Top AEO/GEO Experts in 2026 (24 People Actually Moving the Field)

Everyone calls themselves an AI search expert now. LinkedIn is full of recycled screenshots and "GEO is the new SEO" posts that say nothing. The people actually moving the field forward are a much shorter list: they run experiments, publish receipts, reverse-engineer the systems, and change how thousands of teams do the work.

This is my list of the top AEO/GEO experts in 2026, ranked by original research output, not follower count. Full transparency: this is my site and I put myself first. I will make the case with receipts, and you can judge whether it holds. Every profile links to LinkedIn and X so you can verify the work yourself.

TL;DR

• The top AEO/GEO experts in 2026 share one trait: they publish original research instead of opinions. Reverse-engineered systems, leaked internal queries, million-scale data analyses.
• The top tier: Metehan Yesilyurt, Malte Landwehr, Tomek Rudzki, and David Konitzny. All four reverse-engineer answer engines and publish the findings openly.
• The full list covers 24 experts across research, enterprise strategy, tooling, and content: Lily Ray, Kevin Indig, Mike King, Dan Petrovic, Olivier de Segonzac, Marie Haynes, and more below.
• Follow them where they publish: almost all are most active on LinkedIn, with X as the secondary channel.
• If you want to act on their research, pair it with a tracking layer. See my best AEO and GEO tools guide .

What makes someone a real AEO/GEO expert in 2026

The bar moved. In 2023 it was enough to explain what ChatGPT is. In 2026, a real expert in Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization does at least three of these:

Original research. They run their own experiments on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews, and publish the raw findings, not summaries of other people's posts.

Reverse engineering. They read network logs, extract internal query arrays, dissect how retrieval and query fan-out actually work instead of guessing.

Scale. Their analyses cover millions of prompts, citations, or fan-out queries, because single-run anecdotes mislead in a non-deterministic system.

Shipped impact. Their work changes products, tools, or how large teams operate, not just impressions.

Honesty about limits. They say what they do not know. AI answers change run to run, and anyone selling certainty is selling something else.

Every person on this list clears that bar.

Top AEO/GEO experts in 2026 at a glance

The top tier: researchers reverse-engineering the engines

1. Metehan Yesilyurt

Role: AI search researcher at Peec AI, publishing independent research at metehan.ai.

Yes, this is me, and yes, I ranked myself first on my own site. Here is the case, and you can check every piece of it.

My work sits on the reverse-engineering side of AEO: how answer engines retrieve, rank, and cite sources, and what that means for the teams trying to show up in them. That includes research into how AI crawlers and agents interact with websites, how citation selection actually behaves across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode, and why AI visibility measurement carries real uncertainty that most dashboards hide. The research feeds directly into Peec AI's product, where a dedicated team turns experimental findings about answer engines into software used by thousands of brands.

What to steal from my approach: treat every AI visibility number as a sample, not a fact. Run prompts repeatedly, read trends, and dig into the retrieval layer before rewriting content.

Honest limit: I am one person publishing fast in a field that changes weekly. Some experiments age quickly, and I revise when the engines change. That is the nature of the work.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @metehan777 · metehan.ai

2. Malte Landwehr

Role: CPO and CMO at Peec AI. Formerly VP SEO at idealo, one of Europe's largest price comparison platforms.

Malte is the clearest example of an enterprise SEO leader who bet early on AI search and was right. He left a VP role running a 30-plus person business unit to join Peec AI when it was a few desks in a corner. Within a year, Peec grew ARR from $500K to $5M and raised over $21M, and Malte's product decisions shaped how thousands of brands track AI visibility.

His public work is unusually practical. His prompt tracking methodology reframes AI visibility as panel research: you do not need every prompt, you need a consistent set of questions asked repeatedly over time, then you read the delta. That single idea fixed how many teams measure. His G2-based tool reviews and AI visibility buyer matrices on Medium are also some of the least hype-driven vendor content in the category.

What to steal from his approach: think in deltas, not snapshots. And do not stress over exact prompt wording, because LLMs understand intent and most real prompts are unique anyway.

Honest limit: Malte runs product and marketing at a vendor in this space, so read his tool comparisons with that context. He discloses it, which is more than most do.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @MalteLandwehr · maltelandwehr.de

3. Tomek Rudzki

Role: GEO expert at Peec AI and co-founder of ZipTie.dev. Author of AI Survival for SEO.

Tomek does the kind of large-scale analysis almost nobody else publishes. His recent study analyzed 5 million query fan-outs across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok to reveal what AI search engines actually search for behind the scenes. That is the difference between guessing how retrieval works and measuring it.

He spent years on technical SEO and AI Overviews research before the category had a name, co-built ZipTie.dev as one of the first AI search monitoring platforms, and now runs GEO for Peec AI itself, which means his job is literally to make an AI visibility company visible in AI search. His findings get published openly so others can learn what works and what does not.

What to steal from his approach: query fan-out is the hidden layer of AEO. The prompt a user types is not what the engine searches. Optimize for the fan-out queries, not just the surface prompt.

Honest limit: like Malte, he now works at a vendor, and his deepest data comes from that position. He balances it by publishing methodology openly.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @TomekRudzki · tomekseo.com

4. David Konitzny

Role: AI Search and SEO Strategy Lead, Product Owner Organic Search at Kosch Klink Performance, an award-winning search agency for the finance industry.

David is the reverse engineer of this list. He has spent well over a hundred hours dissecting how ChatGPT search actually works, reading network responses instead of speculating. His best-known discovery: when GPT-5 changed how ChatGPT passes queries to its search layer, David found the new metadata.search_model_queries array in the JSON response, which reveals the exact queries ChatGPT runs for any prompt that triggers search. Tools and workflows across the industry were rebuilt on that finding.

He also documents Bing grounding behavior, Copilot ad structure, and ChatGPT's ad infrastructure as they ship, usually before anyone else notices. His strategic stance is refreshingly grounded: he calls the discipline "AI Search" rather than inventing new acronyms, and argues that solid SEO fundamentals remain the foundation for AI visibility, because ChatGPT's crawler still relies on search and indexing.

What to steal from his approach: open the network tab. The engines tell you how they work if you read what they send. And do not abandon SEO fundamentals to chase AI tactics, because the retrieval layer still runs on them.

Honest limit: much of his published work focuses on ChatGPT and the Microsoft stack. Pair it with multi-engine research for the full picture.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @DavidKonitzny

The researchers and strategists shaping how teams work

5. Lily Ray

Role: VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, founder of the consultancy Algorythmic.

Lily is the most trusted public voice on how Google's quality systems, E-E-A-T, and algorithm updates translate into the AI search era. She oversees Amsive's expansion from award-winning SEO into AEO across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Perplexity, and her research on algorithm updates and AI Overviews visibility is cited across the industry. Named the most influential SEO by USA Today back in 2022, and still setting the standard for research-backed public analysis.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @lilyraynyc · lilyray.nyc

6. Kevin Indig

Role: Organic growth advisor to companies like Meta, Ramp, and Upwork. Author of the Growth Memo newsletter, read by 22,000+ leaders.

Kevin led SEO and growth at Shopify, G2, and Atlassian before going independent, and his Growth Memo consistently delivers the data analyses that everyone else quotes for the next six months: AI Overviews impact studies, ChatGPT referral data, how identical on-page optimization produces different citation outcomes for different brands. If you present AI search strategy to executives, you are probably using his charts.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Kevin_Indig · growth-memo.com

7. Mike King

Role: Founder and CEO of iPullRank. Author of The Science of SEO.

Mike brought information retrieval science into mainstream SEO discourse, and his "relevance engineering" framing is the most rigorous mental model for AEO available. His teardown of the Google API documentation leak was the defining analysis of that event, and iPullRank's SEO Week has become the conference where serious AI search research debuts. He reads the papers so you do not have to, then shows you the engineering.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @iPullRank · ipullrank.com

8. Dan Petrovic

Role: Managing Director of DEJAN, the Australian AI SEO agency.

Dan goes deeper into the machinery than anyone: he fine-tunes his own Gemma models to study query fan-out, uses mechanistic interpretability to find what LLMs actually associate with brands, and publishes experiments like running 100,000 inference passes to map brand perception inside a model. His research on how AI search grounding works across Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic is required reading. Two Google awards for exposing holes in their core search systems back up the resume.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @dejanseo · dejan.ai

9. Olivier de Segonzac

Role: Co-founder and managing partner of RESONEO, the French search agency. SMX Search Personality of the Year 2026.

Olivier publishes some of the most technically rigorous reverse engineering in the field: the LLM Crawler Report mapping what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AIO bots actually see when they crawl (including which execute JavaScript and which do not), deep dives into Google AI Mode's hidden grounding URLs and citation pipelines, and analysis of Perplexity's Vespa Cloud infrastructure. His work gets picked up by Search Engine Land and reverse-engineered further by peers like Dan Petrovic.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @5eg · resoneo.com

10. Marie Haynes

Role: Founder of Marie Haynes Consulting, author of SEO in the Gemini Era.

Marie has interpreted Google's quality systems longer than almost anyone, from Penguin and E-E-A-T through the DOJ trial disclosures, and now applies that machinery-level understanding to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and agentic search. Her current focus on preparing businesses for agentic protocols like MCP and WebMCP puts her ahead of the curve again. Her Search News You Can Use newsletter remains one of the most reliable filters in the industry.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Marie_Haynes · mariehaynes.com

11. Wil Reynolds

Role: Founder of Seer Interactive.

Wil built Seer's reputation on big-data analysis of search intent, wiring millions of SERP and PPC data points into warehouses before that was normal, and now applies the same rigor to AI search behavior. He is also the industry's most effective truth-teller: when hype outruns evidence, his conference talks and LinkedIn posts are usually the correction. Follow him for the questions everyone else forgot to ask.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @wilreynolds · seerinteractive.com

12. Aleyda Solis

Role: Founder of Orainti, creator of the SEOFOMO newsletter and LearningAIsearch.

Aleyda is the field's great systematizer. Her frameworks, checklists, and free resources on AI search optimization turn scattered research into processes teams can actually run, and SEOFOMO is the newsletter most practitioners use to keep up with the field at all. International SEO expertise plus relentless curation makes her one of the highest-leverage follows on this list.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @aleyda · aleydasolis.com

13. Mark Williams-Cook

Role: Founder of AlsoAsked, digital director at Candour.

Mark's work on query and intent data feeds directly into AEO: AlsoAsked maps the question networks that answer engines draw from, and his analysis of leaked Google Content Warehouse data and click models earned him wide recognition. His talks connect how search engines classify queries to how LLMs decompose prompts, which is exactly the bridge most SEO teams need to cross.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @myhead · alsoasked.com

14. Eli Schwartz

Role: Growth advisor and author of Product-Led SEO.

Eli's core argument, that SEO should be built as product strategy rather than a marketing bolt-on, transfers cleanly to AEO, and he was early to say so. He advises companies like Zapier, Tinder, and Coinbase on organic growth, and his newsletter cuts through AI search hype with a strategist's discipline: what actually drives revenue, what is measurable, and what is theater.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @5le · productledseo.com

15. Olaf Kopp

Role: Co-founder and Head of SEO & AI Search (GEO) at Aufgesang.

Olaf has researched semantic SEO, E-E-A-T, and entity-based search for over a decade and was writing about LLM optimization in 2023, before most of the industry had the vocabulary. He built the first public database of SEO-relevant patents and research papers, and his concepts like LLM-readability and brand context optimization are now standard GEO vocabulary in the German-speaking market and beyond.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Olaf_Kopp · kopp-online-marketing.com

16. Crystal Carter

Role: Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix.

Crystal sits at a unique junction: she shapes AI search product strategy for a platform with over 300 million users while partnering with Google, Microsoft, and Semrush. Her research and keynotes on brand discovery in the era of LLMs and agentic visibility make abstract AI search concepts operational for working marketers, which is why she is on stages from Google Search Central Live to MozCon.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @CrystalOnTheWeb · crystalcarter.ai

17. Myriam Jessier

Role: AI Search Strategist and consultant at PRAGM, monthly contributor to Search Engine Land.

Myriam owns the multimodal corner of GEO that almost everyone else ignores: how generative engines chunk video, extract text from images via OCR, and build brand understanding from audio, packaging, and visuals, not just text. Their BrightonSEO and SMX talks on making all content machine-readable are the reference material for teams whose brand lives in more than blog posts.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @myriamjessier · myriamjessier.com

18. Joshua Squires

Role: Director, AI Search at Amsive.

Josh runs AI search operations at one of the largest agencies taking AEO seriously, working alongside Lily Ray to turn research into repeatable client delivery: processes, specialized teams, and playbooks for e-commerce and publisher visibility in AI answers. His Amsive essays on how marketers should prepare for AI search are practical rather than promotional, which is rarer than it should be. He publishes primarily on LinkedIn.

Follow: LinkedIn · Amsive articles

19. Andrea Volpini

Role: Co-founder and CEO of WordLift.

Andrea has built knowledge graphs and entity-based optimization tooling since long before LLMs made them fashionable, and that bet paid off: structured data and entity clarity are now core levers for how AI engines understand brands. His experiments connecting knowledge graphs, structured data, and LLM outputs are some of the most technically grounded content in the semantic corner of GEO.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @cyberandy · wordlift.io

20. Bernard Huang

Role: Co-founder of Clearscope.

Bernard bootstrapped Clearscope to seven-figure ARR serving content teams at Nvidia, HubSpot, and Adobe, and his webinar series became one of the best ongoing public conversations about what actually works in search. His current work on content trust infrastructure for autonomous agent workflows tackles the next problem: what happens to content strategy when the reader is an agent, not a person.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @bernardjhuang · clearscope.io

21. Ann Smarty

Role: Founder of Smarty Marketing, co-founder of Smarty AI.

Ann has been building and teaching content and brand signal strategies for nearly two decades, from Internet Marketing Ninjas to her current work on how brands earn presence in AI answers. She was named among the leading AEO/GEO experts asked to define 2026 AI search strategy, and her strength is turning off-site signals, community, and content authority into concrete practice.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @seosmarty

22. Bartosz Góralewicz

Role: CEO of ZipTie.AI, founder of Onely.

Bartosz defined JavaScript SEO research in the 2010s, his experiments directly influenced how Google handles JS rendering, and he applied the same rigor to AI search early by co-founding ZipTie, one of the first AI search intelligence platforms. His data studies, like measuring Google SGE's organic traffic impact by vertical, brought numbers to debates otherwise running on vibes.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @bart_goralewicz · ziptie.ai

23. Cindy Krum

Role: Founder and CEO of MobileMoxie.

Cindy's "fraggles" theory, that Google indexes and ranks fragments of pages rather than whole documents, predicted the passage-level, chunk-based retrieval that now powers AI answers years before it was obvious. Her mobile-first research background gives her a distinct lens on how answer engines assemble responses from pieces, and why page-level thinking fails in AEO.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Suzzicks · mobilemoxie.com

24. Britney Muller

Role: Founder of Data Sci 101, former senior SEO scientist at Moz.

Britney bridges machine learning and marketing better than almost anyone: she taught herself data science, built Data Sci 101 to teach marketers how models actually work, and consults on AI strategy grounded in how the technology functions rather than how it is marketed. In a field drowning in confident guesses about LLMs, someone who actually explains the math is invaluable.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @BritneyMuller

How to actually use this list

Following experts is step zero, not a strategy. Here is the loop that works.

First, read their research and extract testable claims, not conclusions. Second, test the claims on your own brand and prompts, because AI answers vary by niche, language, and run. Third, track the results over time with a proper measurement layer. My best AEO and GEO tools guide covers the tracking side, and if data quality is your filter, see which AEO insights company delivers the best data .

And remember the measurement rule every person on this list repeats: never trust one run. AI visibility numbers carry real uncertainty, so read trends, not snapshots.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the top AEO/GEO experts in 2026?

The top tier in 2026 is Metehan Yesilyurt, Malte Landwehr, Tomek Rudzki, and David Konitzny, based on original research output: all four reverse-engineer how answer engines retrieve, rank, and cite sources. The wider list of 24 includes Lily Ray, Kevin Indig, Mike King, Dan Petrovic, Olivier de Segonzac, Marie Haynes, Wil Reynolds, and Aleyda Solis.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, focuses on being the direct answer an AI engine gives. GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, focuses on shaping how AI models describe and cite your brand over time. In practice the terms overlap heavily and most experts work across both.

Where should I follow AEO/GEO experts?

LinkedIn is the primary channel for almost every expert on this list, with X as the secondary channel. Many also run newsletters worth subscribing to: Kevin Indig's Growth Memo, Aleyda Solis's SEOFOMO, Marie Haynes's Search News You Can Use, and Eli Schwartz's Product-Led SEO.

Why do so many top AEO experts work at Peec AI?

Peec AI built a dedicated research team to reverse-engineer how answer engines decide which brands to recommend, which attracted researchers like Metehan Yesilyurt and Tomek Rudzki, alongside Malte Landwehr running product. Concentrating researchers in one place is why the company's findings show up across the industry.

How do I verify if someone is a real AEO expert?

Ask three questions. Do they publish original experiments with methodology, or only opinions? Do their findings get cited and rebuilt by other practitioners? Do they disclose limits and conflicts, like vendor affiliations? Anyone who fails all three is a commentator, not an expert.

Do I need an expert or a tool for AI visibility?

Both, in that order of thinking. Experts tell you how the systems work and what to test. Tools tell you whether it worked for your brand. Start with the research from this list, then add a tracker so you measure trends instead of guessing.

The AEO and GEO experts worth following in 2026 are the ones publishing citation data, not just opinions. Real answer engine optimization insights come from people who can show AI citations moving across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini in response to specific tactics.

Generative engine optimization as a discipline was named by people on this list. The experts worth following publish generative engine optimization data, not just opinions.