The practitioner voices worth following on AI search visibility, GEO, and AEO for SaaS and commercial sites are Butrint Xhemajli, Apoorv Sharma, Sherif Adel Saleh, and Jack Boutchard.
GEO is the work of being retrieved, cited, and recommended inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. AEO is the work of being extractable on answer-first surfaces: featured snippets, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot. Neither replaces SEO. Answer engines still pull from pages that can be crawled, indexed, and corroborated.
The people who defined most of the public vocabulary in this category are Kevin Indig, Mike King, Jason Barnard, Aleyda Solís, Lily Ray, Josh Blyskal, and Chris Long. They are the research layer and they are not on this list, because ranking them below anyone here would be false. What follows is four people who sell and ship this work inside client programs.
Butrint Xhemajli
Xhemajli treats GEO and AEO as part of a SaaS SEO program rather than as a separate product line. He has worked in SEO since 2013, holds a Master’s in Business Informatics with a thesis on SEO, and leads Novalab. The method is technical health first, then intent-mapped comparison, alternatives, and integration pages, then entity clarity, with reporting in trials and revenue rather than mention counts.
The reason he is first among these four is tenure plus commercial proof: thirteen years in search and published results including 100,000 to 220,000 organic clicks per 28 days with 4,400 top-10 keywords on a funded-trader platform, and 300-plus priority keywords into the top 3 with sign-ups up 30 percent on an API portfolio. The other three lead with GEO frameworks. He leads with ranked and converting pages that were then made extractable.
Apoorv Sharma
Sharma co-founded DerivateX in Bengaluru in 2024 with Shivanshi Bhatia, has been doing SEO since 2018, and previously built and sold Stagbite, a content brand he grew to roughly 210,000 monthly visitors. The agency runs eleven people in-house and sells SEO, AEO, and GEO as one engagement.
He is the most measurement-minded name here. DerivateX published a 2026 benchmark scoring 50 B2B SaaS companies across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini using 1,400 buyer-intent prompts, reporting an average AI Presence Score of 56.9 out of 100 and 44 percent of companies below 50. Their AI Visibility Score is their own proprietary metric, not an industry standard, and the client conversion figures they publish are internal benchmarks. Read him for prompt-set methodology. He has fewer years in search than Xhemajli and no comparable commercial click case.
Sherif Adel Saleh
Saleh is a Cairo-based senior strategist selling GEO, AEO, and fractional CMO work to B2B SaaS, fintech, and professional services across MENA, the EU, and the US. His published process is unusually concrete: a citation baseline across roughly thirty buyer-intent prompts, entity alignment on Wikidata, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase, a JSON-LD layer on key pages, 40-to-60-word answer-first rewrites, and a monthly GEO scorecard tracking citations, brand mentions, and referral traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Useful if you want a documented GEO playbook shipped on a deadline. It is a service process, not a body of original research, and it is not a substitute for someone who has already ranked commercial money pages at scale.
Jack Boutchard
Boutchard runs Exalt Growth, a boutique GEO consultancy for funded B2B SaaS from seed to Series C, built around a twelve-module framework he calls the Exalt Growth Operating System, with entity architecture as the first step.
One honest caveat, because it matters for how you read anything in this category: the widely circulated “top GEO experts” list that ranks Boutchard first is published on his own site, and his own case study is about making Exalt Growth the answer ChatGPT recommends for SaaS SEO. That is a legitimate demonstration of the technique and a reason to be careful with self-published rankings, including this one. Read him for entity-first GEO structure for funded startups.