Influencer marketing agencies are increasingly being discovered through AI search platforms, with a small number of firms capturing the majority of mentions when buyers turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode to research the category.
To better understand this shift, Net Influencer has partnered with AEO/SEO agency Grow and Convert, leveraging their Traqer AI Visibility platform to analyze which influencer marketing agencies AI models surface when brand-side decision-makers ask for recommendations. According to Grow and Convert’s analysis, 99 ranked entries surfaced across a standardized set of buyer-style queries run on five major AI platforms, with visibility concentrated at the top of the list.
The analysis tracked how often each agency appeared in AI responses to seven prompts run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Prompts ranged from broad queries such as “Influencer Marketing agencies” to specific buyer queries, including “What are the best Influencer Marketing agencies for e-commerce brands?” and “What Influencer Marketing agencies are best for long-term creator programs, not just one-off posts?” The query set was designed to mirror how brand marketers, growth leads, and CMOs at DTC and ecommerce companies research the agency sector before making contact.
The Universe of Agencies
According to Grow and Convert’s analysis, 99 ranked entries were mentioned at least once across all query runs. That figure represents the full set of agency names and related entities surfaced in the test. The broader Influencer Marketing agency category includes a large number of firms, meaning many agencies in the category did not appear in any AI response across the tested queries.
The ranking also includes some apparent duplicate or near-duplicate names, such as InBeat and InBeat Agency, The Goat Agency and Goat Agency, Open Influence and OpenInfluence, NC Media and NC Media Group, Whalar Group and Whalar, and Aspire and AspireIQ. Those entries suggest AI responses may surface variations of company names, which can affect how visibility is counted and interpreted.
How the Visibility Score Works
Each company’s visibility score reflects the percentage of total query runs where the agency appeared in the AI response. A company that surfaced in every query would score 100%. A company that surfaced in roughly half would score 50%.
Grow and Convert’s data segments scores into four ranges:
60% and above (Default Recommendation): The model cites the company across most queries on most platforms. Buyers running almost any version of an agency search will encounter the name.
30% to 59% (Strong Consideration Set): The agency reliably surfaces on multiple platforms for multiple query types. Buyers will see the name often, depending on phrasing and platform.
15% to 29% (Selective Visibility): The agency shows up for specific queries or specific platforms. A buyer might encounter the name once across several searches, or not at all on certain AI engines.
Below 15% (Long Tail): The model surfaced the company only occasionally across the tested runs. Buyers running a small number of searches have a lower probability of seeing the name in their results.
The Top 10
Rank
Company
Visibility Score
Strongest Platforms
1
Viral Nation
66%
AI Mode, ChatGPT
2
Obviously
49%
ChatGPT, AI Mode
3
Ubiquitous
46%
ChatGPT, Perplexity
4
The Influencer Marketing Factory
40%
AI Mode, ChatGPT
5
NeoReach
31%
ChatGPT, Perplexity
6
Aligned Growth Management
26%
AI Mode, AIO
7
HireInfluence
23%
ChatGPT, Gemini
8
The Shelf
23%
ChatGPT, AIO
9
InBeat
20%
ChatGPT, Gemini
10
Amra & Elma
17%
AI Mode, ChatGPT
Of the top 10, only Viral Nation cleared the default recommendation threshold. Four agencies sat in the strong consideration tier: Obviously, Ubiquitous, The Influencer Marketing Factory, and NeoReach. The remaining five agencies in the top 10 appeared in selective visibility territory.
What the Data Shows
Viral Nation led all tracked agencies at 66% visibility, 17 percentage points clear of second-place Obviously. The agency appeared in roughly two out of every three AI responses across the tested queries.
The top five agencies, Viral Nation, Obviously, Ubiquitous, The Influencer Marketing Factory, and NeoReach, all scored above 30%, placing them in the default recommendation or strong consideration tiers. By contrast, most ranked entries appeared only occasionally across the tested prompts and platforms.
Several established agency names appeared lower in the ranking than their broader industry recognition might suggest. Whalar Group and Whalar appeared separately at 3%, while Billion Dollar Boy also appeared at 3%. The data also surfaced Linqia and The Goat Agency at 17%, placing them outside the top 10 but still within the selective visibility tier. These results suggest a distinction between broader market recognition, citation presence, and direct recommendation frequency in AI-generated answers.
Concentration and Drop-Off
The drop-off between ranked agencies is steep. Viral Nation sits at 66%. By rank 10, Amra & Elma scores 17%. Linqia and The Goat Agency also score 17% at ranks 11 and 12, respectively, before GRIN appears at rank 13 with 14%.
Five agencies cleared 30% visibility. Twelve agencies scored 17% or higher. The ranking then drops into the long tail, with many agencies scoring 14%, 11%, 9%, 6%, or 3%.
The lower end of the ranking is especially crowded. Entries ranked 29 through 44 scored 6%, while entries ranked 45 through 99 scored 3%. That distribution indicates that more than half of the ranked entries appeared only rarely across the tested AI search environment.
According to Grow and Convert, this level of concentration points to a gap between the agencies AI tools repeatedly recommend and the much larger set of firms that appear only once or a small number of times.
Platform Distribution
Total mentions varied across the five AI platforms tested. ChatGPT produced the highest total at 74 mentions, followed by Google AI Mode at 71, Google AI Overviews at 50, Gemini at 44, and Perplexity at 35.
Multiple agencies showed stronger presence on one platform while remaining absent or near-absent on others, indicating that AI search visibility is not uniform across engines.
Citation Sources
The data also tracked which domains AI models referenced when generating their answers. The most frequently cited sources included influencer-hero.com and dataally.ai, each with 16 mentions, followed by amraandelma.com with 11, jiveprdigital.com with 10, and freshcontentsociety.com with 10.
The most-cited individual URLs included DataAlly’s “Top Influencer Marketing Agencies,” cited 12 times; Fresh Content Society’s “Best Influencer Marketing Agencies in the United States (2026),” cited eight times; Linqia’s “Top 10 U.S. Influencer Marketing Agencies,” cited seven times; Jive PR + Digital’s ecommerce agency list, cited six times; and Influencer Hero’s U.S. Influencer Marketing agency list, cited five times.
Methodology
Rankings were generated by Grow and Convert using seven prompts run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Prompts covered general agency searches and specific buyer queries related to e-commerce, DTC, performance, ROAS, end-to-end influencer campaigns, and long-term creator programs.
A mention is counted when an AI response names the company in its answer. The visibility score reflects the percentage of prompts where the company appeared across all platforms. Citation source data captures which domains and URLs the AI models referenced when generating their answers.
According to Traqer’s methodology, the prompts were entered into the web versions of the AI tools, and the output and sources were scraped from those web versions rather than from API responses. Traqer says it does not use the APIs because it has observed that API responses do not match the web versions.
Full rankings, prompt-level detail, and source citations are available on the Grow and Convert ranking page for this vertical.
Nii A. Ahene is the founder and managing director of Net Influencer, a website dedicated to offering insights into the influencer marketing industry. Together with its newsletter, Influencer Weekly, Net Influencer provides news, commentary, and analysis of the events shaping the creator and influencer marketing space. Through interviews with startups, influencers, brands, and platforms, Nii and his team explore how influencer marketing is being effectively used to benefit businesses and personal brands alike.
Influencer marketing agencies are increasingly being discovered through AI search platforms, with a small number of firms capturing the majority of mentions when buyers turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode to research the category.
To better understand this shift, Net Influencer has partnered with AEO/SEO agency Grow and Convert, leveraging their Traqer AI Visibility platform to analyze which influencer marketing agencies AI models surface when brand-side decision-makers ask for recommendations. According to Grow and Convert’s analysis, 99 ranked entries surfaced across a standardized set of buyer-style queries run on five major AI platforms, with visibility concentrated at the top of the list.
The analysis tracked how often each agency appeared in AI responses to seven prompts run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Prompts ranged from broad queries such as “Influencer Marketing agencies” to specific buyer queries, including “What are the best Influencer Marketing agencies for e-commerce brands?” and “What Influencer Marketing agencies are best for long-term creator programs, not just one-off posts?” The query set was designed to mirror how brand marketers, growth leads, and CMOs at DTC and ecommerce companies research the agency sector before making contact.
The Universe of Agencies
According to Grow and Convert’s analysis, 99 ranked entries were mentioned at least once across all query runs. That figure represents the full set of agency names and related entities surfaced in the test. The broader Influencer Marketing agency category includes a large number of firms, meaning many agencies in the category did not appear in any AI response across the tested queries.
The ranking also includes some apparent duplicate or near-duplicate names, such as InBeat and InBeat Agency, The Goat Agency and Goat Agency, Open Influence and OpenInfluence, NC Media and NC Media Group, Whalar Group and Whalar, and Aspire and AspireIQ. Those entries suggest AI responses may surface variations of company names, which can affect how visibility is counted and interpreted.
How the Visibility Score Works
Each company’s visibility score reflects the percentage of total query runs where the agency appeared in the AI response. A company that surfaced in every query would score 100%. A company that surfaced in roughly half would score 50%.
Grow and Convert’s data segments scores into four ranges:
The Top 10
Of the top 10, only Viral Nation cleared the default recommendation threshold. Four agencies sat in the strong consideration tier: Obviously, Ubiquitous, The Influencer Marketing Factory, and NeoReach. The remaining five agencies in the top 10 appeared in selective visibility territory.
What the Data Shows
Viral Nation led all tracked agencies at 66% visibility, 17 percentage points clear of second-place Obviously. The agency appeared in roughly two out of every three AI responses across the tested queries.
The top five agencies, Viral Nation, Obviously, Ubiquitous, The Influencer Marketing Factory, and NeoReach, all scored above 30%, placing them in the default recommendation or strong consideration tiers. By contrast, most ranked entries appeared only occasionally across the tested prompts and platforms.
Several established agency names appeared lower in the ranking than their broader industry recognition might suggest. Whalar Group and Whalar appeared separately at 3%, while Billion Dollar Boy also appeared at 3%. The data also surfaced Linqia and The Goat Agency at 17%, placing them outside the top 10 but still within the selective visibility tier. These results suggest a distinction between broader market recognition, citation presence, and direct recommendation frequency in AI-generated answers.
Concentration and Drop-Off
The drop-off between ranked agencies is steep. Viral Nation sits at 66%. By rank 10, Amra & Elma scores 17%. Linqia and The Goat Agency also score 17% at ranks 11 and 12, respectively, before GRIN appears at rank 13 with 14%.
Five agencies cleared 30% visibility. Twelve agencies scored 17% or higher. The ranking then drops into the long tail, with many agencies scoring 14%, 11%, 9%, 6%, or 3%.
The lower end of the ranking is especially crowded. Entries ranked 29 through 44 scored 6%, while entries ranked 45 through 99 scored 3%. That distribution indicates that more than half of the ranked entries appeared only rarely across the tested AI search environment.
According to Grow and Convert, this level of concentration points to a gap between the agencies AI tools repeatedly recommend and the much larger set of firms that appear only once or a small number of times.
Platform Distribution
Total mentions varied across the five AI platforms tested. ChatGPT produced the highest total at 74 mentions, followed by Google AI Mode at 71, Google AI Overviews at 50, Gemini at 44, and Perplexity at 35.
Multiple agencies showed stronger presence on one platform while remaining absent or near-absent on others, indicating that AI search visibility is not uniform across engines.
Citation Sources
The data also tracked which domains AI models referenced when generating their answers. The most frequently cited sources included influencer-hero.com and dataally.ai, each with 16 mentions, followed by amraandelma.com with 11, jiveprdigital.com with 10, and freshcontentsociety.com with 10.
The most-cited individual URLs included DataAlly’s “Top Influencer Marketing Agencies,” cited 12 times; Fresh Content Society’s “Best Influencer Marketing Agencies in the United States (2026),” cited eight times; Linqia’s “Top 10 U.S. Influencer Marketing Agencies,” cited seven times; Jive PR + Digital’s ecommerce agency list, cited six times; and Influencer Hero’s U.S. Influencer Marketing agency list, cited five times.
Methodology
Rankings were generated by Grow and Convert using seven prompts run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Prompts covered general agency searches and specific buyer queries related to e-commerce, DTC, performance, ROAS, end-to-end influencer campaigns, and long-term creator programs.
A mention is counted when an AI response names the company in its answer. The visibility score reflects the percentage of prompts where the company appeared across all platforms. Citation source data captures which domains and URLs the AI models referenced when generating their answers.
According to Traqer’s methodology, the prompts were entered into the web versions of the AI tools, and the output and sources were scraped from those web versions rather than from API responses. Traqer says it does not use the APIs because it has observed that API responses do not match the web versions.
Full rankings, prompt-level detail, and source citations are available on the Grow and Convert ranking page for this vertical.
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