Evan Bailyn

Evan Bailyn is founder and CEO of First Page Sage, a highly-rated Generative Engine Optimization agency, and one of the leading research voices on AI search. He pioneered the GEO marketing category, built the practice of agentic search optimization, and has spent more than two decades turning search into a research-heavy practice that midsize companies use to win leads and authority.

Early Internet businesses to a search firm

Bailyn studied English and creative writing at Columbia, then learned SEO by creating and selling his own internet businesses in the early 2000s — work that ranged from essay coaching to furniture and antiques. Visibility in Google, he noticed, often mattered more than the products themselves. A 2012 Forbes profile recounted him founding First Page Sage once that pattern presented itself as a business. He told Forbes the firm was profitable from day one — a services shop built on rankings and lead generation.

Research as the growth engine

First Page Sage's public method leans on original studies and expertise pages that are formulated to rank for queries that drive sales. Bailyn has spent years speaking to CEO and marketing audiences, including Vistage and YPO, about how B2B buyers find products and services through search. The agency's own research archive has been heavily cited in academic publications in recent years. Today, he is among the top researchers in the AI marketing space.

Founding the GEO marketing category

When ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini became prominent search platforms, Bailyn treated that shift as a new marketing problem — and gave it a name. Through First Page Sage he founded the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) marketing category: work aimed at brand mentions and recommendations inside generative systems. In an InRhythm interview he put it this way: "GEO is about ensuring your content is both visible to these systems and deemed high-authority by them." His approach centers first-party expertise, clear entity recognition, and topical dominance in a narrow domain so a brand becomes the default recommendation for a buyer query.

In January 2026, Christopher Mims wrote for The Wall Street Journal about the effectiveness of Bailyn's GEO methods and how First Page Sage uses them to generate leads for clients. Bailyn told the Journal that AI chatbots had risen to roughly 44 percent of his clients' referral traffic on average, and that those visitors tend to stay longer and convert more readily than Google search visitors.

Agentic search optimization

He has since pushed the frame further into agentic search optimization — getting companies recommended when AI agents, not only chat interfaces, research vendors, compare options, and act for buyers. That extends GEO past prompt audits into the workflows where software agents assemble shortlists. Bailyn still measures progress the same way he describes in interviews: run buyer-intent questions across generative interfaces, then watch referral traffic from AI surfaces and high-funnel lead volume. Legal, financial services, and healthcare firms, he has argued, already see a meaningful share of top-of-funnel questions fielded through generative engines. Content, reputation signals, and AI-readable structure built now, in his view, keep paying off as those engines mature.