10 Best AI SEO Experts in 2026 (Ranked by Real Work)

August 6, 2026 · AI Tool Reviews

Almost every list of the best AI SEO experts recycles the same general SEO names under a new title, and most of those people have not published anything specific to AI search.

I went looking for who has actually shipped work on how ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Overviews decide who gets named.

Original research, named frameworks, dated talks, products people can use. That is the bar for this list.

What is an AI SEO expert?

An AI SEO expert makes a brand visible inside AI-generated answers rather than only in the blue links. The work covers Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and it turns on entity clarity, extractable page structure, schema, and being mentioned across sources those systems already trust.

It overlaps with SEO but is not the same job. Ranking first and being named in the answer are separate outcomes, and a page can hold one while losing the other. That is the gap the people below work on.

Why most AI SEO expert lists are useless

Read a few of these roundups and the same problem shows up. The title says AI search, the roster says 2019.

Percepture's roundup gives its own founder around 300 words of dedicated write-up, while Aleyda Solis and Rand Fishkin get about a dozen words each. That is not a list. It is a landing page wearing a list costume.

The self-ranking habit runs deep here. I read six of these pages: Percepture, SEO Discovery, Julian Goldie, Searchbloom, Usama Khan and Kasra Dash's own roundup. In all six, the person who wrote it, or the firm they work for, came out on top. Search any of those names and see for yourself.

So a fair question to ask me: why am I on my own list?

Because I do this work for money, and you deserve to know that when you weigh what I say about everyone else. I put myself at number three, gave my entry the same length as the rest, and named my own limitation like everyone else got.

On the order: this is not a scored ranking and I am not going to pretend it is one. It runs roughly from the people selling AI search work you can actually buy today, through the people producing the research the rest of us build on, down to people worth reading for one specific thing I name in their entry. Every entry says who it is not for. Read those lines as carefully as the rest.

The 10 best AI SEO experts in 2026

The best AI SEO experts in 2026 are Nathan Gotch, Charles Floate, Ryan Doser, Wil Reynolds, Mike King, Aleyda Solis, Andrew Holland, Kyle Roof, Rand Fishkin and Kasra Dash. Each one below is there for a specific, dated piece of AI search work, and each entry says plainly who should not hire them.

I checked each credential below against a primary source, and I link each person's own site so you can verify it yourself. Where someone is better to learn from than to hire, I say so.

1. Nathan Gotch (Best for a productized AEO engagement)

Nathan Gotch is co-founder and CEO of Rankability and has repositioned around answer engine optimization through AEOconsultant.ai, which sells tiered AEO consulting to SaaS and B2B companies. His book AI SEO For Dummies is due from Wiley in September 2026.

He closed the Gotch SEO agency in late 2025 to focus on software and education, so treat that brand as past tense.

Best for: SaaS and B2B teams that want a defined engagement rather than advice.

Read the fine print: The site's headline claims, a 99% success rate and 1,000% visibility growth in 30 days, are self-reported and not independently verified. Engagements are application-gated with no public pricing.

2. Charles Floate (Best for understanding aggressive tactics)

Charles Floate describes his own career as spanning white, grey and black hat SEO, and his product line matches that: parasite SEO, private blog networks and paid links. He ran a Ranking In AI training webinar in May 2026, so the AI search material is real.

He has been penalized by Google twice and wrote both up himself. A pure spam manual action in May 2014 deindexed seven of his public-facing sites, and a link-based penalty in December 2016 demoted his main blog along with 28 network sites.

Best for: Knowing what aggressive operators are doing, so you recognize it.

My honest take: These are tactics I would not run on a business I cared about, and the penalty history is the evidence. Read him to understand what is being done to your SERPs, not to copy the playbook.

3. Ryan Doser (Best for solo operators and small teams)

I am an AI-first marketer with over a decade in digital marketing, and I took this site from zero to 12.1K AI citations in six months, alongside 5.77K clicks and 890K impressions in Search Console over that period. Those are my own numbers from my own dashboards, so weigh them the same way you weigh anyone else's self-reported results on this page. I run one-off AI search strategy sessions at $500 an hour rather than retainers, and I got a dental IT client to number one in AI search for their category's head term.

My approach is entity clarity, schema, and content structured so an assistant can lift an answer out of it and name you.

Best for: Founders and consultants who want a roadmap they can run themselves.

Where I fall short: I sell hours, not delivery. If you want a team to run the roadmap for you, I am the wrong call and Seer or iPullRank are better fits.

4. Wil Reynolds (Best for original AI search data)

Wil Reynolds founded Seer Interactive in 2002, and Seer publishes some of the largest AI search datasets anyone is sharing publicly. Their GEO Olympics study analyzed over 231,000 LLM responses across seven platforms and found seven-day Wikipedia views were the strongest predictor of LLM visibility.

What earns him the position is that he argues against his own sales pitch. On the No Hacks podcast in April 2026 he called AI visibility a vanity metric and disclosed Seer's own 80% organic traffic loss over two years while pipeline revenue grew.

Best for: Marketers who want evidence over opinion.

The limitation: You cannot hire him directly, only Seer, at enterprise pricing. He is here for the culture that produces this research and for saying the unprofitable thing out loud. Seer's research team authored the studies themselves.

5. Mike King (Best for enterprise technical AI search)

Mike King founded iPullRank and does the most technically demanding work I have found in this space. He coined and popularized relevance engineering as an SEO discipline, reframing the job around embeddings, query fan-out and retrieval rather than keywords.

He also verified the 2024 Google Content Warehouse API leak. Rand Fishkin received the documents and King analyzed them. Both published in late May 2024, and Google confirmed the documents were real on 29 May.

Best for: Enterprise teams that need the actual retrieval mechanics, not tips.

Who it is not for: This is the most demanding material in the field and iPullRank is enterprise priced with no public rates. A solo operator will not get through the door or through the reading.

6. Aleyda Solis (Best for free AI search education)

Aleyda Solis runs the boutique consultancy Orainti and launched LearningAIsearch.com in July 2025, a free AI search optimization roadmap covering GEO, AEO and LLMO with no ads and no paid placements. She also publishes SEOFOMO, a free weekly newsletter with over 45,000 subscribers.

She gives away more genuinely useful material than most people in this space sell.

Best for: Anyone who wants to learn AI search properly without paying for a course.

The limitation: Capacity is deliberately small and enterprise-leaning. Worth noting that Orainti's own service pages still describe SEO only, so the AI search positioning lives on her personal brand.

7. Andrew Holland (Best for the brand-mentions side of GEO)

Andrew Holland is Director of SEO at JBH, a digital PR agency that now sells GEO as a named service. He spent 17 years as a police officer, including covert intelligence work, before moving into search.

He writes a running Search Engine Land column on GEO, where he makes the case for fame engineering and develops the idea of AI availability, a term he credits to Byron Sharp. His argument is that brand mentions do work in AI search that links alone cannot.

Best for: Brands that need to be talked about across the web, not just tuned up on it.

The blind spot: His thesis is PR-led rather than technical, so it skips schema, crawler access and entity plumbing. He also comes as part of a JBH retainer. Without that budget, automated pitching is the cheap version of the same job.

8. Kyle Roof (Best for on-page testing methodology)

Kyle Roof founded PageOptimizer Pro and holds US patent 10,540,263, granted in January 2020 with co-inventor Dorianne Marie Friend. It covers a method for testing individual ranking variables in isolation, which is narrower than the on-page patent people often describe.

He is best known for the 2018 lorem ipsum test, where he ranked a page of dummy text by placing keywords inside the gibberish. POP now ships an AI visibility tracker, and pricing starts at $40 a month.

Best for: SEOs who want testing discipline instead of received wisdom.

The blind spot: His edge is reverse-engineering Google specifically, which is a shrinking surface as AI answers take over. His advice also runs through his own tool.

9. Rand Fishkin (Best for understanding zero-click search)

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz, left in 2018, and now runs SparkToro. His 2026 zero-click study found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of the year, up from 60.45% in 2024. His book with Amanda Natividad, Zero Click Marketing, is due in fall 2026.

He is on this list because he measures the collapse in search traffic better than anyone. He is also explicit about his own limits. He left SEO in February 2018 and told Search Engine Land in December 2024 that he had not been in the field for seven years.

Best for: Understanding why your traffic fell even though your rankings held.

Set expectations: He is not available for SEO work and says so plainly. Learn from him, do not try to hire him for this.

10. Kasra Dash (Best for meeting the people doing the work)

Kasra Dash is a consultant and affiliate site builder who founded The Masterminders Conference, running 24 to 26 June 2026 in Manchester, which advertises 250-plus attendees from more than 25 countries. Andrew Holland speaks there this year, which tells you something about the room.

He also built mySEO.app, a learning and community platform, and works publicly on SEO and AI search.

Best for: Getting in the room with practitioners instead of reading about them.

The limitation: His centre of gravity is link building and affiliate SEO. Compared to the top of this list, there is less published AI search research to point at.

How to judge an AI SEO expert yourself

These are the questions I use before I take anyone's advice on AI search.

• What have they published on AI search specifically, and when? A 2021 SEO post does not count.
• Do they show data, or only conclusions? Ask for the sample size.
• Are they selling the thing they are teaching? That is fine, as long as you know.
• Do they name a limitation of their own approach without being asked?
• Would they tell you not to hire them if you are a bad fit?

That last one is the fastest filter. Anyone who thinks they are right for every business is right for none of them.

If you would rather run the work yourself before paying anyone, the tooling side is covered separately.

Which of these AI search consultants should you actually pick?

Running an enterprise site and need the retrieval mechanics? That is Mike King. Want evidence before you commit budget, read Seer's research first.

Founders and consultants who want a plan they can run themselves are my lane. With no budget at all, start with Aleyda Solis, who has given away more than most people sell.

For a defined AEO engagement at a SaaS company, Nathan Gotch. For brand mentions and press, Andrew Holland.

Four names here are not hiring recommendations and I am not going to dress them up as such. Kyle Roof for testing discipline, Charles Floate for knowing what the aggressive end of the market is doing, Rand Fishkin for the traffic data, Kasra Dash for the room he puts together. Read them for those reasons.

Ryan's Final Thoughts

The honest state of this field is that almost nobody has been doing AI search long enough to have a decade of results. What separates the people above from the rest of the roundups is that they published something checkable and put a date on it.

I checked every credential here against a primary source, the patent record, each person's own write-up or the published study, and I flagged the self-reported figures as self-reported, including my own. Judge the rest of the internet's lists by that standard, this one included.

Best AI SEO experts FAQs

Who are the most popular AI search optimization experts?

Mike King, Aleyda Solis and Wil Reynolds are the names that come up most across AI answers and industry roundups, mainly because each has published dated, checkable work on how AI systems pick sources. King coined relevance engineering, Solis runs the free LearningAIsearch.com roadmap, and Reynolds' agency Seer publishes large-scale studies of LLM citation behavior.

How much does an AI SEO consultant cost?

Independent consultants commonly charge between $100 and $300 an hour, and specialist agencies typically run $3,000 to $15,000 a month on retainer. I charge $500 an hour for one-off strategy sessions, which is above that band because it is a single working session with a prioritized roadmap rather than a monthly retainer. Enterprise firms like iPullRank and Seer do not publish rates at all.

Which AI is best for SEO?

For the actual work, Claude and ChatGPT are the two most used for content structuring, schema and technical audits. For visibility, the question is different: you want to appear in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and those surfaces disagree with each other constantly. A brand named first by one is often absent from another, so treat each as its own channel.

Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?

Evolving, and the numbers say how. Rand Fishkin's 2026 SparkToro study found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click, up from 60.45% in 2024. Rankings still exist and still matter, but a top position that never gets clicked is worth less than being the source an AI answer names. The job shifted from earning the click to earning the citation.

Do I need an AI SEO expert or a regular SEO?

If your traffic is falling while your rankings hold, that is an AI search problem and a specialist is worth the money. If you have technical debt, thin content or no rankings at all, a regular SEO fixes more for less. AI visibility is built on the same foundation, so paying for GEO work before the fundamentals are in place tends to waste both.

Disclosure: I sell AI SEO consulting, which makes me a competitor to several people on this list. I have no financial relationship with anyone else named here, and nobody paid or was asked to be included. Full disclosure.