We Asked AI for the Best Agency 450 Times. Here Is What It Cites

The short answer

When you ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity which agency to hire, almost half of the pages they cite are agencies ranking agencies, and most of those lists put their own author at #1. We sent 450 buyer-style questions across 10 marketing services on October 8, 2026 and typed every one of the 3,192 web citations that came back. 1,504 of them (47.1%) went to an agency's self-published "best agencies" list. Of the 458 lists we could parse, 301 (65.7%) rank the publisher first. Directories like Clutch were 12.1% of citations. Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube together were 10.

A disclosure before the numbers: we publish this kind of list ourselves. Our best AEO agencies list ranks AEO Labs first and says so in its first paragraph.

Key findings

1. Agency lists are the biggest source by a wide margin. 47.1% of web citations went to agency-published rankings. Add other agency pages (13.5%) and 60.6% of everything cited was written by agencies about the agency market.

2. Most of those lists rank their author first. 301 of 458 parsed lists (65.7%) put the publisher at #1, and 365 (79.7%) include the publisher somewhere. Weighted by how often each page was cited, 71.3% of citations to these lists land on a self-first page.

3. Self-first lists show up in most answers. 319 of 450 answers (70.9%) cite at least one page where the author ranks itself #1. Gemini did it in 145 of 150 answers, Perplexity in 144 of 150, ChatGPT in 30 of 150.

4. The author often ends up in the answer. In 478 of the 1,071 citations to self-first lists (44.6%), the answer that cites the page also names the page's publisher.

5. The first link is usually a list. Of 358 citations in the first position of an answer, 187 (52.2%) were agency lists. Directories were 49 and media 17.

6. Perplexity barely changes its sources. ChatGPT and Gemini change most of theirs. A page Perplexity cited appeared in all 3 repeats 99.2% of the time. ChatGPT managed 27.0% and Gemini 23.5%.

Where the citations come from

Here is the full mix across all three engines. ChatGPT also returned 420 Google Maps place links, which are not web pages, so they are left out of every share below.

The sources most marketers think of as neutral are a thin slice here. Directories and review platforms (Clutch, DesignRush, The Manifest, G2 and similar) were 12.1%. Media was 6.6%. Community sites barely showed up for agency questions.

One domain stood out. thriveagency.com was cited 81 times, in 79 of the 450 answers, across 8 of the 10 service categories. All 12 of its pages that the engines cited rank Thrive first, and 56 of the 79 answers that cite the site name Thrive. 11 of the 25 most cited domains in the whole study were agencies citing their own rankings.

How the three engines differ

Perplexity leans hardest on agency lists, at 53.6% of its citations, and returned exactly 10 citations every time. Gemini cites agencies' own service pages far more than Perplexity does (23.9% against 2.0%). ChatGPT cited very little: 342 web links across 150 answers, and 92 of those 150 answers had no web citation at all, only Maps cards or nothing. Its column rests on a small base.

Consistency splits the same way. We ran every prompt three times on each engine. Perplexity cited the same pages on 498 of 502 checks. ChatGPT repeated a page in all 3 runs 54 times out of 200, and Gemini 187 times out of 796. The wording of the answers changed on every repeat for all three engines; Perplexity's sources just stayed put.

Category by category

The pattern held in all 10 services. Agency lists were the top source type in every category, from 35.3% in email marketing to 55.2% in SEO.

Directories carry real weight in web design (24.3%) and PPC (21.6%). Shopify development and email marketing lean on vendors, at 29.1% and 28.0%; in those two categories the vendors are Shopify apps and email platforms. Digital PR is the one category where media gets past 15%.

The AEO category

Answer engine optimization is our own market, so we looked at it closely. Its 45 answers produced 351 web citations across 142 distinct pages. Agency lists were 54.1% of them. Vendors were 17.1%, mostly AI visibility tool companies publishing "best AEO agencies" posts. Directories were 5 citations out of 351 (1.4%), the lowest directory share of any category.

The most cited AEO page was an agency list on unifiedplatforms.com, cited in 21 of the 45 answers by all three engines. Second was a list on loudface.co, cited 15 times, all by Perplexity. Of the 13 agency list pages among the 18 most cited AEO pages, 12 rank their publisher first.

The agencies named most often in AEO answers were iPullRank (23 of 45), Siege Media (22), Omniscient Digital (22), First Page Sage (22) and NoGood (19). AEO Labs was named in 0 of the 450 answers, and aeolabs.ai was cited 0 times. Brand counts are a lower bound, because the parser misses some short forms of a name.

What it means if you are hiring an agency

Read an AI recommendation the way you would read a ranking published by one of the companies on it. Click the sources. If the first link is a "best agencies" post on an agency's own domain, check who wrote it and where they put themselves. In our data, two out of three put themselves first.

Three checks help. Look for the same agency named across sources with different owners, not repeated across one site's pages. Ask the same question twice, especially on ChatGPT or Gemini, where most sources change between runs. And treat a directory profile or an independent media mention as a different kind of evidence from a self-published list, while knowing that directories were only 12.1% of what the engines cited.

What it means if you run an agency

The pages that get cited for "best agency" questions are mostly lists, and agencies write most of them. In 44.6% of the citations to a self-first list, the answer also named the list's publisher. That figure measures co-occurrence: the cited page and the named agency show up in the same answer. It does not prove the list caused the mention, since an agency that writes these lists may also be well known for other reasons.

Two things follow. First, get onto other people's lists, because they are the biggest source pool in every category we tested. Second, if you publish your own, disclose it in the first paragraph and give readers enough facts about each agency to check. Our checklist for getting cited by AI covers the on-page side, and our AEO service page explains how we run this for clients.

How we ran the study

• Prompts. 10 service categories: AEO/GEO, SEO, PPC, content marketing, digital PR, web design, Shopify development, social media, email marketing and B2B demand generation. Five buyer-style prompts each, such as "What are the best X agencies in 2026?" and "Best X agency for a small business with a limited budget". We wrote the prompts ourselves, and real buyers phrase things in many more ways.
• Engines. DataForSEO's LLM Responses API with web search on: ChatGPT as gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14, Gemini as gemini-2.5-flash, Perplexity as sonar, each capped at 1,500 output tokens. These are API models, not the consumer apps, which may use different models and retrieval.
• Volume. 3 repeats of every prompt on every engine: 10 x 5 x 3 x 3 = 450 calls, all 450 completed, for $10.01 in API spend.
• Date and market. All calls ran on October 8, 2026, with DataForSEO's default United States location and English. Results change week to week and will differ in other markets.
• Links. Gemini cites through Google redirect links. We resolved all 1,328 distinct redirects to their real destination the same day, with 0 left unresolved. ChatGPT's 420 Maps links are excluded from shares.
• Typing. Every cited page got a type from URL rules, a homepage fetch for unknown domains, and hand review of every domain cited 5 or more times. Domains cited 1 to 4 times were not all checked by hand. In a random hand check of 45 agency list pages, 3 (6.7%) turned out to be something else (a software tool, an awards directory and an agency service page), so the agency list share carries a few points of error.
• Self-rank check. We fetched each of the 470 distinct agency list pages and parsed the headings to find where the publisher ranks itself. 458 loaded. The parser agreed with the 45-page hand check on 43 pages, and both misses were self-first pages it scored as not first.
• Sample size. 450 answers is 45 per category and 150 per engine. Differences of a few points between categories or engines are noise.

The data covers public, generic prompts only. No client data, client prompts or client names went into it.

Key takeaways

• 47.1% of web citations in AI answers to "best agency" questions point to an agency's own ranking of agencies.
• 65.7% of the parsed lists rank their publisher first (a floor; the hand check found 35 of 45).
• 319 of 450 answers cite at least one self-first list.
• Directories are 12.1% of citations, media 6.6%, and Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube together 10 citations.
• Perplexity repeats its sources 99.2% of the time across runs; ChatGPT 27.0% and Gemini 23.5%.
• We publish a self-ranked list too, and we disclose it.

Cite this study

You can quote any finding here with attribution to AEO Labs and a link to this page. Suggested citation: AEO Labs, "We Asked AI for the Best Agency 450 Times. Here Is What It Cites" (2026), aeolabs.ai/blog/ai-agency-recommendations-study.

The raw data lives in a private repository. Email aidan@aeolabs.ai and we will send the citation-level CSVs, the cited-pages file, the self-rank results, the 45-page hand check and the scripts that collected and analyzed it all.