Q3 2026 Search Report

NEW RESEARCH: AI recommends the brands it already cites.

Read the Report
SEO and AEO in one strategy

An SEO agency for the next generation of search.

Our research shows Google gives an AI answer on 97.5% of buying searches, and the brands it cites are more likely to be recommended when it’s time to buy. Our SEO and AEO services help you earn the citations and rankings that influence the shortlist.

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5x SEARCH AGENCY OF THE YEAR
3x Winner & 33x Finalist
Best SEO Campaign
From US and global agency search awards
7x Winner & 60x Finalist
Best Use of Search
Health · Fashion · Finance · Retail · B2B · B2C
2x Winner & 13x Finalist
Campaign Effectiveness
US Agency · Global Agency · Global Search
229 awards and finalist honors · 2018–2026
US Search Awards US Agency Awards Global Search Awards Global Agency Awards

Trusted by leading brands.

SoFi
GE Digital
Delta Dental
Wayfair
Bissell
Salesforce
Buyer behavior has changed

Your buyers are making a shortlist before they reach your website.

More people are using AI assistants to research and choose solutions. Even the ones still using Google are more and more likely to be influenced by AI-generated answers.

94%

of brands AI cited during research were named when buyers asked who to choose, against 50% of brands it didn't cite.

37%

of Google AI Overview citations rank in Google's top 10 for the same question.

Source: Victorious Q3 2026 Search Report

Why choose Victorious

How our SEO marketing company works with your team.

Pioneering AI search

We run experiments on how AI search picks brands, including citation-to-recommendation tracking, Google ranking overlap and mention thresholds. The findings shape our services and strategies.

They did the work necessary to maintain SEO visibility in the new world of AI…
Vincent NeroVP and GM of Service and Sales, Successories

Data-driven strategy

We rank every recommendation by its projected impact. One dashboard tracks rankings, AI search visibility and conversions, so leadership sees how search contributes to business outcomes.

Victorious has helped increase our company's revenue tenfold, and our ROI is excellent.
Chelsea BoylanDigital Marketing Lead, enTouch Wireless

Invested in your growth

SEO strategists, content specialists and technical experts work as an extension of your in-house team and chosen vendors. We can also implement content and technical changes on your site directly.

I'm most impressed with their incredible customer service and hands-on account management.
Bailey JamesSenior Content and Marketing Manager, Tenstreet

MODERN SEARCH DEMANDS MORE THAN TACTICS

Designed for discovery today.

Organic search remains one of the strongest drivers of high-conversion traffic and long-term growth. But meaningful visibility in today’s digital marketing space requires more than optimizing individual pages or chasing rankings.

Search systems evaluate expertise across topics, entity relationships, and credibility signals that extend beyond a single URL.

Our approach reflects that shift. SEO, content, technical, and web services work together as one coordinated system organized around your primary products and services.

That coordination extends into AI-powered search. We optimize for AI Overviews and LLM-generated answers so your brand appears wherever your customers seek information.

With Victorious, you gain a team of SEO specialists, content strategists, and technical experts who prioritize work based on opportunity and performance data.

Success is measured by business outcomes, not rankings alone, helping your brand earn durable visibility that drives qualified traffic and revenue to generate real business growth.

You've seen how we think.
Now see what we can do.

Tell us where your business needs to go and we'll show you how search gets you there.

You’ve got the vision. We’ve got the strategy.

Explore how our customized framework puts search first to deliver success for businesses like yours.

Let’s turn search into your most profitable channel.

Get more leads, reach more customers, and do it all with less lift.

Schedule a consultation to discuss your search and growth goals and learn how we can help you accomplish them.

Ready to get started?

US agency awards 2026 winner
Global Search Awards 2026 silver
Global Agency Awards 2025 finalist
US Search Awards 2026 winner

Award-winning strategies, exceptional results.

Get the latest scoop on search trends and tips from our SEO experts.

If organic traffic is down this quarter, that doesn't mean a site's SEO program stopped working. In this episode of The Search Signal, Michael Transon makes the case that search is behaving more like a brand channel than a performance...

Victorious’s Q3 2026 AI search report tracked which brands AI platforms name when buyers ask who to choose. Brands AI had already cited while buyers were researching the category got named 94% of the time, against 50% for brands with...

10 m read

Feeling torn between SEO and GEO? Think you could be falling behind as others start to optimize for AI search engines? Keep reading before making changes to your SEO strategy.

Have questions about hiring an SEO agency?

An SEO company increases a business’s online visibility and search rankings through on-page, off-page, and technical optimization. These strategies are designed to drive targeted traffic, leads, and revenue, typically focusing on keyword research, content creation, and local SEO. Top SEO companies can improve technical website performance, increase organic traffic, and grow leads and revenue.

Core Functions of an SEO Agency

  • On-Page & Content Optimization: Creating and refining content to align with search intent, strengthen topical authority, and support commercial conversion paths.
  • Technical SEO: Improving site architecture, crawlability, speed, schema implementation, and overall technical clarity to ensure search systems can properly evaluate and index your site.
  • Off-Page SEO & Authority Building: Developing high-quality backlinks and reinforcing credibility signals that increase trust and domain strength.
  • Strategy & Analytics: Analyzing search intent, competitive gaps, entity associations, and performance data to prioritize activities and measure ROI.
  • Transparent Reporting: Offering unified reporting and structured reviews that translate search performance into clear, decision-ready insights for your leadership team.

A digital marketing agency is likely to spread your resources across multiple channels, which can dilute efforts and results. As a 5x Search Agency of the Year, Victorious runs SEO with singular focus, clear execution, and reporting that ties work to outcomes.

Our SEO marketing company offers a full range of SEO services designed to grow your online presence, increase traffic, and boost sales through organic search and AI search.

  • Keyword Research: We identify high-value, relevant keywords that align with your business goals and match what your customers are searching for.
  • On-Page SEO: From optimizing metadata and headers to improving website structure and internal linking, our on-page SEO strategies enhance your site’s relevance and usability.
  • SEO Content Writing Services and Optimization: Our team creates SEO and AEO-friendly pieces that engage your target audience and position your brand as a trusted authority. Every piece is informed by search data and competitive insights that tie back to your marketing goals.
  • SEO Audits: Our SEO site audit services pinpoint and resolve technical issues like crawl errors, duplicate content, and slow load times so your pages perform better in search and attract more qualified leads.
  • Link Building: We help boost your site’s authority with ethical link building strategies to illustrate entity associations.
  • Technical SEO: Our technical services combine continuous monitoring with expert validation to identify and resolve technical issues that impact crawlability, site performance, and AI retrievability. Automated scans surface crawl errors, Core Web Vitals gaps, and structural weaknesses, while our specialists review each finding to add context and prioritize fixes. From site architecture and schema to indexing controls and page speed, we implement improvements that strengthen long-term search performance across traditional and AI-driven search.
  • Answer Engine Optimization: We optimize your content for the next generation of search by improving AI retrievability, strengthening entity associations, and structuring content clusters that support your key commercial pages. Through clear information architecture, strategic schema, and retrieval-focused formatting, we increase your chances of earning citations in AI Overviews and answer engines where your customers are searching. This approach is also known as generative engine optimization (GEO).
  • Website Maintenance Services: We help you maintain your website, quickly implementing SEO and content recommendations to save time and maintain a competitive advantage. We also offer scalable managed WordPress hosting.
  • SEO Site Migration: Our strategists help protect your hard-earned search equity during site migrations with a proactive strategy that ensures a smooth transition and uninterrupted visibility. Through structured redirect mapping, crawl diagnostics, and post-launch validation, we preserve authority signals and reduce traffic volatility during critical transitions.
  • Local SEO: We deliver scalable local SEO services for single-location, multi-location, and franchise brands. Through Google Business optimization, citation management, and location-level strategy, we help each site earn visibility in its market and support consistent performance across regions

Whether you’re navigating a large-scale migration, looking to boost online sales for your ecommerce brand, or need help closing competitive gaps, our SEO solutions are fully customizable to fit your goals.

Yes. If you have a request for proposals for SEO services, please send it to [email protected].

We view AI-enhanced search as an extension of SEO. The same fundamentals that drive performance in traditional search (clear site architecture, technically sound pages, authoritative backlinks, and high-quality content) remain essential. What’s changed is how those fundamentals are applied.

With our answer engine optimization (AEO) service, we prepare your pages to perform in AI-driven search, whether it’s Google’s AI Overviews or LLM-powered engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

From there, we implement structured optimizations that improve AI retrievability and citation potential. That includes strengthening entity associations, structuring pages for machine parsing and summarization, refining schema markup, and expanding topical coverage around your revenue-driving services and products.

No. If you look at AI search optimization as an extension of your SEO efforts instead of a separate discipline, the fundamentals (clear site architecture, technically sound pages, high-quality content, and authoritative backlinks) still matter. What’s different is how these fundamentals are applied.

For AI-powered environments like Google’s AI Overviews and other answer engines, the focus shifts toward structuring blog posts and pages in ways machines can easily parse, summarize, and cite. That means leaning into schema markup, producing people-first content that directly addresses queries, and ensuring topical authority is strong across product pages, blogs, and resources.

So while you don’t need to overhaul your strategy, you do need to evolve it by layering in AI visibility considerations. Our quarterly search research tracks how AI platforms cite and recommend brands, and those findings shape our services.

If you want to work with a company for SEO, start by understanding your business goals and what success looks like for you to help you identify an appropriate budget range. There’s no one-size-fits-all number; the right investment depends on your industry, how competitive your market is, your website’s current performance, and how ambitious your growth targets are. We recommend budgeting at least $8,000 a month for AEO and SEO optimization services and committing to a 12-month campaign to start.

When you partner with a search engine optimization company like Victorious, you get consulting, strategy, and implementation that aligns with your budget and delivers real impact. Learn more about how much SEO costs and how to budget for SEO.

Our professional SEO company measures success against your business goals, using both leading and lagging indicators. For AI search, we use Scrunch to track a set of prompts tied to the commercial pages we’re optimizing, built from your keyword strategy and expanded across the full buyer journey. For each prompt, we report citations, mentions, share of voice and sentiment across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. We read those alongside keyword rankings and the outcomes your business cares about: organic, direct, branded and AI-referred traffic, plus on-site events and conversions. You can see all of it in a live dashboard, available 24/7, and we review it with you on monthly performance calls.

Finding the right search engine optimization agency is a big decision that can make or break your search success. When looking for SEO agency recommendations, the best place to start is by identifying what matters most to your business  and asking the right questions during the vetting process.

In addition to their experience and expertise, here’s what to look for in a great SEO partner:

  • Transparency: Anyone you partner with should be able to clearly describe their methodology and practices.
  • Communication: Look for an agency that keeps you in the loop and explains their recommendations.
  • Consistent reporting: Determine the types of reporting you’ll receive and how frequently you’ll be provided with insights into your SEO campaign.
  • Ethical practices: Avoid agencies using shortcuts or black-hat tactics — they can hurt your site more than help it.
  • Flexibility: Avoid one-size-fits-all approaches. Make sure the agency builds strategies around your goals and adapts as your needs evolve.
  • Scalability: Your SEO needs may change as your business grows. Choose a search engine optimization firm that can scale its search engine optimization services to support your future growth.

To better understand how an SEO marketing company works, check its SEO case studies, reviews, and awards.

SEO isn’t an overnight fix, but with the right strategy, it pays off.

Most businesses start to see noticeable improvements in search rankings, organic traffic, and engagement within three to six months of consistent SEO work. That timeline can vary based on your industry, your site’s current condition, and how competitive your space is.

However, SEO is a long-term investment. Initial gains are just the beginning, with the full impact often unfolding over a longer period. Continuous optimization efforts are crucial for sustaining and building on initial successes, adapting to algorithm updates, and staying ahead of competitors. Patience and persistence, combined with a strategic approach, are key to unlocking the full potential of SEO for any business.

Guaranteed rankings sound too good to be true for a reason. They are. No SEO agency can guarantee you will rank for a particular keyword or that you’ll stay there forever.

As a 5x Search Agency of the Year, our guarantee is a commitment to best practices, a deep understanding of search engine optimization, and dedication to pursuing the highest possible organic rankings and visibility for your brand. Our focus is on sustainable growth, aiming for lasting results rather than quick fixes that could potentially harm your online visibility in the long run.

We’re headquartered in San Francisco and are recognized as one of the best SEO companies in California for brands seeking structured, performance-driven search strategies.

But we aren’t limited to The Golden State; we have customers across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. No matter where you’re located, our approach remains the same: Build a strategy around your services and products to drive measurable business growth.