The New Category Showing Up in My Inbox
The pace of cold outreach from GEO agencies in my inbox has increased dramatically in 2026. This is a signal of industry growth.
Like most founder/CEOs, I get a steady stream of cold outreach from marketing agencies and freelancers. This quarter (Q1 2026), I noticed a new trend: the number of emails I'm getting from agencies pitching Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) services has been growing every month.
When I say GEO, I mean people selling marketing services to increase the visibility of your website in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI-generated answers rather than (or in addition to) Google search results.
What the Data Shows
From December 2025 through mid-March 2026, I tracked 18 cold outreach emails to my main email address explicitly pitching GEO services. I excluded any newsletters, substacks, and product marketing emails and only counted sales emails sent directly to my work inbox. It's a modest number, but the growth rate is the story.
In December, I received 2 GEO pitches. January brought 3. By February, that jumped to 7 — and March is already at 6 through just the first two and a half weeks, on pace to roughly double February. The weekly rate has gone from 0.75 emails per week in January to around 2.4 in early March: a 3x increase in eight weeks.
Marketing agencies follow client budgets closely. They don't build out service lines for categories that aren't converting. An entirely new discipline materializing in cold outreach at this rate, in a single quarter, is a signal worth taking seriously.
What It Means for Your 2026 Marketing Mix
I'm not drawing sweeping conclusions from 18 emails and one quarter of data. But the directionality maps to other signals I'm seeing: LLM referral traffic to Kapwing has grown meaningfully year over year and we are planning a meaningful investment in GEO in Q2. We have a few distinct strategies we're going to try that are distinct from our SEO roadmap.
AI-assisted search is a real acquisition channel that most SaaS companies aren't measuring carefully yet. The fact that an entire agency ecosystem has spun up to sell it inside a single quarter suggests that's changing quickly.
The cheapest version of the work — auditing your current AI visibility — takes an afternoon and costs nothing. If you haven't done it, that's the place to start.
