GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and AI Search describe the same shift: how businesses get cited, named and recommended inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. We use GEO and AI visibility interchangeably, in line with the direction the UK PR trade has settled on.
Why this landscape is UK-only, on purpose
Known & Cited operates globally. We measure how AI engines cite and recommend businesses in any market, in any language, and we work with clients well beyond Britain. But K&C is a UK business, run by named people in Bath, and we only put our name to a map we can stand behind.
The field outside the UK is too crowded to chart honestly without rolling the dice on accuracy. A global "top agencies" page would be guesswork dressed as authority, and guesswork is the opposite of what this discipline is supposed to be about. So we cover the UK, properly, with editorial honesty about who has real substance and who is mostly positioning. If you want our read on a market we have not mapped here, ask us directly and we will tell you what we actually know.
The structural shift: AMEC draws the line (May 2026)
If there is one moment that defines UK GEO in 2026, it is not a product launch. It is a warning from the industry's own standards body.
On 20 May 2026, AMEC, the global body for communications measurement, launched its GEO Principles and a Practitioner's Guide to bring rigour to AI-led communications measurement (AMEC, May 2026). The companion piece carried a title that landed like a thrown gauntlet: "Why AI Visibility Alone Is the Next AVE" (AMEC, May 2026).
For anyone outside PR, "AVE" (Advertising Value Equivalent) is the metric the industry spent two decades trying to kill: a vanity number that looked precise and proved nothing. AMEC is now putting the entire UK measurement market on notice that an AI visibility score, divorced from outcome, is heading the same way. The clear message: a single opaque number from a single tool is not a strategy, and a score that nobody acts on is not worth paying for.
This is a structural shift because it reframes the buying question. Through 2025 the question was "who can give us an AI visibility number?". From mid-2026 onward the question is "who can give us a rigorous number and the work that moves it?". A meaningful slice of the UK market is built around the first question. The pressure now is on the second. It is also why K&C has always positioned AVS as discovery-to-delivery rather than a score in isolation. We agree with AMEC, and we built for it.
The methodology axis: how to place every player
Two questions sort the entire UK field. Ask them of any provider and you will know what you are actually buying.
Axis 1 · Delivery model
Dashboard (you log in, you read the numbers, you act on them yourself) versus human-led (named people tell you what to change and help you do it). Some sit in between as a hybrid: a tool wrapped in a service, or a service that ships a tool.
Axis 2 · Scope of work
Measure only (here is the score) versus measure and deliver (here is the score, here is what to change, and we change it for you: the content, the PR, the technical fixes). In between sits measure-plus-advisory: we tell you what to do, you do it.
Map the UK on those two axes and four groups appear:
| Quadrant | What it means | Who sits here |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard, measure only | Buy the screen, read the numbers, act yourself. Best for in-house teams with delivery capacity. | Profound, Waikay |
| Hybrid tool, light delivery | A tool that ships inside a wider PR-tech stack you already pay for. Delivery stays with you or your incumbent agency. | Onclusive GEO Analytics, Notified SOAR, Agentcy |
| Human-led, advise only | Small boutiques that tell you what to change. Measurement runs on a partner platform. Delivery is on you. | Tilio, NeuralAdX, Rank4AI, The GEO Agency |
| Human-led, measure AND deliver | Named people who measure and then do the work: copy, PR, strategy, in-house. The K&C quadrant. | Known & Cited, The Romans (with Serpent), Edelman, PR Agency One, Golin, Burson |
The big network shops obviously have full-service muscle. The differentiator in the top-right quadrant at the K&C and Romans tier is that the same small, named team measures and delivers, at a fundamentally different price and access point. Separately, the SEO shops covered at the end of this page sit on a different axis altogether: "GEO" appears on their pages, but the work underneath is still technical content optimisation and digital PR, with measurement borrowed where it exists at all.
Named products and platforms with real engineering behind them. You can buy a thing, log in, and see a number. The honest question is whether the number ever turns into action.
US-headquartered, but included here because the UK presence is substantial rather than a flag on a map. CEO James Cadwallader positions the London team as a founding team, not a satellite (Profound). The product is a dashboard: Answer Engine Insights, Agent Analytics, Prompt Volumes and agent build tools, SOC 2 Type II, enterprise pricing. Recent moves include London enterprise hiring, a Benchmarking feature added to Agent Analytics (May 2026), and the Zero Click summit hosted in London.
Honest read: the most serious, best-funded dashboard now competing for UK enterprise budgets. Well engineered, UK-CEO-rooted, going hard after the same accounts as every other enterprise tool. If you have an in-house team to act on the data, it is a credible buy. It hands you a screen, not a plan.
Launched 19 March 2025, spun out of InLinks (Waikay). An entity-first, multi-language, multi-model dashboard: Brand Visibility Tracker, Topic Reports, Fact Tracker, Source Tracker and GEO Action Plans. Co-founder Dixon Jones is a UK SEO veteran (author of Entity SEO, ex-Majestic), and that profile gives Waikay outsized share of voice in the UK SEO world. The team co-published the EntityMap open standard and ran a 48-hour visibility experiment claiming a 26-point lift (PPC Land).
Honest read: the most credible UK-built standalone GEO platform, with real founders and a real methodology. It will compete head-on with Profound for the UK agency reseller tier. Still a dashboard at heart: it tells you what AI knows, then leaves the doing to you.
Serpent was announced in PR Week on 27 November 2025 after a year of build and a beta phase (PR Week). It identifies which sources AI relies on, what content it values, which journalists to pitch and which story angles will move the needle, and is sold by subscription to other agencies and in-house teams. The Romans was UK agency of record for OpenAI during the build.
Honest read: the most interesting UK independent-agency GEO product right now. A creative-PR shop that shipped a genuine tool, branded it well, and resells it to peers, effectively a UK-built equivalent to Profound for the agency tier. Worth watching closely.
GEO Analytics launched in late May 2026, available first to Onclusive Unified Platform customers in Europe, with a US rollout planned for July 2026 (National Law Review). It tracks brand mentions and sentiment across five AI engines as part of unified PR analytics, and the launch line leans on action: it does not just show you where you stand, it tells you what to do next.
Honest read: the PR-measurement incumbent move. Buyers already on Onclusive will switch this on by default. It does not change anyone's positioning; it changes the dashboard they already log into. Delivery still sits with the client or their agency.
The SOAR Content Framework (Structure, Originality, Authority, Recency) launched on 13 November 2025 (GlobeNewswire), followed by the AI Press Release Optimizer on 29 April 2026. Both are built into Notified's existing wire distribution rails. UK presence is real but supports a US-led product.
Honest read: the clearest "fit the existing wire" GEO play. SOAR is a genuinely useful framework even if you never pay for the tool. If your comms already run on Notified, this is a sensible bolt-on rather than a new discipline.
Pitched as the first PROps (PR Operations) platform: media monitoring, AI visibility tracking, content creation, journalist CRM, influencer intelligence and an AgentcyAI copilot (Agentcy). The UK push through 2025 and into 2026 included a LinkedIn campaign and floor presence at the AI for PR Conference. The About page references "Resonance + Agentcy" coming together but does not clearly name founders or HQ.
Honest read: real product, smart category bid, weak transparency on team and HQ. The "PROps" frame is clever. UK buyers should ask hard questions about who is behind it before signing.
The full-service shops and the measurement specialists. They can measure and deliver, often at serious scale. A K&C client rarely meets them head-on, but procurement will quote them as the benchmark.
GEOsight launched on 21 May 2025 (Edelman), with the Edelman Intelligence consolidation following in May 2026. The pitch: optimise editorial and owned content to be cited accurately by LLMs, leveraging Edelman's Counter Disinformation Unit and Trust Stream / ArchieAI platforms. Hybrid by design: proprietary audits, content frameworks and real-time monitoring.
Honest read: the most credible big-network GEO product, because it is built on what Edelman is genuinely good at. The UK practice has scale, but a UK midmarket PR or marketing buyer rarely buys at this tier.
Award-winning PR with a Creative Effectiveness proposition powered by the proprietary OneEval measurement framework. Crawford was a primary contributor to the AMEC GEO Principles launched on 20 May 2026 (AMEC) and is on the AI for PR Conference 2026 panel.
Honest read: the most credible UK "GEO measurement" claim of anyone here, because they literally helped write the industry standard. Strong measurement story, less of a productised, consumer-facing offer.
Bentwood leads roughly 120 data scientists pioneering GEO approaches across the network, layered onto a practice that has won the AMEC Communications Research & Measurement Team award seven years running. The offer: outcome-based measurement and insights, including GEO approaches to maximise brand visibility across AI platforms. Bentwood is a speaker at the AI for PR Conference, 18 June 2026 (Communicate Magazine).
Honest read: serious bench, serious modelling. K&C clients rarely meet Golin head-on, but they will hear the name quoted as the gold-standard benchmark by procurement.
Burson is positioning GEO and AI visibility through its EMEA Data & Intelligence team, with no separately branded GEO product surfaced publicly as of June 2026. Spray is a speaker at the AI for PR Conference (Communicate Magazine), and PR Week has described 2026 as a renaissance moment for the practice.
Honest read: has the talent and the reach to ship a real GEO offer, but as of June 2026 is positioning rather than productising. Watch for an announcement after Cannes 2026.
A performance-driven B2B PR consultancy with a GEO services line on its primary nav, marketed hard on the line that "GEO is PR's biggest opportunity in 20 years". GEO sits alongside media relations, content, paid and ABM, with no public proprietary dashboard. Sparey swept the UK PR Honours on 28 April 2026 (PR Personality of the Year, Most Loved by Journalists and the satirical Best Dressed category) (Hard Numbers) and is speaking at the AI for PR Conference, 18 June 2026.
Honest read: brilliantly positioned in the trade press, and the thought-leadership engine is the real product. The GEO offer underneath is thinner than the noise around it.
Not a GEO-native shop, but Mayfield is one of the UK's most consistent AI-in-PR commentators (he writes the Antonym newsletter on humans and machines) and a speaker at the AI for PR Conference, 18 June 2026 (Communicate Magazine). The work is human-led advisory: digital and AI transformation for global organisations, systems thinking plus experimentation.
Honest read: an integrated transformation advisor that has earned its right to advise on AI in comms. Not a GEO-product play, and does not pretend to be one.
Small, UK-active, single-focus consultancies. These are K&C's closest peers in shape. They tell you what to change; the doing usually stays with you. Measurement typically runs on a third-party platform.
Founded mid-2025, live in 2026, single-focused on AI search measurement with structured benchmarking and page-level recommendations (Tilio). Active blogging and "Top GEO agencies UK" content published from its own domain.
Honest read: the closest peer to K&C in positioning: small, single-focus, UK-active. Real but young. Where K&C differs: founder visibility, a longer track record, and embedded delivery (we write the copy and run the PR, not just advise).
A UK GEO specialist publishing the "AI Citation Benchmark" and the "AI Answer Visibility / Share of Voice Benchmark", with third-party tracking via Otterly.ai (NeuralAdX). Productised measurement reports, reseller of the underlying platform.
Honest read: the methodology to benchmark AVS against most directly. Branded measurement in a similar shape, but built on a third-party platform rather than an in-house measurement framework and in-house delivery.
A real, small UK boutique in the AEO camp. Advisory in shape: it tells you what to change, and the doing stays with you. Lighter on public footprint than the cohort's named-benchmark players, with measurement typically run through a partner platform rather than an in-house framework.
Honest read: useful if you already have in-house writers and a PR team to action the recommendations. Less useful if you need someone to deliver them. Where K&C differs: measurement and delivery in one relationship, not advice alone. Ask the three questions at the foot of this page before you commit.
A real, small UK boutique. Advisory in shape: it tells you what to change, and you do the work. Lighter on public footprint than the cohort's named-benchmark players, with measurement typically run through a partner platform rather than an in-house framework.
Honest read: useful if you already have in-house writers and a PR team to deliver against the advice. Less useful if you need the recommendations actually executed. Where K&C differs: discovery-to-delivery in one relationship. Ask the three questions at the foot of this page before you commit.
Also in this cohort, credible SEO/organic shops repositioning into GEO such as Honed and Quirky Digital. Worth a conversation; ask the three questions at the foot of this page before you commit.
Where Known & Cited sits
In a market crowded with dashboards, network products and SEO firms with new vocabulary, K&C is deliberately something different: small but powerful, person-led, and built around delivery rather than measurement-as-a-product.
K&C is not a dashboard. We do not sell access to a piece of software. We run a productised methodology, the AI Visibility Strategy (AVS), that takes a brand from discovery to delivery in a single relationship. AVS measures how AI platforms cite and recommend a business across the engines that actually matter for that brand, scores it, and places it in one of five bands, from Ghost and Whisper through Emerging and Cited to Known and Cited. But the output is a plan and the people to deliver it, not a login. Where the dashboards hand a client a screen, K&C hands a client a strategy, the copy to act on it, and the PR motion to amplify it, all in-house.
- Productised AVS methodology, scored and banded (Ghost, Whisper, Emerging, Cited, Known and Cited)
- Named people accountable for the measurement, not an anonymous dashboard
- In-house GEO-optimised copywriting and GEO-led PR delivery
- Discovery-to-delivery in one relationship, at a price that does not need board approval
- Honest about what is and is not known: a rigorous score, never a vanity number
The mantra: Focus. Measure. Plan. Deliver. Repeat. The dashboard players stop at "Measure". The network PR firms claim "Plan" but outsource or skip "Measure". The SEO rebrands have "Measure" and "Plan" but no real "Deliver" in a comms sense. K&C closes the loop. Our mission is simple: Be Known. Be Cited.
On the methodology axis, K&C sits in the top-right quadrant: human-led, and measure and deliver, alongside The Romans, Edelman and the network big names, but at a fundamentally different price and access tier. We are a GEO consultancy and GEO-led PR partner. That, and the fact that the same small named team measures and delivers, is the differentiator.
Real businesses with real SEO capability that have added a "GEO" or "AEO" services page between late 2025 and mid-2026. Evaluate them on SEO terms, because that is mostly what the work is. A smaller group has built or licensed genuine tooling.
SEO and digital-marketing roots, repositioned heavily around AI visibility across 2024 to 2026, with aggressive content marketing and continuous self-published "leading AI visibility agencies" listicles from its own domain (ClickSlice).
Honest read: a real business with a real founder and strong content marketing. The "GEO leadership" claim is mostly self-published, not third-party validated. Treat the listicles as marketing, not credentialling.
The wider SEO-rebrand tail, listed honestly so you can place it: Impression Digital, Hallam and Re:signal lead with structured-data and digital-PR language repackaged as "AI-readiness", with no new measurement layer. Jellyfish has run a scaled rebrand (the Currys partnership is cited as proof) but with no public proprietary measurement. A smaller group has partial substance via licensed or in-house tools: Croud (BrandAI / SearchEverywhere), Found (Everysearch / Luminr) and ROAST (an AI Branding Index and AI Overviews tool). All are still primarily SEO shops. From a services page alone, a buyer genuinely cannot tell the difference, which is exactly why the three questions below matter.
Honourable mentions: posturing, not yet productising
Real, capable businesses that get talked about in the same breath as GEO, but that are positioning around AI in comms rather than shipping a productised offer. Worth knowing; not yet worth ranking.
MSL
Publicis network PR, vocal on the "AI space race" in 2026 trade coverage (PR Week). Strong narrative, no separately productised GEO offer surfaced.
MHP Group
Established UK corporate and public-affairs agency. Active in the AI-in-comms conversation; no public, branded GEO product as of June 2026.
M&C Saatchi PR
Creative-led PR with AI woven into the wider offer. Positioning and capability, rather than a standalone GEO measurement product.
Brunswick
Top-tier strategic and financial communications. Serious advisory weight on AI and reputation; not a packaged GEO play.
JBP
Long-standing UK PR and public-affairs agency. GEO appears in the conversation, not yet as a productised, measured service.
Carrot
B2B and tech PR with AI-aware positioning. Capability is real; a branded, measured GEO product is not yet on the table.
Battenhall (Battenhall Labs)
Battenhall Labs launched in February 2026 (Battenhall) as an innovation arm rather than a packaged GEO product. One to watch.
UK landscape trends, June 2026
Five movements are shaping the UK field right now. Each one changes how a buyer should read everything above.
1. Productised GEO has shipped at network scale
Edelman GEOsight (May 2025), Notified SOAR (Nov 2025) and AI PR Optimizer (Apr 2026), The Romans' Serpent (Nov 2025), Onclusive GEO Analytics (May 2026) and Golin's GEO methodology all landed inside a twelve-month window. GEO has moved from talk to ship at the top. The UK midmarket is the next wave.
2. The standards body is warning against the very thing the market sells
AMEC's GEO Principles and the "Next AVE" warning (May 2026) put every UK boutique built around a single proprietary score on notice. The buying question is shifting from "who has a number?" to "who has a number and the work that moves it?".
3. SEO shops are rebranding without methodology
A meaningful fraction of UK technical SEO agencies added GEO/AEO pages between late 2025 and mid-2026, mostly without any new measurement. A smaller group built or licensed real tooling. From a services page, buyers cannot tell the two apart.
4. The PR industry is debating GEO without GEO platforms in the room
The AI for PR Conference London, 18 June 2026, is heavy on senior PR practitioners and tied to the launch of Waddington and Verinder's Kogan Page book AI for Public Relations. It is not a GEO-platform showcase. The UK PR industry is treating AI visibility as a PR question for PR consultants, which leaves a clear stage open for a GEO-native operator in 2027.
5. US-built dashboards are establishing real UK presence
Profound's London office (Nov 2025) and Zero Click London are the clearest example. This compresses the room for UK-built dashboards and raises the bar on "why UK?" as a positioning claim. K&C's answer is not "we are British", it is "we are person-led and we deliver".
Honest tier separation: substance versus positioning
K&C's editorial voice is honest, so here is the honest read. The UK market in mid-2026 has more real substance than it had a year ago, and more rebrand and posturing too.
| Tier | What it means | Who sits here |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 · Real substance, named methodology, productised | A published or proprietary method, named people, and a real product or service behind the claim. | The Romans / Serpent, Edelman GEOsight, Notified SOAR, Onclusive GEO Analytics, Waikay, Profound (UK), PR Agency One, Golin, and Known & Cited |
| Tier 2 · Credible boutique, light productisation | Real positioning, mostly human delivery, measurement often on a partner platform. | Tilio, NeuralAdX, Rank4AI, The GEO Agency, Honed, Quirky Digital, Hard Numbers |
| Tier 3 · SEO rebrands with new vocabulary | Real SEO capability, "GEO" on the page, classic technical-SEO work underneath. Evaluate on SEO terms. | Impression Digital, Hallam, Re:signal, Jellyfish, Croud, Found, ROAST |
| Tier 4 · Self-publishing positioning | Real business, real founder, but the "leadership" claim is self-published rather than third-party validated. | ClickSlice, plus the wider listicle ecosystem |
| Tier 5 · Slick presentation, transparency gaps | Polished marketing, real product, weak transparency on team and HQ. Interrogate before signing. | Agentcy |
Three questions that separate substance from positioning
The single most useful filter for any UK buyer is to ask a prospective partner these three questions. If they answer all three cleanly, they are credible.
1. Who is the named person responsible for the measurement?
2. What engines are in the sample, how often is the prompt set refreshed, and is the methodology published?
3. If we accept the recommendations, who does the work: you, us, or a third party?
K&C can answer all three, on this page. A named founder owns the measurement. The engine stack and prompt approach are set out in our methodology. And if you accept the plan, we do the work, in-house.
How this page is sourced
This landscape is built from primary sources, fetched and verified: company sites, trade-press coverage (PR Week, Communicate Magazine), the AMEC GEO Principles, and launch announcements. Where a claim is an inference rather than a stated fact, we have flagged it as such. We have not used every service named here, so comparisons rest on published methodologies, public positioning and our own research. This is a market map, not a critique. The GEO space is better for having more real players in it.