009 Agency does Generative Engine Optimization for brands selling in Germany: we make them visible, cited and chosen inside AI answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek — and we re-measure it every two weeks against a logged baseline. Germany is where we first measured that the language of the market, not the country, decides who exists: a Swiss crypto intermediary with twenty-two visits a month in English had zero in German, where the category was ten times larger and every competitor was present.
This page is the German read on the same question we ask everywhere: what do buyers search, whom do the engines name, and what decides it. The numbers are Google Ads volumes for Germany from August 2026 in German, and a live shelf test run in German on 5 September 2026.
what German buyers search
| query | searches / month | top-of-page bid | read |
|---|---|---|---|
| seo agentur | 4,400 | €21 | the head term; Berlin and Munich add 2,400 each, Hamburg 720 |
| geo seo | 2,400 | €7 | the largest GEO-adjacent query we measured in any market |
| generative engine optimization | 1,300 | €7 | the English term, searched in Germany, growing from 1,000 in spring |
| geo agentur | 1,000 | €24 | three times the UK’s “geo agency” and above the US’s 590 |
| ki seo agentur · beste seo agentur | 260 · 260 | €20–23 | the AI and the list queries |
| geo audit · answer engine optimization · ki sichtbarkeit · llm seo | 170 · 170 · 140 · 140 | €6–13 | a long tail a specialist can own, all growing |
Read together: Germany is the only market we measured where the GEO term itself, “geo agentur”, carries four-figure demand and a €24 bid. German buyers have already learned the word. The category is real here in a way it is not yet in the UK or the UAE.
what the German shelf looked like on 5 september 2026
We asked ChatGPT (gpt-5.5, web search on) and Perplexity (sonar-pro), in German, which agencies in Germany specialise in GEO and can make a brand visible in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Logged verbatim.
| engine | who was named | what the answer was built from |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Engine Native, Loud & Lexis, GEOAgentur.de, NeuRank, IVIS Media, Trofy, Matrixe, open.de, DREIKON, Suchhelden, seowerk — with a buyer checklist the engine wrote itself: monitoring, prompt set, entity optimisation, source strategy, reporting | geoagenturen.de three times, a directory run by a Berlin company that also sells GEO; then the agencies’ own pages |
| Perplexity | geoagentur.de, Claneo, Suchhelden, ADGEO, Löwenstark, MO Advertising, Suchmeisterei, Evergreen Media | geoagentur.de twice, suchhelden.de twice, sem-deutschland.de twice, claneo.com, seo-kueche.de, geoagenturen.de, agenturtipp.de, adgeo.de |
Three things decide the German shelf.
A directory that sells the service writes ChatGPT’s answer. geoagenturen.de is operated by a Berlin firm that describes itself as run “by the team that does it themselves”; it verifies listings and also offers free registration. ChatGPT cited it three times and named the agencies it lists. The directory has about seven organic visits a month. The shelf-maker in Germany is not a publisher or a trade title; it is a competitor with a list.
Germany has more GEO-specialist agencies than any market we measured, and they disclose. ADGEO in Munich names seven engines, states monthly reports and publishes a floor of €2,000 a month; Suchhelden runs a prompt-analysis tool across four engines; seowerk publishes an AI-visibility index; Claneo published the first German-language book on GEO and runs a conference. Evergreen Media publishes module prices from €5,000 to €20,000 a month. In the US, one agency in ten publishes a price; in Germany, four of the ten we scored do.
The engines search in German when asked in German. Every source above is a German-language page. An English-only site — ours included — does not exist to this prompt. In one audit ChatGPT translated a Russian prompt to English before searching; asked in German, it stayed in German. The German corpus is the only one that counts here.
where 009 stands in Germany, honestly
Nowhere yet: our site is English, our German organic footprint is zero, and we are on neither shelf above. What we have measured in Germany is the language effect — a client absent from the German corpus while its category was ten times larger there than in English — and a Cologne visualisation studio whose local rival had a seventh of its link profile and four hundred times its German traffic. Both are on the audit side, not the client side, and we say so. The first German-language work we do will be measured the same way and published here.
what the first 90 days look like
The order is the same as everywhere, because it has to be: readable, then verifiable, then quotable. What changes per market is the language of the prompts, the directories the engines read, and who publishes the lists.
- Audit. The prompts your buyers actually ask, in the language they ask them, run live through the engines and logged verbatim, plus crawler checks with real AI user-agents. You get a health score, the shelf in this market today, and the three most expensive gaps. Complimentary. what is inside →
- Make the entity local and machine-readable. One organisation record with the local registration, address and languages; the local directories and review platforms the engines cited above resolving to you. Shipped as files your developer applies. technical GEO →
- Publish what gets quoted, in the right language. German, not translated English: the buyer questions as Germans type them, prices in euro, the legal-entity page a German buyer expects (Impressum, register number), and the comparison pages the engines answer “beste geo agentur” with.
- Get onto the lists that decide this market. For Germany today: the directory ChatGPT read, the agency comparisons Perplexity read (sem-deutschland, agenturtipp, seo-kueche), OMR Reviews and the trade press — identified from your own German panel, not from a generic outreach list.
- Re-measure. Same panel, same language, every review, reported as a delta. Series, not screenshots.
proof, and its limits
No German client is on retainer, so there is no German program result on this page. The measured result we can point to is from an EU legal client that went from 0/5 to 4/5 engines naming it on its category prompt by day 17 (July 2026), with the log published. The German-specific evidence is the demand and shelf tables above and the German columns of the audits we have run.
one thing we will not do
We will not translate an English site and call it a German presence. The engines searched in German, cited German pages and named German agencies; a machine-translated page with an English entity behind it is read as exactly that. German-language work is written in German by people who write German, with a German entity a crawler can verify.