Lourdes Paul Agilan · 2026-07-22
GeoCited vs. iPullRank: Two Different Approaches to AI Visibility
Note on verification: two things in this post could not be independently confirmed — Mike King's "2025 Search Marketer of the Year" title (found only on iPullRank's own site, not in independent Search Engine Land award coverage we could locate) and any client-satisfaction data for iPullRank (their Clutch and DesignRush profiles currently show no submitted reviews). Every claim about GeoCited is limited strictly to its confirmed schema.org positioning, the "Glass Box" standard, the "Share of Answer" metric, and the PromptRanked data asset — nothing else about GeoCited is asserted here.
Where they actually differ: iPullRank is a 2014-founded, New York-based enterprise SEO and content agency, led by founder Mike King, that has spent the last two years rebuilding its offering around "Relevance Engineering," a proprietary framework for getting brands cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other answer engines, layered on top of a long-standing technical SEO and content practice serving large brands like American Express, MGM Resorts, Chase, Nordstrom, and Adidas. GeoCited is a newer, narrower alternative built specifically for B2B SaaS companies, structured around a published measurement standard ("Glass Box"), a named metric for AI citation frequency ("Share of Answer"), and a proprietary cross-category citation dataset (PromptRanked), rather than a traditional agency retainer. They aren't really fighting for the same buyer: iPullRank fits large, well-capitalized enterprises that want one partner for technical SEO, content, and AI search strategy together; GeoCited fits B2B SaaS teams that specifically want a transparent, reproducible number for how often their product gets named inside AI answers, without committing to a six-figure enterprise engagement to get it.
What iPullRank does well, and who it's a good fit for
iPullRank was founded in 2014 by Mike King and is based in New York, with a team in the 10–49 employee range according to its Clutch profile, which also lists a minimum project size of $50,000+ and undisclosed hourly rates. The agency describes itself as a "Black-owned digital marketing agency" on its About Us page, and positions itself today as an "enterprise SEO, content strategy, and AI Search agency" on its homepage, with a stated headline claim of "$5B+ in results" delivered for clients, including a cited $2.4 billion in incremental revenue for a bank client and $290 million in revenue for an ecommerce marketplace client (also per About Us), figures that are self-reported and not independently audited in anything we found.
Where iPullRank has genuinely distinguished itself is in publishing real thinking on generative/answer engine optimization well before it became a crowded category. Its "Relevance Engineering" framework, described in An Introduction to the Relevance Engineering Framework and formalized as a service line, combines information retrieval concepts (embeddings, passage retrieval, query fan-out) with content strategy and technical SEO. King has also published a long-form AI Search Manual, including chapters on why the "blue links" era is ending and a detailed GEO methodology chapter covering structured data, knowledge graphs, and NLP-level content signals (tokenization, entity recognition, semantic chunking). On measurement specifically, iPullRank has proposed its own framework of "Input, Channel, and Performance" metrics along with seven named proprietary scoring methods (Cosine Similarity, Comprehensive Coverage Index, Strategic Entity Richness, and others), detailed in From Clicks to Citations: New AI Search Measurement Metrics. In a Search Engine Land interview, King argues search has become "a branding channel" and that most SEOs still don't understand how query fan-out actually works inside AI Overviews, a genuinely useful reframe for teams still measuring success by click volume alone.
The independent, third-party read on iPullRank is consistent: strong technical depth, enterprise scale, high price of entry. Embarque's review credits iPullRank with "pioneering concepts like Relevance Engineering" but flags "cost barriers," "enterprise focus over mid-market agility," and a content-depth approach that doesn't always align with companies needing fast, conversion-focused iteration. Optimist's ranking of AEO agencies places iPullRank at #4 of 10, calling it "best for enterprise brands with complex site architectures," while explicitly noting the $50,000 minimum "puts them out of reach for most companies" and that their sweet spot is large enterprise, "making them potentially misaligned for $20M ARR SaaS companies." Notably, iPullRank's own published case studies cover mortgage, financial services, telecom, self-storage, a car publisher, and an ecommerce marketplace, none of them a B2B SaaS company, and DesignRush lists their client industries as automotive, entertainment, finance, and retail, not software. That's not a knock, it just means their published track record doesn't (yet) show B2B SaaS-specific results.
If you're a large enterprise, a bank, retailer, telecom, or media brand, with a real budget and a need for deep technical SEO plus AI-search strategy from one full-service partner, iPullRank has a legitimate, well-documented case for being on your shortlist.
What GeoCited does differently, and who that's a better fit for
GeoCited starts from a narrower premise: it exists specifically for B2B SaaS companies trying to get their product named, by name, inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, not general brand visibility across all of AI search, and not technical SEO. Rather than a retainer built around strategic recommendations delivered by consultants (the model most third-party reviews describe for agencies like iPullRank), GeoCited is organized around three specific, checkable artifacts: the "Glass Box" standard, under which every number it tracks is published with a reproducible methodology rather than held as a black box; "Share of Answer," its own metric for how often a brand is cited or recommended across AI answer engines for a defined set of prompts; and PromptRanked, its own dataset tracking AI citation share across many SaaS categories specifically.
That combination matters for a specific kind of buyer: a B2B SaaS company that doesn't need (or can't yet justify) a six-figure enterprise engagement covering technical SEO, content strategy, and AI search all at once, but does want a defensible, reproducible answer to how often AI models actually recommend it by name, and against whom. Because the methodology is published rather than proprietary and opaque, it's also easier for a smaller team to sanity-check the number itself instead of taking a vendor's word for it.
How to actually decide
The honest version of this decision isn't "pick the GEO specialist" or "pick the SEO agency," it's about what you're actually trying to buy. If you need one partner to handle technical SEO, content operations, and AI-search strategy together, at enterprise scale, with a team that's been publishing on this topic since before "GEO" was a common term, iPullRank has a real, well-documented case, and its $50,000+ minimum reflects a genuinely different scope of work. If you're a B2B SaaS company whose actual question is narrower, are we being cited by name in AI answers, how does that compare to competitors, and can we verify the number ourselves, that's a more specific problem, and one where a published, reproducible methodology matters more than a full-service retainer. Worth noting plainly: as of this writing, when we tested a generic "recommend a GEO agency" prompt across a live AI model, iPullRank was the name that came back, not GeoCited, which is itself a useful, unpolished data point about where each company currently stands in the exact channel this whole category is about.
Sources cited: iPullRank, Clutch, Search Engine Land, Embarque, Optimist, DesignRush, AEO Engine.