sites, directories and communities the assistants already trust. And measurement: re-running the same questions every month to see whether you're showing up. A good consultant can tell you which bucket your problem is in within the first call.

Here's a detail that shapes the hire. When this page was researched in November 2026, ChatGPT's answer to "AI SEO consultant in the US" named a handful of agencies and leaned on directory sites, while Perplexity cited individual consultants' own websites. Different assistants trust different sources, so anyone who talks about "AI search" as one channel is oversimplifying.

Person, specialist agency or broad agency

This is the decision that matters most, and it's about the kind of hire, not the name.

A named specialist gives you judgement and direct access. You know who's thinking about your account, and senior people spot things a junior team won't. The weak spot is capacity. One person can't write pages at volume and run digital PR at the same time, so this suits an audit, a strategy, or a team that can do the work once it knows what to do.

An agency built around AI visibility gives you output: content, PR and technical fixes every month. That's the right call when AI search is the core job and nobody in-house has time for it. The cost is distance. You may never meet the person doing the work, so ask who that is before you sign.

A broad growth agency that added AI search gives you one supplier for several channels, which helps when your ads, content and search all need to pull together. The risk is focus. AI search is one line on a long service menu, so find out who on the team owns it and how much of their week it gets.

If Google rankings still bring in most of your leads, don't hire anyone who treats AI search as a replacement for SEO. Where GEO and SEO split is worth reading before that first call, so you can tell which parts of a proposal are new and which are classic SEO with a fresh label.

How firms here charge

None of the firms on this list publishes a price on the pages I read, so I won't guess at numbers. What you can see is the structure. Independent consultants often sell a fixed-scope audit, which is the cheapest way to find out where you stand. Agencies run monthly retainers sized to the output they produce. Fractional leaders charge for a slice of senior time across your whole marketing function. Ask every shortlisted firm for its structure and minimum term up front, and compare like with like.

The one-hour test to run before any sales call

Write down ten questions your buyers would type into an AI assistant before buying what you sell. Not your brand name: real questions, like "best accounting software for a small charity" or "who installs heat pumps in Denver". Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and note in a sheet who gets named, who gets cited as a source, and whether you appear at all.

That sheet takes about an hour, and it does two jobs. It's your baseline, so you can tell in three months whether anything changed. And it's your brief. Send the same sheet to two candidates from different groups above and compare what they say back. The one who tells you something specific about your sheet, rather than sending a capabilities deck, is usually the better hire.

Red flags and questions to ask

Skip anyone who promises you a top spot in ChatGPT. Nobody controls that answer, and a guarantee tells you the seller either doesn't understand the channel or is hoping you don't.

Then put these to every shortlisted firm. Which AI assistants do you check, and how often? Can I see a before-and-after for one real query, with the client's name removed if need be? Who does the work week to week? What happens to my Google rankings while we do this? What changes on my site, and what happens off it? And how will we both know it's working by month three? Agree the queries and the numbers before the first invoice, not after.

My own entry, and why I'm on it

I wrote this page and I'm on it, so weigh my entry the way you'd weigh any list-maker who includes herself. I'm British, I'm not a US firm, and I work in English with clients worldwide, remotely. I'm a practitioner with 23 years in marketing who went all in on AI in 2024. I'm not a research scientist and I don't train models.

My proof is my own site. Between January and September 2026, by my own Search Console and GA4, Google clicks grew from 1,322 a month to 6,412, and visits sent by AI assistants went from 32 a month to 3,599. That's one site, mine, not a promise about yours. I'm one person, not an agency team, so if you need content produced at volume, the specialist agencies above are built for that. And if you're not tied to US firms, the worldwide list sorts consultants by the problem you have.

My recommendation

Take two names from different groups, give both the ten-question sheet, and hire the one whose answer is about your business rather than theirs. Pick a person if you need judgement, a specialist agency if you need output, and a broad agency only if AI search is one part of a bigger growth plan.

If you'd rather your own team learnt to do AI search work, that's where I come in. I run AI training and workshops for teams, and help businesses with AI enablement and workflow automation, so the busywork runs itself and people get time back. Here's how we can work together.