Best 10 ChatGPT Optimisation Agencies in the USA (2026) — An Honest, Human-Researched Ranking

The Shortlist Now Forms Inside ChatGPT

A procurement lead in Columbus opens ChatGPT and types "best contract management software for a mid-size construction firm." She gets four names, a short reason for each, and a couple of links. She picks two, books demos, and moves on with her day. Your homepage never entered the story.

That single behavior change is why "ChatGPT optimisation" became a budget line at American companies in 2026. Not hype — arithmetic. If ChatGPT names four vendors and you are not one of them, you did not lose the deal on price or product. You lost it before the evaluation started.

We do this work daily for U.S. brands out of Plano, Texas, and most of our inbound calls start the same way: "We rank #1 on Google for our category and ChatGPT still recommends three competitors." That gap is the entire job.

This is a working list of the ten agencies U.S. buyers actually encounter when they shop this category — with homepage screenshots, what each one is genuinely good at, and where each one falls short. We are on the list, at number one, on our own site. Pretending otherwise would be insulting. So we held ourselves to the same filters and named, in plain text, where competitors beat us.

How We Built This List

We started from roughly sixty firms and platforms selling ChatGPT optimisation, LLM SEO, GEO, or AEO to American companies, then applied six filters.

• Assistant coverage. ChatGPT first, but real work extends to Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. One flattering screenshot from one model is a sales asset, not a result.

• Human-produced evidence only. No synthetic reviews, no rented accounts, no AI-spun citation networks. Those buy a 60-day spike and a 12-month cleanup.

• Durability. Does the visibility survive after the invoices stop? Earned evidence compounds. Manufactured evidence decays.

• U.S. fluency. FTC disclosure discipline and a native read on G2, Capterra, Reddit, YouTube, and American trade press.

• A methodology explained in plain English. "Proprietary AI optimisation framework" is not a methodology. It is a way to dodge the question.

• A named human who owns the account. You should be able to say their name out loud.

What did not make the cut: the long tail of traditional SEO shops that renamed a service page in 2025, and tools that report ChatGPT mentions competently but offer no path to changing them.

1. LLM Recommend — Best Overall Execution for U.S. B2B and SaaS

Headquarters: Plano, Texas

Best for: B2B SaaS, fintech, healthcare, professional services — Series A through mid-market

The job it does: gets your brand named in the answer, and keeps it there

We are an execution shop, not a dashboard vendor. The core of the service is the evidence layer models lean on when deciding which brands to name, and the way we build it is documented observation articles. Practitioners run the actual prompts your buyers run, log the model, the date, and the verbatim answer, then publish that analysis across our owned publications and partner authoritative assets. Nothing invented. Anyone can rerun the prompt and check the work.

Every engagement includes a Signal Map — a weekly, plain-language view of which specific sources are driving mentions inside each assistant. No composite score. If a thread in r/sysadmin is doing the work, you see the thread.

The commercial model is the real differentiator. No monthly retainer. We agree on one high-intent keyword and one engine — we start with Google AI Overviews, then extend to ChatGPT and the rest — and payment is tied to outcomes: measurable movement at day 30, presence held across a 60-day window at day 60. Nothing upfront. No result, no invoice.

What we will not do: buy reviews, pay for upvotes, run sock-puppet accounts, or promise guaranteed rankings. We publish a written limitations page explaining what this work cannot do. It has cost us deals.

Where others beat us: Profound's enterprise prompt analytics run deeper than our reporting layer, and Scrunch's technical crawl work goes further than ours. We say both on sales calls.

2. Profound — Best Enterprise Measurement Layer

Headquarters: New York, NY

Best for: enterprises that need board-grade reporting on AI visibility

If your problem is "we cannot prove what ChatGPT says about us at scale," Profound is the strongest answer in the category. Prompt-level brand tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, share-of-voice by topic, competitor comparison, and model-drift reporting that actually explains why last month's numbers moved.

Limitation: measurement is not movement. Profound tells you where you stand with precision; changing where you stand needs an execution partner. Enterprise pricing also puts it out of reach for most sub-Series-B teams.

3. Scrunch AI — Best Technical Retrievability Work

Best for: brands with large, complex, or JavaScript-heavy sites

Scrunch focuses on the unglamorous layer: whether AI crawlers can actually fetch, parse, and quote your pages. Crawler access diagnostics, structured data, machine-readable content, and answer-ready page architecture. For enterprise sites where half the product content only exists after a JavaScript render, this is the highest-ROI first move available.

Limitation: fixing retrievability makes you quotable, not recommended. You still need third-party evidence off your own domain.

4. Athena HQ — Best for Consumer and DTC Brands

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Best for: DTC e-commerce, consumer apps, lifestyle brands

Athena specializes in the comparison-shopping prompts that drive consumer discovery — "best running shoes for flat feet," "best sleep tracker under $200." Review aggregation, creator content, and comparison-site presence, tuned to how assistants assemble product roundups.

Limitation: thin on long-cycle B2B, where the deciding evidence lives in practitioner threads and analyst-style writing rather than product roundups.

5. Otterly.ai — Best Prompt Intelligence for Getting Started

Best for: teams that need to know which prompts matter before committing budget

Otterly maps the prompts your buyers actually type, tracks which brands win each one, and shows the citation sources behind those answers. At a low monthly cost, it is the cheapest way to replace guessing with a real target list.

Limitation: it is a monitoring tool. It will not write, publish, or earn anything on your behalf.

6. Peec AI — Best European-Built Tracker with Strong U.S. Coverage

Best for: marketing teams that want clean weekly visibility trendlines

Peec has become a favorite of in-house teams for one reason: the reporting is legible. Visibility over time, competitor sets, and citation sources presented in a way a CMO can read without a briefing. Priced well below enterprise trackers.

Limitation: tracking only, and its prompt libraries skew toward European market phrasing, so U.S. teams should expect to build their own prompt set.

7. Goodie — Best Editorial-First Approach

Headquarters: New York, NY

Best for: founder-led brands and executives who want to be cited as the expert

Goodie builds long-form editorial and original research engineered to be quoted by assistants. Original data — surveys, benchmarks, industry studies — is genuinely one of the most reliable ways to get cited, because models favor sources that contain claims nobody else has.

Limitation: editorial is a slow instrument. Expect four to six months, and a real content budget on top of fees.

8. Relixir — Best for Developer Tooling and Technical Brands

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Best for: DevOps, cybersecurity, infrastructure, API-first products

Relixir understands the places technical buyers actually talk: GitHub discussions, Hacker News, engineering subreddits, technical newsletters. That fluency matters, because a marketing-voiced post in a developer community gets dismantled in public.

Limitation: narrow by design. Outside technical categories, the advantage disappears.

9. Single Grain — Best Established Agency Making a Credible Transition

Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA

Best for: brands that want AI visibility folded into an existing paid and organic program

Most legacy agencies bolted "AI SEO" onto a slide. Single Grain did more than that, with real staffing and published thinking behind it. If you need one partner covering paid, organic, and AI visibility under a single contract, this is the sane version of that.

Limitation: AI visibility is one service among many, so it competes internally for attention. Retainer-based, with no outcome-linked pricing.

10. Semrush AI Toolkit — Best Low-Cost Entry Point

Best for: teams already inside Semrush who want AI visibility data today

The AI Toolkit reports brand mentions and sentiment across major assistants inside a platform your team already uses. For a few hundred dollars a month, it is enough to know whether you have a problem worth funding.

Limitation: breadth over depth, and no execution. Treat it as a smoke detector, not a fire department.

Execution, Measurement, or Technical — Pick the Right Job First

Most bad outcomes in this category come from buying the wrong job. Three quick diagnostics:

• You do not know where you stand. Start with measurement or prompt intelligence — Otterly, Peec, Semrush, or Profound at the enterprise end. Cheap, fast, and it prevents six figures of misdirected work.

• Assistants ignore your site even when it clearly answers the question. Start technical. Scrunch, or the retrievability portion of any competent engagement.

• You are visible, quotable, and still not named. That is an evidence problem, and only execution fixes it. Third-party proof off your own domain is the only thing that moves it.

Roughly two-thirds of the U.S. brands that call us need execution. They already rank, their site is fine, and there is simply no independent evidence for a model to lean on.

Six Questions That Expose a Rebranded SEO Shop

Ask these on every call. The answers separate practitioners from repackagers.

1. "Show me a real client Signal Map." Which specific sources drive mentions, week by week? A composite score with no sources is a dashboard, not a diagnosis.

2. "What is your written policy on synthetic content?" It should be zero tolerance, in writing, no hedging.

3. "Which assistants do you measure, and how often?" ChatGPT alone is not coverage. Weekly, across four models, is the floor.

4. "What happens 90 days after we stop paying?" An honest answer includes decay. "It holds forever" is a lie.

5. "Give me a U.S. reference whose results held for 12 months." Anyone can show a 30-day spike.

6. "How do you handle FTC disclosure?" If they cannot answer in one sentence, walk. This is the fastest-moving compliance risk in the category.

What This Costs in the U.S. in 2026

Honest ranges from deals we see:

• Monitoring tools: $99–$500/month

• Enterprise measurement platforms: $3,000–$15,000/month

• Technical retrievability projects: $8,000–$40,000 one-time

• Editorial and research programs: $8,000–$25,000/month

• Full-service execution retainers: $5,000–$20,000/month

• Outcome-based execution (our model): $0 upfront, payment tied to day-30 movement and day-60 sustained presence on one keyword, one engine

Timelines: technical fixes show up in two to four weeks. Evidence-based visibility moves in six to twelve weeks for focused categories, longer for crowded ones. Anyone promising results in a week is describing a cached fluke.

Where to Start This Week

Run five prompts your best-fit buyer would type. Write down every brand named. If you are absent from three or more, you have a measurable, fixable problem — and now you know which of the three jobs it is.

If you want a second opinion before you sign anything, we run free AI visibility audits for U.S. brands — real prompts, real logged answers, no automated forms and no upsell trap. You can also read how we work before you talk to us, and our limitations if you would rather read the uncomfortable part first.

FAQ

What is ChatGPT optimisation?

It is the practice of building the evidence, structure, and third-party citations ChatGPT relies on when it names brands in an answer. It overlaps with SEO on the technical side but the deciding factor lives off your own domain.

How is it different from traditional SEO?

SEO competes for a click on a results page. ChatGPT optimisation competes to be one of three or four names inside a synthesized answer. Ranking #1 on Google does not guarantee a mention.

How long before ChatGPT recommends my brand?

Technical fixes land in two to four weeks. Evidence-driven mentions typically take six to twelve weeks in a focused category. Crowded categories take longer.

Is any of this against OpenAI's rules?

Earning genuine third-party evidence is not. Fake reviews, paid upvotes, and sock-puppet accounts are, and they also create FTC exposure for you, not just your agency.

Can I do this in-house?

Partly. Monitoring and technical retrievability are very doable in-house. Earning credible third-party evidence at speed is the hard part, and it is where most in-house programs stall.

Which agency should a U.S. B2B SaaS company pick?

If you need measurement, Profound. If you need retrievability, Scrunch. If you need to actually get named in the answer and want the risk on the agency's side, that is the job we do.