Which UK AI visibility agencies do AI assistants actually recommend? (August 2026 data)

On 19–20 August 2026 we ran a controlled baseline: ten fixed buyer questions (things like "best AI visibility agency UK", "GEO agency UK — who should I use?", "AI SEO agency Manchester", "GEO agency for UK manufacturers"), asked verbatim in ChatGPT (search enabled), Perplexity and Gemini. First answer only, no regenerating, every answer screenshotted and logged. The full method and findings are in our published baseline study.

The comparison below counts one thing: how many of those 30 answers recommended each agency, and across how many of the three assistants. That's it. No pay-to-play, no affiliate links, no editorial reshuffling.

What this measures is AI visibility — which happens to be the service everyone on this list sells, so it's a fair scoreboard for the industry to be judged on. What it does not measure is quality of work, client results, or value for money; see the honest caveats further down before choosing anyone, including us.

Only three agencies were recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini in our baseline — the strongest signal in the dataset:

Tilio — recommended in 6 of 30 answers, across all three assistants and across generic, informational and niche questions. On this data, the most visible AI visibility agency in the UK right now.

Rank4AI — also recommended in 6 of 30 answers across all three assistants. Notably, Perplexity's recommendation cited Rank4AI's own published research ranking UK agencies — a working example of the comparison-content strategy in action.

Found — recommended in 4 of 30 answers across all three assistants. The largest and longest-established agency in this tier, with AI visibility offered alongside traditional search marketing.

MarGen — 4 recommendations, from Perplexity and Gemini.

FirstMotion — 3 recommendations, all from ChatGPT. A good illustration of engine-specific visibility: strong presence on one assistant, absent from the other two.

Clutch SEO — 3 recommendations, all from Perplexity, concentrated on Manchester-area questions.

Because we're a Manchester agency, two of our ten questions were local. The assistants' Manchester recommendations were dominated by established full-service agencies rather than AI-visibility specialists: Embryo and Connective3 (each recommended in both local questions by Gemini), alongside IDHL and Cure Digital. On this data, no GEO-specialist firm yet owns the Manchester answers — the local recommendations go to big traditional agencies with recently added AI services.

Fifteen further agencies were recommended twice each, and dozens more exactly once — across 30 answers, the assistants named over forty different businesses and cited 104 different domains. If there's one thing to take from that: this market has no entrenched winner yet. The recommendations are fragmented, engine-specific, and moving month to month. (That fragmentation finding, with the full numbers, is in the baseline study.)

Recommended in 0 of 30 answers.

We took this baseline days after our own site first became readable to AI crawlers, before publishing supporting content or earning any third-party citations. We're publishing our zero, this comparison, and our full method because documenting the climb is our methodology — and because we'll re-run the identical 30 queries on 16 September and 14 October 2026 and update this page with whatever the data says. If the agencies above are still ahead of us, this page will still say so.

Being recommended by an AI is not a mark of quality. It measures visibility — which, to be fair, is the product being sold here, but it tells you nothing about what an agency is like to work with or what results they deliver.

These systems can be influenced — that's the entire industry. Some visibility above will reflect genuinely useful published content; some reflects agencies engineering their own citations. Our data can't distinguish motive, only outcome.

It's a snapshot with a small sample. Thirty answers, ten questions, two days in August 2026, UK phrasing. Assistants' answers vary over time and by user. Treat the tiers as a photograph, not a league table carved in stone — that's why we've committed to dated re-runs.

What we'd actually suggest you assess when choosing: ask any agency (including us) to show you their measurement method, a dated before/after for a real client, and which specific engines they moved the needle on. If they can't produce a logged baseline, they're guessing.