Which German SEO agencies AI recommends in 2026, and where it gets that from

Three agencies lead. Claneo was named in 200 of 633 AI answers (31.6%), Aufgesang in 178 (28.1%) and Seokratie in 167 (26.4%). Their margins overlap, so they are a leading group and not a first, second and third place. Eight more agencies, from SEO-Küche to xpose360, sit between 11.7% and 18.2%. 47 of the 109 agencies we tracked were not named once. The four engines disagree strongly: each has a different most-named agency, and some agencies exist in one engine only. The page the engines cite most is a list of the best SEO agencies that an agency wrote itself. The method is the one we used for GEO agencies in the US earlier this month.

The overall table further down rewards agencies that the engines name on the broad questions. Buyers rarely ask broad questions. If you already know whether you run a shop, sell to other businesses or need SEO and Google Ads from one team, start here: the three most-named agencies for each of the ten questions. Two rows deserve a second look. On the B2B question the engines name Evergreen Media in 30 of 62 answers and TRYSEO in 17, and neither is in the overall top ten. On the question about transparent prices none of the overall top ten is named more than twice in 62 answers; the engines recommend agencies that publish their prices, and most of those are not on our list. And when the question is how to find a reputable agency, not one of 61 answers names an agency at all. The engines answer with a checklist and point to the BVDW certificate and to Google's own documentation.

Claneo is named in 200 of 633 answers, Aufgesang in 178 and Seokratie in 167. Their 95% ranges overlap, so this is a leading group of three and not a podium with a fixed order: with another week of answers the order inside the group could change. Behind them, eight agencies sit between 11.7% and 18.2%, from SEO-Küche to xpose360, and again the neighbours are within each other's ranges. After that the numbers fall quickly. The larger finding is at the other end of the list. 47 of the 109 agencies were not named once in 633 answers, and another 22 were named between one and five times. The ten most-named agencies account for 65.6% of all 1,854 namings. For most agencies on the list the honest reading is that the engines do not know them yet, at least not for these questions.

Read the four engine columns next to each other and the idea of one AI ranking falls apart. Wolf of SEO is named 54 times, 48 of them in Google AI Overviews and not once by ChatGPT or Perplexity. get traction is named 26 times, every time by ChatGPT. xpose360 gets 44 of its 74 namings from AI Overviews and one from ChatGPT. Bloofusion and eology, fifth and tenth overall, do not appear in a single one of the 149 AI Overview checks. Each engine also has its own leader. ChatGPT names Claneo most often (58 of 162), then morefire (47). Gemini names Seokratie most (66 of 160), then Claneo (48) and Peak Ace (46). Perplexity names Claneo in 82 of 162 answers, more than half, followed by SEO-Küche (56) and Aufgesang (54). Google AI Overviews name Aufgesang in 69 of 149 checks, then Wolf of SEO (48) and xpose360 (44). For a buyer this means one engine's shortlist is one opinion. For an agency it means that being visible in AI is four separate questions with four separate answers. We have looked at the reasons separately in why AI engines disagree about your brand.

The 633 answers cited 449 different domains. The most-cited one is ucentric-media.de, the website of an online marketing agency in Regensburg, cited in 207 answers, most often for its own article on the best SEO agencies. It is not alone. seo-kueche.de is cited mostly for its own comparison of the ten best GEO and SEO agencies, mister-seo.com and keyweo.com for list articles of the same kind. Ten of the fourteen most-cited domains belong to agencies or, in one case, an SEO consultant. Three are directories or review platforms (OMR Reviews, Sortlist, Agenturtipp) and one is the industry association BVDW, cited mainly for its SEO quality certificate page. So a large part of what AI says about German SEO agencies is built from what agencies publish about each other and about themselves. Ucentric Media, for the record, is not on our list of 109 and therefore has no row in the tables; the engines named it in 5 of the 65 answers to the small-business question. ChatGPT and Gemini also show the web searches they run before answering; Perplexity and AI Overviews do not. In the 296 answers where we could see them, the word the engines added to the buyer's question most often was Deutschland. After that came BVDW (67 searches), Referenzen (61), Leistungen (36), KMU (35) and E-Commerce (32), then Zertifikat and Qualitätszertifikat. In 104 searches the engine went to one site directly, most often more-fire.com (18), bvdw.org (16), claneo.com (12) and seokratie.de (11). The engines are looking for proof: a certificate, named client references, and a page that says plainly what the agency does. There is no search volume for these queries, because nobody publishes one, and we do not estimate any.

It counts what four engines said in eight days. It does not measure the quality of anybody's work, and an agency that is never named may be excellent. The tables cover the 109 agencies on our list. The engines named others. On the rankings question Radyant came up in at least 8 of 65 answers, on the shop question OPEN in at least 6 of 62, on the small-business question ADWING in at least 6 of 65, and on the pricing question Trofy and Pixelegg in at least 4 of 62 each. We say at least because names outside the list are captured less strictly than names on it. They will be on the list for the next edition. Where an engine shortens a name, a naming can be missed. We saw this for one agency outside the top 20 (Webgeist instead of Webgeist GmbH, three answers). And the questions were asked in German for the German market; the same questions in English produce different answers.

Three things follow from the data, and none of them is a trick. 1. Be findable for the specific question. The B2B row is led by two agencies with pages that say B2B SEO in so many words; tryseo.de was cited in 38 of the 62 B2B answers and evergreen.media in 33. The engines match the question to a page. 2. Be present where the engines read. For these questions that is OMR Reviews, Sortlist, Agenturtipp, the BVDW certificate page and, whether one likes it or not, the best-of lists that other agencies publish. 3. Publish the proof the engines search for. References with names, a clear services page, and prices if the buyer's question is about prices. The pricing question was won by agencies that put numbers on their website. If you want to see what the engines say about your own agency, the free AI visibility check shows in about a minute whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention you. We plan to repeat the measurement during 2026 at this address, with the agencies the engines named added to the list.

The table further up stops at twenty. Here are all 62 agencies that were named at least once, in the same format. The complete data for all 109 agencies is also available as a CSV file, published under CC BY 4.0: use it freely, credit CrunchJunkie and link to this page as the source.

These 47 agencies were on the list and no answer named them. That says nothing about their work. It says that four engines did not bring them up for these ten questions in these eight days, and for most of them it is the normal state of affairs: nearly two thirds of all namings go to ten agencies. 42DIGITAL, Bytebizz, CAMEDIA, CreativeConsult.de, cyberpromote, Die Linkagentur, Die SEO-Firma, Digital Nativ, Digitaleffects, Dirk Schiff, DIXENO, Eberle Consulting SEO Agentur, Exportarts, felixlitsch.de, G38, IMA Marketing & Consulting, internetwarriors, Kim Labs, KlickPiloten, KOCH ESSEN, LA Click, marmato, Matthias Klenk, move elevator, Nabenhauer Consulting, NETPROFIT, netspirits, njoy online marketing, No-black-box-seo, Online Marketing Solutions, Online-Profession, Onlinemarketing-Strategen, RegioHelden, Schoch & Friends, Semotion, SEO Revolution, seoCon, Seofaktum, seomaxx, seooffensive, SEOPT, V4 Visions, Veriseo, VISIO.7, Waldhirsch, wambo, Webgalaxie.