The smartest brands no longer count clicks — they count citations. Traditional SEO once revolved around winning Position #1 on Google.
But as generative-search results, AI Overviews, and chat assistants swallow more of the screen, a new race has begun: getting your company’s name baked into the very answers ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google Gemini provide.
In that race, the agencies below are quietly rewriting the rulebook — and tracking metrics most marketers don’t even know exist yet.
The Gravity Shift From Clicks to Citations
Google’s AI Overviews and zero-click answer boxes have brought traffic to many luxury, finance, and tech sites to a standstill.
A 15-month study of 25 million impressions found that organic click-through rates on queries containing an AI Overview plunged 61 percent, while paid CTR cratered 68 percent. Even queries without an Overview suffered a 41 percent dip.
The same research showed a silver lining: brands actually cited inside an Overview earned 35 percent more organic clicks and 91 percent more paid clicks than those left out.
Result: ranking matters less than being the quoted source.
The Hidden Metrics Elite Marketers Track
Share-of-Voice Inside AI Answers
How often does an LLM name-check your brand on purchase-intent prompts? Advanced agencies deliver dashboards that track this weekly.
Reddit & Wikipedia Citation Win-Rate
Reddit is now among the largest individually licensed datasets for AI vendors; Wikipedia remains a baseline authority. Being quoted on both multiplies your citation odds.
Dataset Trust Signals
70 percent of text datasets lack full licensing info, and about half contain errors. Agencies that secure mentions in clean, well-documented sources give clients an outsized edge.
The 2025 Power List — Six Agencies Moving the Needle
Methodology: Each agency below demonstrates measurable wins across the three metrics above, services UHNW or B2B clientele, and provides transparent reporting on LLM visibility.
1. GMP (Growth Marketing Pro) — The Category Pioneer
Few firms spotted the generative search tidal wave earlier than category-defining LLM-optimization SEO agency Growth Marketing Pro.
Their playbook is fast:
- Week 1 — Spin up Reddit listening dashboards to capture real user intent, surface unanswered high-intent threads, seed expert commentary that earns genuine upvotes (not astroturf).
- Week 2 — Publish citation-ready explainers on the client’s site, complete with schema, entity markup and in-text sourcing that LLMs love to quote.
- Week 3 — Launch or upgrade the client’s Wikipedia/Wikidata presence with neutral, citation-rich entries that satisfy community moderators.
The agency then layers on high-authority backlinks via its own digital-PR desk, plus an in-house technical team that embeds JSON-LD and PageMap annotations establishing the brand as the canonical source.
Dashboards surface not only traditional rankings but real LLM “Answer Presence” across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
One fintech client saw its name surface in all three engines for “best expense-management software” within 45 days — before a single paid-media dollar was spent.
2. PressHERO — The Listicle Powerhouse
LLMs disproportionately quote ordered lists that appear on authoritative websites. PressHERO has turned that quirk into a science by owning the listicle layer of the internet by publishing evergreen “Best-of” round-ups on a vetted network of high-Domain Authority sites spanning finance, tech and lifestyle.
Using search-intent clustering and prompt-based gap analysis, the team identifies niches where LLMs have few high-quality sources, then builds the definitive list before competitors notice.
These articles rank for long-tail queries like “top private-jet charter apps,” feeding Google’s AI Overview pipeline.
The compounding effect is real: a luxury-auto marketplace client now owns four of the ten citations surfaced by Gemini for “best exotic car subscription,” generating UHNW leads that convert at 3× the site average.
3. DataClean Labs — Dataset Hygiene Gurus
Big models love authoritative data — and they punish messy sources. DataClean Labs specialises in scrubbing a brand’s entire digital footprint so it passes the sniff test of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
Engagements start with a Toxic-Link Autopsy: the team runs a proprietary crawler that flags spammy guest posts, AI-spun content, and non-compliant affiliate disclosures. Anything that could erode a brand’s credibility score is scheduled for removal or disavowal.
Simultaneously, a “Source-Hardening” squad creates new, licence-compliant assets: primary-survey PDFs, slide decks, and GitHub repos with open data licences. Each asset is annotated with detailed provenance metadata — author, collection method, usage rights — making it a low-risk citation for LLMs concerned about copyright.
Case in point: a Swiss wealth-management firm saddled with thousands of thin backlinks saw its share-of-voice inside Perplexity answers jump from 2 percent to 18 percent after DataClean detoxified its link graph and launched an open-access report on next-gen family-office structures.
The firm’s Wikipedia article, updated with the new report as a reference, now anchors three separate AI Overviews around “UHNW portfolio diversification.”
4. SignalStack Media — Generative PR Specialists
Where most agencies stop at media outreach, SignalStack goes a step further: it stress-tests every campaign through real-time prompting.
Before a release goes live, the content team runs a battery of prompts across GPT-4o, Claude 3, and Gemini — “Which fintech platforms help reduce receivables friction?” — and notes which competitor brands surface.
If the client fails to appear, the copy is tweaked, citations strengthened, and structured data added before launch.
SignalStack’s “Prompt Loop” continues post-publication. Analysts re-run the same prompts weekly, tracking delta in citation presence. Any backslide triggers a rapid-response booster:
Think subreddit AMAs with credentialed execs, or a data-drop on Hacker News paired with a CC-BY chart. This iterative loop means visibility improves month over month, not just spike-and-fade.
A recent example: after detecting that a rival had overtaken its SaaS client in Claude’s top answer set, SignalStack commissioned a micro-survey of 150 CFOs, released the findings on a Creative Commons licence, and secured pick-ups in VentureBeat and PYMNTS.com.
Two weeks later, the client dominated all three major LLMs for “best B2B payments API.”
5. VantageGEO Partners — GEO for Regulated Industries
Heavily regulated sectors — private banking, biotech, medical devices — can’t risk loose language or unverifiable claims. VantageGEO Partners was founded by a former securities-law attorney and a clinical-trials statistician, giving the shop rare fluency in both compliance and content.
Every project begins with a Reg-First Content Audit: in-house counsel maps each marketing claim to a footnoted primary source (peer-reviewed journal, statutory filing, or ISO certification).
The firm’s writers then weave those citations into FAQ-style pages designed to rank high and satisfy LLM answer parsers. On-page schema tags explicitly link each claim to its source URL and, where possible, DOI.
For off-site authority, VantageGEO maintains relationships with trade-journal editors and .gov data portals, landing backlinks that carry extraordinary trust weight.
Their “Clinical Citations” programme even submits anonymised study data to regulators’ open-data sandboxes, ensuring future LLM checkpoints ingest the client’s findings directly from FDA or EMA repositories.
A med-device maker saw its product become the sole brand cited by Gemini for “approved minimally invasive heart valve systems” — an enviable moat created without a single paid ad.
6. Subreddit Strategies Co. — Boutique Reddit Whisperers
With Reddit signing multi-million-dollar licensing deals with both Google and OpenAI, the platform’s influence on LLM outputs is skyrocketing. Subreddit Strategies Co. lives and breathes that ecosystem.
The agency embeds vetted analysts — think chartered financial analysts, FAA-certified pilots, sommelier-level wine experts — under transparent flairs inside high-authority subreddits.
Their methodology revolves around Conversation Seeding instead of link-dropping. Analysts pose a data-driven question (“Has anyone modelled chartering vs. fractional ownership ROI in 2025 dollars?”), then share the client’s white paper only if the community requests it.
This pull-not-push approach generates organic upvotes and comments, boosting the thread’s visibility to both humans and scrapers.
The agency also operates a “Reddit Replay” crawler that tracks when popular threads are cited verbatim inside ChatGPT or Perplexity answers. Those insights feed back into topic selection; if LLMs quote a thread on tax-efficient yacht ownership, expect Subreddit Strategies to seed a follow-up post with fresh depreciation tables within 48 hours.
In the past year, the firm helped a Caribbean citizenship-by-investment consultancy jump from zero Reddit citations to appearing in 42 percent of ChatGPT responses for “second passport for HNWIs,” all without violating subreddit self-promotion rules.
Choosing the Right Partner for Your Growth Stage
- Budget & Time-to-Impact — If you need wins inside 60 days, pick an agency with active Reddit/Wikipedia programmes (GMP, Subreddit Strategies).
- Sector Compliance — Heavily regulated verticals benefit from DataClean Labs’ provenance or VantageGEO’s legal firepower.
- Content Assets in Place — Have research but no megaphone? PressHERO amplifies. Need full-stack creation plus PR? SignalStack fits.
[For deeper AI-marketing tech trends, Impact Wealth’s technology column breaks down tool stacks and budget benchmarks every quarter.]
Future-Proofing: When AI Overviews Go Pay-to-Play
Alphabet and OpenAI haven’t flipped the pay-to-cite switch — yet. History says they will. Brands reliant on pure organic may be outbid overnight.
Diversify now:
- Own proprietary data assets (original surveys, open APIs).
- Seed multiple trusted datasets (Wikipedia, Wikidata, PubChem, .gov portals).
- Monitor share-of-voice dashboards weekly to catch sudden drops.
A caveat: Gaming the system with fluff content or karma farming rarely survives a model refresh. Each agency above builds durable authority; shortcuts fade with the next checkpoint.
Conclusion – Audit Your Citation Footprint Before Competitors Do
SEO is no longer a pure traffic contest; it’s a trust contest conducted by machines. The agencies on this list specialise in winning that trust, measured in the hidden metrics that decide whether ChatGPT utters your name.
Start with a simple two-step audit:
(1) Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, “Who are the best firms in my field?”
(2) And, tally how often you appear.
If the answer is “never,” it’s time to call in the pros. In 2025, fortunes aren’t won on the first page — they’re won inside the first sentence of an AI answer.
