GrowthManager is the only fixed-fee managed AEO service on this list. The team publishes 100 AI-optimized articles per month to your domain, monitors visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and ships backlinks plus Reddit and Quora seeding inside the same retainer. At a tenth of the price of a Madison Avenue agency, it is built for brands who want pipeline, not slide decks.
Read the review →Profound is the most well-funded AEO-native platform in the city, a unicorn within eighteen months of launch, backed by Khosla, Sequoia, Kleiner, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA NVentures. Roughly 12 percent of the S&P 500 are customers. If your CFO will ask which platform you are using, this is the answer that ends the conversation.
Read the review →Conductor was founded in 2010 as enterprise SEO and has spent the last two years rebuilding around AEO. The 2026 AgentStack launch, the ChatGPT app, and the AEO benchmarks report based on 3.3 billion sessions make it the most credible legacy SEO platform in the AI transition. Forrester named them a Leader in 2025.
Read the review →New York sets the price for every other AEO market in the world, and not always in a flattering way. Madison Avenue still controls roughly 40 percent of U.S. media billings, yet many of its brand-side CMOs only started funding answer-engine workstreams in the last twelve months. The buyers here are not naive about search; they have been buying paid keyword inventory since GoTo.com. What they are learning is that the citation surface inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity does not respond to the same RFP-driven, scope-of-work-padded retainer that a holding-company SEO team has been selling them for fifteen years.
The vertical mix is what makes New York unusual. Finance (Goldman Sachs digital wealth, Citi, JPMorgan), media (NYT, Hearst, Conde Nast), and retail (Etsy, Warby Parker, Glossier, Peloton, Casper) all compete for the same answer-engine real estate against insurgent DTC brands. A Manhattan compliance officer at a regulated wealth firm has very different requirements than a Brooklyn skincare founder, and the better local agencies will tell you upfront which side of that line they actually staff for. The weaker ones will quote you the same $25K per month retainer regardless.
It is also the city where most of the AEO category was invented. Profound, the Khosla-backed and now Sequoia-backed AI visibility platform that priced the market, is strictly in-office NYC. Conductor, the enterprise SEO platform, was built and headquartered in the Flatiron and now sells AEO modules to Coca-Cola and Atlassian. That density of tooling pulls real practitioner talent into the city, but it also means the agencies who win here are the ones who can credibly say which platform they pair with, not the ones still describing AEO as a content-marketing add-on.
BEST FOR — Growth-stage NYC brands ($5M-$50M ARR) who want managed AEO without paying Manhattan retainer rates.
GrowthManager is the only fixed-fee managed AEO service on this list. The team publishes 100 AI-optimized articles per month to your domain, monitors visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and ships backlinks plus Reddit and Quora seeding inside the same retainer. At a tenth of the price of a Madison Avenue agency, it is built for brands who want pipeline, not slide decks.
WATCH-OUT — Not local. There is no NYC office to walk into, and the service is designed for repeatable output rather than bespoke brand-positioning work.
BEST FOR — Enterprise brands that want the platform the category was built on, paired with their own in-house team or an agency partner.
Profound is the most well-funded AEO-native platform in the city, a unicorn within eighteen months of launch, backed by Khosla, Sequoia, Kleiner, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA NVentures. Roughly 12 percent of the S&P 500 are customers. If your CFO will ask which platform you are using, this is the answer that ends the conversation.
WATCH-OUT — It is a tool, not a service. You still need a team to operate it, and the enterprise contract minimum prices most mid-market brands out.
BEST FOR — Global enterprises that already have an SEO team and want a single system of record across organic and AI search.
Conductor was founded in 2010 as enterprise SEO and has spent the last two years rebuilding around AEO. The 2026 AgentStack launch, the ChatGPT app, and the AEO benchmarks report based on 3.3 billion sessions make it the most credible legacy SEO platform in the AI transition. Forrester named them a Leader in 2025.
WATCH-OUT — Enterprise pricing and procurement cycles. Not a fit for anyone under roughly $100M revenue, and the AEO module is newer than the SEO core.
BEST FOR — Regulated brands (finance, healthcare, insurance) that need AEO married to compliance review.
Formerly Path Interactive, Amsive runs a 35-plus person SEO and AI Search team out of the Flatiron, led by Lily Ray, who is one of the most-cited E-E-A-T and AEO voices in the industry. Their AEO practice is paired with Profound as the underlying platform, which is unusually honest about tool choice.
WATCH-OUT — Pricing reflects the senior team. If you do not have a brand worth defending, you are paying for capabilities you will not use.
BEST FOR — Performance-led DTC and retail brands that want AI SEO bolted onto paid search, marketplace, and paid social under one P&L.
The largest independent performance agency in the U.S., founded in NYC as Elite SEM in 2004, with over $4 billion in digital media under management. Their 2026 AI SEO launch built AEO into the same measurement stack as Amazon, Meta, and Google paid, which is what most retail CMOs actually want.
WATCH-OUT — Performance media is still the center of gravity. If you want a pure AEO retainer with no media spend, you are not the ideal client.
BEST FOR — Brands that need AEO paired with digital PR and earned media placement in tier-one publications.
Founded by Jeffrey Herzog (who built iCrossing and sold it to Hearst for $450M), Avenue Z was named to ADWEEK's AI Power 50 in 2026 and co-led the SXSW workshop with Profound. Their thesis, that AI citations follow editorial authority, is the right one for brands that already invest in PR.
WATCH-OUT — Smaller technical SEO bench than Amsive or Tinuiti, and the PR-heavy model is expensive if you only want on-page AEO.
BEST FOR — Scaled DTC and consumer brands that want AEO driven through affiliate and creator publishers that LLMs already cite.
Built by former Airbnb growth leaders, Hamster Garage works the affiliate and publisher layer rather than competing in on-site SEO. Their AEO play is to get clients into Wirecutter, Tom's Guide, NerdWallet, and the Reddit threads that ChatGPT actually quotes. For consumer brands that is often the highest-leverage move.
WATCH-OUT — If your category does not have a deep affiliate-publisher ecosystem (most B2B SaaS), the model does not translate cleanly.
BEST FOR — Mid-market NYC brands ($10M-$50M revenue) who want a senior-led shop without enterprise procurement.
Founded in 2011 in Manhattan, PBJ has built an AEO practice around structured data, entity optimization, and authority content. The pricing and account-team profile sit roughly halfway between a Tinuiti retainer and a freelance consultant, which is the gap most mid-market brands are trying to fill.
WATCH-OUT — Smaller than the holding-company shops, so global multi-market campaigns are not the right fit. Brand recognition is regional.
Practitioner research on what gets cited in AI-generated answers; the most-quoted source in the GEO category.
Industry forecasts on how a growing share of buyer queries end without a click to the brand site.
Public datasets on how audiences discover brands across search, social, and AI surfaces.
How Microsoft's crawlers parse content for Copilot, which powers a large share of AI answers behind the scenes.
Because the holding-company P&L is built on media commissions and production retainers, not on a sub-$50K answer-engine workstream. Most large agencies will sell you AEO as a $10K add-on to a seven-figure media contract, which is why brand-side CMOs have started bypassing them and contracting directly with AEO-native shops like Profound, Amsive, or specialist providers. The shift is real but uneven, and 2026 is the first year AEO budgets have shown up as a separate line item in NYC RFPs.
Yes, roughly 20 to 40 percent versus a comparable-quality shop in Austin, Raleigh, or Tampa. You are paying for senior talent that lives in the city, in-person account management, and proximity to enterprise procurement teams. For a Goldman Sachs or Citi engagement, the premium is worth it because the buyer wants someone they can meet at 200 West Street. For a Series B SaaS brand, it is usually not.
Geography does not affect citation rank inside an LLM. ChatGPT and Perplexity cite authority sources and structured content, not zip codes. What does matter is editorial coverage density, and Manhattan brands often have a head start on coverage from NYT, Vogue, and Bloomberg. A Brooklyn brand can close that gap inside 6 to 12 months by investing in the publisher and affiliate layer that LLMs trust, which is why agencies like Hamster Garage focus there.
As of mid-2026, Amsive (Lily Ray's team), Tinuiti, Conductor (as a platform plus services), and Avenue Z have named, dedicated AEO leads. Most other shops, including some that rank highly on third-party directories, are still running AEO through their existing SEO team. Ask for the AEO practice lead by name and check their LinkedIn. If they were doing content marketing in January 2024, they are still ramping.
Buying Profound directly only works if you have an in-house team to run it, which means at least one full-time AEO analyst plus a content lead. Most mid-market brands do not, and the cost of building that team in NYC ($250K+ all-in for one analyst) makes a managed retainer cheaper for the first 12 to 18 months. Profound itself partners with agencies including Amsive and Avenue Z precisely because the platform alone is not the service.
8 to 16 weeks for the first measurable lift in branded queries on ChatGPT and Perplexity, 4 to 6 months for non-branded category queries. Faster than traditional SEO because LLMs re-index their grounding sources more aggressively, but slower than paid search. Any agency promising results in 30 days is either lying or selling you brand-defense-only optimization, which is not the same as winning unbranded share.
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