Belorado GEO has been in business for about a year. When we recently asked ChatGPT to recommend the best GEO agencies in Oregon, something pretty cool happened: it recommended us first.
For a business that helps companies become more visible in AI search, it’s hard to think of a better test of whether our own strategy is working. But this isn’t really an article about getting a "#1 ranking." It’s about how quickly search is changing, what we’ve done over the last year to improve our own visibility, and what other businesses can learn from it.
We want to be careful with that language because ChatGPT doesn’t have a permanent leaderboard of GEO agencies in Oregon. AI-generated answers can change depending on the exact prompt, model, available information, location, and changes happening across the web.
When we say Belorado GEO was the #1 recommended GEO agency in Oregon, we’re referring to our testing in August 2026, where ChatGPT placed Belorado GEO first when asked for GEO agency recommendations in Oregon.
That distinction matters because GEO isn’t about finding some secret trick to permanently "rank #1 in ChatGPT." It’s about increasing the likelihood that AI systems understand your business, find credible information about it, and recommend it when someone asks a relevant question. That’s exactly what we’ve spent the last year working on, both for our clients and for ourselves.
When we started Belorado GEO, "GEO" was still an unfamiliar acronym to most business owners. Honestly, it still is. Generative Engine Optimization is the process of improving how a business, brand, product, or organization appears in answers generated by tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
The idea behind Belorado GEO was relatively simple. People were beginning to search differently. Instead of only typing something like "Oregon marketing agency" into Google and clicking through ten websites, someone could ask an AI, "What's the best marketing agency in Oregon for a small service business?" or "Who would you recommend for SEO and AI visibility in Portland?" The AI could research the options, compare them, explain its reasoning, and give the user a shortlist.
We believed those recommendations were going to become increasingly valuable. So we built a company around helping businesses earn them.
There’s an obvious problem with selling GEO services. If we claim we can help other companies become more visible in AI search, our own company should probably be visible there too.
So we treated Belorado GEO like one of our clients. We worked to make it extremely clear what our business does, where we operate, what services we provide, and why an AI system should associate Belorado GEO with topics like GEO, SEO, AI visibility, web design, and online visibility in Oregon.
That meant rebuilding and refining pages across our website, improving page titles and headings, adding structured data, creating content around questions our potential clients actually ask, strengthening traditional SEO, and making the information surrounding our business as consistent as possible.
Most importantly, we focused on creating actual evidence. GEO isn’t just about telling an AI system that you’re good at something. It’s about giving search engines and AI systems enough information to independently understand who you are and enough supporting evidence to have a reason to recommend you.
One of the biggest misconceptions we see around AI search is the idea that you can simply add a paragraph to your website saying you’re "the best GEO agency in Oregon" and expect ChatGPT to believe you.
Your website matters, but it’s only one part of the information ecosystem AI systems can use. They may encounter your company through search results, business profiles, articles, directories, reviews, mentions on other websites, structured data, social platforms, and other publicly accessible sources. Those signals collectively help establish who your business is, what it does, and whether the claims on its own website are supported elsewhere.
That’s why our approach to GEO overlaps heavily with SEO, content, digital PR, local search, website structure, and brand authority. The goal isn’t to manipulate one AI model into mentioning your company. The goal is to make your business unusually easy to understand and unusually easy to verify.
After about a year, we started seeing the exact thing we had originally built the company to accomplish for other businesses: AI systems began recommending us.
In our August 2026 testing, when we asked ChatGPT about GEO agencies in Oregon, Belorado GEO appeared as the first recommendation. That's a cool milestone for us, but the more interesting part is what it demonstrates.
We’re not a ten-year-old agency with thousands of backlinks, a massive advertising budget, or decades of brand recognition. We’ve been doing this for roughly a year. In that time, we’ve been able to build enough relevance and authority around what we do that AI systems have started associating Belorado GEO with the service we actually sell.
To us, that suggests there’s still a huge window of opportunity in AI search. Most businesses aren’t actively optimizing for this yet, and many don’t even know they can. The companies building those signals now have an opportunity to establish themselves before their competitors begin taking AI visibility seriously.
Our own visibility isn’t the only reason we believe in this. Over the last year, we’ve been applying these principles to businesses in architecture, interior design, tourism, wine, and other service industries.
One of our clearest examples is Best Oregon Tours. When we started working with them, they were a small Oregon tour company competing for visibility against much larger travel platforms and operators. Over the following year, their website traffic grew from roughly 70 monthly visitors to more than 330.
But traffic wasn’t the only thing that changed. AI systems started recommending them too. Best Oregon Tours became a leading recommendation for tour-related searches in Eugene, including appearing as the #1 recommended option in our AI visibility testing.
That’s the kind of outcome we’re ultimately trying to create. Traffic is useful, but traffic for the sake of traffic isn’t the goal. We want our clients to be visible at the moment someone is deciding where to go, what to buy, or who to hire.
Google isn’t disappearing. Traditional SEO is still extremely important, and we don’t think businesses should abandon it. What is changing is the number of places people use to research a decision.
Someone might discover a company through Google, research it through ChatGPT, look at its Instagram, read its reviews, return to its website, and then make a decision. Another person might skip Google entirely and start by asking ChatGPT to compare the best companies for what they need.
That means businesses increasingly need to think about visibility across an ecosystem rather than rankings on a single platform. SEO, GEO, local search, content, PR, reviews, and website quality aren’t completely separate strategies anymore. They reinforce one another.
A year ago, very few Oregon businesses were thinking about whether ChatGPT would recommend them. Today, we’re already seeing people use AI this way. As that behavior becomes more common, competition for those recommendations is going to increase.
Not in the same way you traditionally think about ranking #1 in Google. There is no fixed ChatGPT search results page, and different prompts can produce different recommendations.
What you can influence is how clearly AI systems understand your business, how much credible information exists about it, and how strong the evidence is for recommending it over an alternative. That's what GEO is really about.
Becoming ChatGPT’s first recommendation for GEO agencies in Oregon is a useful indication that the same system we’re building for our clients is working on us too.
For a company that's only been around for about a year, we'll take it.
There’s a simple question most business owners haven’t asked yet: when someone asks AI who they should hire, does it recommend you?
That’s one of the first things we look at with our free visibility audits. We test how your business appears across traditional search and AI-generated answers, look at which competitors are being recommended instead, and identify the opportunities that could improve your visibility.
No 40-page automated report designed to scare you into buying something. Just a practical look at where your business stands, what we find, and what we’d change.
Want to find out where your business stands? Get a free visibility audit from Belorado GEO.
