Julian Goldie ranks his own Goldie Agency first in a list of 10 generative engine optimization agencies

• What's offered: GEO/SEO consulting aimed at getting a business named in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI answers. Access starts with a free one-on-one strategy call (video, 01:47).
• Model versions: none are specified. The claims refer generically to "Google's AI answer" and "Google's AI features."
• Paid add-on: a GEO tutorial section inside the paid AI Profit Boardroom community on Skool (Reddit post).
• Other agencies: each of the nine is described in one or two lines. No pricing or performance data is given for any of them.

• Method as described: every page includes an original case study, content is posted across several of Goldie's own sites plus a community and a subreddit, new topics are covered within 24 hours, and all of it sits on 10 years of SEO and link building (video, 05:10–05:46).
• How the proof works: the main receipt is that searching "best GEO expert" returns an AI answer naming Julian first, drawing on several Goldie-owned pages (video, 04:16). This is circular evidence: the AI answer is built from the same pages that make the claim.
• Reproducibility: each check is a single query run once. There is no logged-out, location-controlled or repeated sampling. That matters because one multi-engine study found only 10.6% of AI-cited URLs were still cited 28 days later (Everything-PR).
• Overlap with research: adding statistics and quotations matches tactics tested in the GEO paper (arXiv).

The video concedes that much of its best proof comes from Goldie's own sites (06:05). No independent corroboration of any receipt was found.

• GEO became a formal research topic with the KDD 2024 paper. It reported visibility gains of up to about 40% on its own benchmark (arXiv).
• Google's guidance says AI Overviews and AI Mode depend on core ranking systems and unique content (Search Engine Journal). That supports the video's point that "GEO sits on top of SEO" (05:36).
• Other "best GEO agency" lists also exist. One Indie Hackers reviewer argues that most such firms are repackaged SEO (Indie Hackers).

• Conflict of interest. The ranker owns the #1 agency. On the September page, that fact appears in the body text rather than up front (AI Profit Boardroom).
• Inconsistent lists. The October list has ten agencies and the September list has seven. DEJAN, NP Digital and Single Grain drop out, and the team size changes from "50" to "small."
• Citation isn't recommendation. In Lily Ray's study, self-ranked listicles were cited but lost the recommendation 69% of the time (Siteoscope).
• Video disclosure. The narrator is an AI avatar, and the video says it does not guarantee placement in AI answers (06:21).

• Treat self-ranked lists as marketing. Ask for named client sites, Search Console exports and repeated query sampling over time, not one-off screenshots.
• The checklist itself is sound: proof, a method explained in plain words, and solid SEO basics (06:51). Apply it to the ranker as well as to the agencies ranked.
• Measure persistence. Because citations churn quickly, run any GEO reporting over at least 28 days and across several engines (Everything-PR).
• Use Google's own guidance as the baseline before paying for llms.txt files or chunking work (Gigazine).