Austrian SEO and GEO Agencies Compared: 2026 Benchmark

Every Austrian agency now sells “visibility in ChatGPT”. At least 17 of the 20 agencies on our shortlist list pages about GEO, KI-Sichtbarkeit or AI search in their own sitemaps. The harder question for a buyer is which of them AI engines actually name when an Austrian asks for an agency, and whether that matches who wins on Google.

We measured it. On 9 November 2026, AmICited ran 100 German-language prompts targeted at Austria on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and recorded which agencies each answer named and which websites it cited. Ahrefs supplied organic traffic, keywords and backlinks for 125 domains. We also crawled each agency’s homepage and sitemaps and read their published case studies and prices. This article documents the method and what the evidence supports, agency by agency.

Snapshot date: 9 November 2026. This is a one-time observation, not a live ranking. Every traffic figure labelled Ahrefs is a modelled estimate, not an agency’s analytics. The experiment targets Austria and German-language prompts. It is the second country edition after our Slovak SEO and GEO agency comparison, and it uses the same method so the two can be compared.

Key Takeaways

• ithelps Digital was named in the most AI answers (71 of 300), ahead of otago (48), seoCon (43), KOMMA99 (33) and SEO Schmiede (32), in AmICited’s one-time Austria snapshot of 9 November 2026.
• The engines disagree. ChatGPT named ithelps Digital in 37 of 100 answers but seoCon in only 9; Google AI Overviews named seoCon in 22 answers, more than any other agency.
• Google rank is a weak predictor of AI naming. seoCon appeared in 32 of 100 classic Google result sets, more than anyone, while ithelps Digital, the most-named agency in AI answers, appeared in 13.
• seoCon has the highest Austrian organic traffic among agency-service sites: about 3,480 visits a month (Ahrefs). SEO Schmiede’s higher 6,349 comes mostly from one free “ChatGPT kostenlos” tool page.
• Small brands can win AI answers. KIGEO and Souk Social were each named 10 or more times with almost no Ahrefs traffic, so a big organic footprint is not the only route into an answer.
• Directories shape the answers. Sortlist was cited in 24 AI answers and agenturcheck.at in 11; buyers should read those listings as one input, not as an independent ranking.

How we ran the Austrian benchmark

The brief was simple: find out whom an Austrian buyer sees when they ask Google or an AI assistant for an SEO, GEO or online-marketing agency, and what that buyer can verify about those suppliers before signing. We fixed the questions, sources and comparison rules before looking at any answers.

Tools and evidence used

The whole pipeline ran through the AmICited and Ahrefs MCP connections, so every number in this article can be traced to a stored export.

AmICited · Prompt detail · „Beste SEO Agentur in Österreich?“

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

What buyers should take away

For AI recommendations, three agencies stand out: ithelps Digital, otago and seoCon were each named in more than 40 of 300 answers and were each cited as a source in 37 or more. KOMMA99 and SEO Schmiede form a second group with 32–33 answers.

For classic Google visibility on the buyer’s own queries, seoCon is clearly ahead, with results for 32 of the 100 prompts. LUSEO, GoldenWing and KOMMA99 follow. For organic traffic on their own Austrian websites, seoCon, Ameisenhaufen, REICHLUNDPARTNER and KOMMA99 lead among agency-service sites.

For transparent prices, KOMMA99, promeSeo, webhead, GoldenWing and ithelps Digital publish starting prices. For published proof, otago, GoldenWing, LEMONTEC and pixelart publish case studies with numbers. Those numbers are supplier claims, not audited results.

Method: three layers of evidence

Layer 1: AI answers. AmICited sent each of the 100 prompts once to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, with Austria as the target country, and stored the answer text, the brands it named and the URLs it cited. All 300 runs completed. 299 returned answer text (one AI Overview was empty), and 290 named at least one brand. Classic Google results for the same 100 queries were recorded alongside, 946 organic results in total. They are reported separately and never counted as AI sources.

Layer 2: the agencies’ own domains. Ahrefs batch analysis (subdomains, both protocols, average volume mode) for all 125 hosts, for Austria and worldwide. Ahrefs traffic is an estimate built from rankings and search volumes, so it is useful for comparison but is not a visit count.

Layer 3: public websites. A bounded crawl of each registry homepage, robots.txt and up to 12 sitemap files or 50,000 URLs per host, plus imprint checks and up to four official pages per shortlisted agency. Lighthouse ran three mobile lab passes per shortlisted homepage from one machine.

Two ways of counting AI visibility

We report two numbers and keep them apart:

• AI answers naming the agency. For each of the 300 answers, does it name the agency at all? Several mentions in one answer count once, so the maximum is 300. Brand spellings are merged to one domain (“otago”, “Otago Online Consulting GmbH” and “otago Online Consulting” are the same agency), using an automatic key plus a hand-checked alias list. Unresolved spellings are not credited to anyone.
• AI answers citing the agency’s website. Does the answer link to a URL on the agency’s host? Again, one per answer, maximum 300.

AmICited’s dashboard also shows its own mention counts (ithelps Digital 66, otago 45, seoCon 42 after merging aliases). They follow the same order but use AmICited’s definitions and list only the top 50 brands, so we show them as a secondary column.

A one-time run is not a trend

Every prompt ran once per engine on 9 November 2026. Asked again, ChatGPT may name different agencies. The value of 300 answers is breadth across many questions, not a stable position for any single question. A buyer or agency that wants a trend needs recurring prompts; see how to build a prompt library for AI visibility tracking.

Which agencies AI names most often

ithelps Digital is the clearest AI winner. It was named in 71 answers, almost 50% more than the next agency, and it was named by all three engines: 37 times by ChatGPT, 19 by AI Overviews and 15 by AI Mode. It describes itself as a Vienna agency founded in 2016 with about 20 specialists and offices in Munich and Tyrol, and it publishes a dedicated GEO service page.

otago and seoCon come next, with very different engine profiles. otago’s visibility comes mainly from ChatGPT (30 of its 48 answers). seoCon’s comes mainly from Google: AI Overviews named it 22 times, AI Mode 12 and ChatGPT only 9.

AmICited’s overall figures for seoCon: named in 29 of 100 prompts (29% prompt visibility), a 2.7% share of voice and an average position of 2.8 when named. The share-of-voice denominator includes 1,534 brand mentions, among them platforms such as Google, OpenAI and Sortlist, so it is not Austrian market share.

AI answers naming each agency, by engine

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

AmICited · Prompts · brand share of voice

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

Agencies the registry missed

The engines also named agencies that were not among our 100 registered competitors, and that is a finding in itself. We measured 24 of them afterwards. WEBU (16 answers), iGrow, Evergreen Media (13 each), Improove, Souk Social (12 each), inconcepts, SlopeLift, OnlineRocker (11 each) and KIGEO (10) were all named about as often as several shortlisted agencies.

Some have almost no organic footprint. KIGEO was named in 10 ChatGPT answers with an Ahrefs DR of 4 and no measurable Austrian organic traffic. Souk Social had 12 answers with DR 1. AI naming can follow a narrow, well-matched positioning, such as a name that literally contains “KI” and “GEO”, as much as it follows domain size. We describe this association; we don’t claim it as a cause.

Mentions are not citations: which websites become AI sources?

For each answer, we count a host once even if the answer cites several URLs from it. The maximum is 300.

Agency websites are cited heavily. otago (40 answers), ithelps Digital (38), seoCon (37), GoldenWing (35) and KOMMA99 (29) were cited more often than any directory. GoldenWing shows the gap between citation and naming: its site was cited in 35 answers, but GoldenWing itself was named in only 16. The most-cited GoldenWing URLs are its own list pages, “beste-online-marketing-agenturen-wien”, “beste-seo-agenturen-wien” and “beste-seo-agenturen-oesterreich”. Engines used an agency’s ranking of its competitors as a source without recommending the agency that wrote it.

google.com is the top “source” for a technical reason: 224 of its cited URLs are Google’s internal searchviewer links in AI Mode answers, and the rest are mostly Google Maps listings. We keep it in the data but don’t read it as a website preference.

Directories matter. Sortlist was cited in 24 answers, agenturcheck.at in 11, Semrush’s agency directory in 10, and herold.at, Dr. Web, OMR Reviews, Trustpilot and Feedbax in 7–9 each. ithelps Digital states on its team page that it holds first place for SEO and GEO in Vienna on agenturcheck.at, and agenturcheck.at was cited in 9 ChatGPT answers. That is a plausible route into AI answers, not a proven one.

AmICited · Sources · cited domains

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

AmICited · Sources · cited URLs

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

Each AI engine picks differently

The three engines behave like three different advisers:

ChatGPT gives the longest lists and leans towards agencies with strong directory and review presence: ithelps Digital (37), otago (30), SEO Schmiede (22). AI Overviews stays closest to Google’s organic results, so seoCon, which leads classic Google here, leads AI Overviews too. AI Mode names the fewest agencies and links mostly to Google’s own surfaces.

A buyer who asks only one assistant sees only one of these shortlists. An agency that reports “AI visibility” without naming the engine is hiding most of the story. That is why AmICited tracks each engine separately; see how to track Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Google rankings and AI answers don’t match

For every prompt, AmICited also recorded the classic Google organic results. Comparing them with the AI answers shows how much (or how little) the two channels agree.

seoCon wins Google; ithelps Digital wins the AI answers. seoCon appeared in the Google results of 32 prompts, 9 of them in the top three, but ChatGPT named it in only 9 answers. ithelps Digital appeared in 13 Google result sets and was named in 71 AI answers. LUSEO, a Salzburg agency with more than 2,000 sitemap URLs, appeared in 22 Google result sets but was named in only 11 AI answers.

The correlation is strongest for AI Overviews, which draws on Google’s index, and weakest for ChatGPT, which relies more on directories, reviews and third-party lists. For an agency, ranking well on Google is necessary for AI Overviews but not sufficient for ChatGPT.

Why prompt selection changes the ranking

Short keywords (“seo agentur wien”) and buyer questions (“Welche SEO Agentur in Graz ist gut?”) are different measurements. We compared the shortlist’s ranking in the two prompt groups:

The top three hold in both groups: ithelps Digital, otago and seoCon. Below them, the order moves. wukonig.com ranks fourth on buyer questions but twelfth on short keywords; its B2B and Graz positioning fits specific questions better than generic ones. get on top and promeSeo rank higher on short keywords (eighth) than on buyer questions (thirteenth and fourteenth). maxonline shows the opposite: ninth on buyer questions, sixteenth on short keywords.

Both groups named a similar number of brands per prompt (12.8 for short keywords and 13.3 for buyer questions, across three engines). seoCon was named in 15 short-keyword prompts and 14 buyer-question prompts. Any agency ranking that does not publish its prompt list can be engineered by choosing the prompts. Ours is published in full below.

Main comparison of the Austrian shortlist

The interactive table holds the full shortlist. Switch the view for AI visibility, Google, traffic, links and keywords; click a heading to sort.

¹ Dashboard mentions use AmICited’s definitions and list only the top 50 brands; a dash means the agency was outside that list, not zero.

AmICited · Competitors · share, Web Vitals, authority

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

Who wins Austrian organic traffic?

*SEO Schmiede is a special case. Ahrefs attributes 5,811 of its 6,349 estimated Austrian visits to a single page, a free ChatGPT tool ranking for “chatgpt kostenlos”. Its page for “seo agentur linz” brings about 52. That traffic is real, but it is not demand for agency services, which is why we did not choose SEO Schmiede as the reference domain.

seoCon leads on agency-relevant traffic: 160 Austrian keywords, 50 of them in the top three, including first place for “seo agentur wien”. REICHLUNDPARTNER ranks for the most Austrian keywords (191, 57 in the top three), including first place for “werbeagentur wien”, an advertising-agency query rather than an SEO one. Ameisenhaufen, which positions itself as a web-design and app agency in Vienna, earns almost 3,000 visits from fewer than 80 sitemap URLs.

Traffic and AI naming barely overlap. Ameisenhaufen, WESEO and pixelart are in the top ten for Austrian traffic but were named in only 2–6 AI answers. Simplexx and promeSeo have fewer than 100 estimated Austrian visits each, yet were named in 21 and 17 answers.

Authority and links have limits

Ahrefs Domain Rating is a relative score of a domain’s backlink profile on a 100-point scale. Referring domains count unique linking sites.

Source: Ahrefs batch analysis, 9 Nov 2026; AmICited snapshot.

Links alone don’t explain AI naming. ithelps Digital has the largest link profile and the most AI answers, but WESEO, Ameisenhaufen and pixelart have DR 65–74 and were rarely named. otago has a mid-range DR of 41 and the second-most AI answers. Simplexx combines DR 16 with 2,625 referring domains, a pattern that usually means many low-authority links. We don’t judge link quality from these aggregates; a buyer who cares should ask the agency for its own link-building rules.

How technically sound are the sites?

Core Web Vitals: what real Chrome users experience

AmICited imports Chrome UX Report field data (LCP, INP and CLS at the 75th percentile of real Chrome visits) for every tracked domain. The import for this registry finished on 9 November 2026, after the AI snapshot; the values below were read from AmICited’s Competitors view that day. Google’s thresholds for “good” are LCP up to 2.5 s, INP up to 200 ms and CLS up to 0.1 ( Web Vitals).

15 of the 20 shortlisted agencies have field data, and 11 of them pass all three metrics. WESEO (LCP 0.8 s), LIMESODA and get on top (1.0 s each) are the fastest. Four fail: seoCon on loading (LCP 5.0 s), and REICHLUNDPARTNER (CLS 0.18), PromoMasters (0.14) and SEO Schmiede (0.12) on layout stability. wukonig.com, webhead, LUSEO, Simplexx and promeSeo have too little Chrome traffic for a field value; that is “not measured”, not “fast” or “slow”. Across the whole registry, 39 of 101 sites have field data and 30 pass.

Lab and field data disagree, sometimes sharply. seoCon scores 83 in our Lighthouse lab test but has the worst field LCP of the shortlist. GoldenWing has a lab LCP of 8.8 s but a field LCP of 1.3 s. Real users’ devices, networks, caches and the pages they actually land on differ from one emulated phone, which is why we report both and rank neither as the truth.

Lighthouse: one machine’s lab measurement

Lighthouse ran three mobile lab passes per shortlisted homepage (Lighthouse 12.6.1, emulated mid-range Android phone, simulated throttling) from one workstation on 9 November 2026. We report the median. Lab scores depend on the test machine and network, so they compare sites under identical conditions; they don’t replace real-user data.

promeSeo (99) and webhead (96) have the fastest homepages in the lab, and promeSeo is the only one with a lab LCP under 2.5 seconds (1.7 s). seoCon is fourth with 83 (LCP 3.8 s). Several agencies that sell technical SEO fall well short: REICHLUNDPARTNER (44), LUSEO (47), Simplexx (49) and SEO Schmiede (55, lab LCP 11.5 s). In total, 14 of the 20 homepages have a lab LCP above 4 seconds. Layout stability is good almost everywhere (CLS 0.03 or lower), and 18 of 20 score 92 or higher in Lighthouse’s SEO category.

Speed and AI naming don’t line up in this sample. ithelps Digital, the most-named agency, scores 62; promeSeo, the fastest, was named in 17 answers. GoldenWing and pixelart redirected the mobile test to their English homepages, so their scores describe the English start page. The Lighthouse documentation explains what each category measures.

Direct HTML observations

97 of 101 registry homepages returned HTTP 200 to our bounded fetch; the others returned 403, 502, 503 or no response. SEO Schmiede’s homepage returned HTTP 502. Of the 19 shortlisted homepages that responded, 17 have exactly one H1; wukonig.com has two and LUSEO none in its static HTML. pixelart publishes no JSON-LD on its homepage; seoCon publishes five blocks.

Robots.txt and AI crawlers: 15 of the 101 registry sites name AI crawlers in robots.txt. Among the shortlist, GoldenWing, PromoMasters and LUSEO address GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or Claude crawlers explicitly. Naming a bot is not the same as blocking it; check the AI accessibility report for what each rule actually allows.

llms.txt: AmICited’s llms.txt check scores seoCon, ithelps Digital, GoldenWing, PromoMasters, wukonig.com, LUSEO, SEO Schmiede and promeSeo at 0.9 or higher. otago, REICHLUNDPARTNER, LEMONTEC, pixelart, Ameisenhaufen and get on top scored 0. otago is the second-most-named agency without one, so an llms.txt file is clearly not a prerequisite for being named.

Sitemaps: how much content is actually discoverable?

AmICited · Competitors · sitemap vocabulary

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

88 of the 101 registry sites returned a complete sitemap inventory within our limits, 6 a partial one and 7 none. Sitemap size varies by a factor of almost 30 within the shortlist: LUSEO lists 2,099 URLs, GoldenWing 1,245, ithelps Digital 578, while get on top lists 51 and Ameisenhaufen 77.

Size is not the same as reach. Ameisenhaufen’s 77 URLs bring almost 3,000 estimated Austrian visits. LUSEO’s 2,099 URLs bring about 150. Much of LUSEO’s inventory sits in repeated sections: chatgpt-werbung (280 URLs), vergleiche (143), chatgpt-agentur, webdesign-hotel and webdesign-restaurant (117 each). That pattern suggests templated pages; we didn’t audit their content.

Freshness: real updates or changed timestamps?

The lastmod value in a sitemap is a declaration, not proof of an edit. Three patterns stand out:

• promeSeo declared 99 of its 102 URLs as modified in the last 30 days, with a median age of 6.9 days. That fits its three-times-weekly SEO news section, but such a uniform update rate can also come from automatic timestamps.
• Suchhelden (the German control) declares lastmod for only 4 of its 382 URLs, all with the same value, which says nothing about when individual pages changed.
• seoCon has the oldest median lastmod of the shortlist, 1,039 days, with only 5 URLs touched in the last 30 days. Its sitemap understates its news activity or its update cadence; either way, it gives search engines and AI crawlers little freshness signal. See content freshness.

Which topics do the URL inventories emphasise?

Counting URL words reveals what each agency invests in:

Glossaries (“lexikon”) are common among the agencies AI cites most: ithelps Digital, GoldenWing and promeSeo all run one. But the most-cited pages are not glossary entries. GoldenWing’s citations come mainly from its “best agencies” list pages, which match the shape of a buyer’s question exactly. That fits a broader pattern in what ChatGPT cites, but it isn’t proof that list pages cause citations, and an agency ranking its own competitors is not a neutral source.

Agency profiles: evidence and open questions

Each profile separates what we measured from what the agency says about itself. Claims are quoted from official pages fetched on 9 November 2026.

ithelps Digital · homepage

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

otago · homepage

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

seoCon · homepage

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

ithelps Digital: the AI favourite, with heavy review and directory presence

Named in 71 AI answers and cited in 38, both the highest or near-highest in the study. It has the largest link profile (4,601 referring domains, DR 73) and the strongest reach outside Austria (an estimated 4,674 visits a month from Germany). The site claims “900+ erfolgreiche Projekte”, “20+ Experten”, 4.98 of 5 stars from 366 reviews and first place for SEO and GEO in Vienna on agenturcheck.at. What to check: which of the 900 projects match your size and sector, and who in the roughly 20-person team would run yours.

otago: ChatGPT’s second choice and the most-cited agency site

Named in 48 answers (30 of them by ChatGPT) and cited in 40, more than any other agency. otago calls itself a Google Premier Partner and publishes SEA case results ("+42% Conversion Rate", “–27% CPA”) and a GEO workshop for Vienna Insurance Group. It has no llms.txt and a modest DR of 41. What to check: the baselines and periods behind the SEA percentages.

seoCon: Google’s favourite, under-represented in ChatGPT

The reference domain. Highest agency-service traffic in Austria (3,480 visits a month), most classic Google results (32 of 100 prompts), named in 43 AI answers, of which 22 were AI Overviews and only 9 ChatGPT. The Linz-based company (FN 414513 d) says it grew “von 1 auf 25 SpezialistInnen” and completed “über 500 Kundenprojekte”. It publishes current pieces on ChatGPT Ads and llms.txt, but its sitemap lastmod values are old. What to check: comparable case studies; its reference pages are sparse in published figures.

KOMMA99: balanced across engines, with published prices

Named in 33 answers, spread evenly across ChatGPT (12), AI Overviews (8) and AI Mode (13), and in Google’s results for 19 prompts. KOMMA99 publishes prices: SEO retainers “ab 1.399 Euro pro Monat”, one-off projects from €3,299 and workshops from €999. It claims “10+ Jahre Erfahrung, 500+ umgesetzte Projekte” and 5/5 stars from 56 Google reviews. What to check: what the €1,399 retainer includes in hours and deliverables.

SEO Schmiede: strong in ChatGPT, thin evidence elsewhere

Named in 32 answers, 22 of them by ChatGPT, 9 by AI Overviews and 1 by AI Mode. It had no classic Google results in our prompt set; its homepage returned HTTP 502 to our crawl and no sitemap could be read. Its large Ahrefs traffic comes from a free ChatGPT tool page. We could not machine-verify its imprint. What to check: company details, team and references before any shortlist.

LIMESODA: a long-established full-service agency

Named in 28 answers and cited in 13. A Vienna agency founded in the early 2000s, with offices in Vienna, Linz and St. Pölten, an award history going back to 2006 and Google Partner status since 2011, according to its own timeline. It publishes a page on “KI-Agentic Commerce”. What to check: whether SEO/GEO is a core team or one service among many.

Simplexx and promeSeo: small domains, solid AI naming

Simplexx (21 answers) and promeSeo (17) both have fewer than 100 estimated Austrian visits a month but appear often in ChatGPT. promeSeo publishes package prices, a three-times-weekly news section and its own study of 159 Viennese companies’ AI visibility, and it names its founder and “120+ Projekte”. What to check: capacity; small teams can be excellent but have limits.

wukonig.com: a B2B specialist that wins on buyer questions

Named in 20 answers and ranked fourth on buyer questions, but only twelfth on short keywords. The Graz agency says it has worked “seit 1999”, with “500+ erfolgreiche Projekte”, runs a workshop “Von SEO zu GEO” at FH Joanneum and gives in-house GEO consulting to enterprise clients, including ams OSRAM. What to check: fit outside B2B and industry.

GoldenWing: the most-cited content, rarely the recommendation

Cited in 35 answers but named in 16. Its most-cited pages are its own lists of the best SEO and online-marketing agencies in Vienna and Austria. GoldenWing has 1,245 sitemap URLs, including a glossary and a Russian section, and publishes many client results ("+300% Umsatzsteigerung", “+180% qualifizierte Leads”). Those percentages carry no baseline or period on the pages we read. What to check: the baseline and time period for each figure.

get on top, maxonline, LEMONTEC, webhead, PromoMasters and LUSEO

• get on top (onlinemarketing.at, Thalgau): named in 18 answers, publishes a guide to measuring AI visibility and says it has “4 Standorte. 30+ Teamplayer”.
• maxonline (Leiben, Lower Austria; FN 659087 x): named in 12 answers, all of them by Google’s engines and none by ChatGPT, cited in 15 and in Google’s results for 10 prompts, 6 of them in the top three. The mirror image of SEO Schmiede.
• LEMONTEC (Upper Austria): named in 14 answers, DR 68, published case studies and a Caesar Award mention.
• webhead (Vienna): named in 13 answers, web-design packages “ab 999 €”, “400+ erfolgreiche Projekte” and a GEO service page.
• PromoMasters (Salzburg, Villach, Vienna): named in 13 answers, describes itself as “Österreichs 1. auf SEO spezialisierte Agentur” with 15 experts and runs GEO SEO seminars.
• LUSEO (Salzburg): named in 11 answers, but appeared in 22 Google result sets and was cited in 20 answers. Its imprint did not show an Austrian company number in our machine check.

REICHLUNDPARTNER, WESEO, Ameisenhaufen and pixelart

These four have strong own-site traffic or authority but little AI naming (2–7 answers each). REICHLUNDPARTNER is a large Linz advertising group; its homepage cites Medianet Xpert Awards for creativity and client satisfaction. WESEO (Pöllau, Styria) has a strong hotel focus in its references and runs GEO webinars for hotels. Ameisenhaufen and pixelart are mainly web-design and full-service studios. For these, the gap between own-site strength and AI naming is the finding, not a verdict on their work.

Suchhelden: a German agency competing in Austria

Suchhelden GmbH is registered in Osnabrück, Germany, and runs suchhelden.at alongside German and Swiss sites. It appeared in Google’s results for 12 prompts but was named in only 5 AI answers. It claims “über 1.000 Kund:innen und über 4.000 Projekte” since 2012, and its founders wrote a book on GEO. We keep it as a control because Austrian buyers will meet it in search.

The revenue leaders are almost invisible in this prompt set

kraftwerk, valantic and dreifive, the three largest Austrian digital agencies by audited fee revenue in the HORIZONT ranking 2025, were named in 0–3 AI answers each. Their business is large transformation and development projects, not the SEO and GEO questions we asked. Size and AI visibility for SEO queries are different things.

Who demonstrates international organic reach?

Most Austrian agencies are domestic: for 13 of the 20 shortlisted sites, Austria accounts for more than 80% of estimated organic traffic. The exceptions are ithelps Digital, with an estimated 11,078 visits worldwide, 4,674 of them from Germany, a de-de section and a Munich office, and SEO Schmiede (33,138 worldwide, 18,369 from Germany), whose reach comes from its free tool page. LIMESODA and KOMMA99 each draw about 500 estimated visits a month from outside Austria and Germany.

What seoCon should do next

seoCon is the strongest Austrian agency on classic Google in this study, and that strength carries into Google AI Overviews. The gap is ChatGPT, where seoCon was named in only 9 of 100 answers, against 37 for ithelps Digital and 30 for otago. On the evidence, these steps follow:

1. Close the ChatGPT gap through third-party sources. ChatGPT cited Sortlist, agenturcheck.at, Semrush’s agency directory, herold.at and review platforms. Complete, current and reviewed profiles there are the most direct lever for an agency that already wins Google.
2. Fix the sitemap’s freshness signal. A median lastmod of 1,039 days hides a site that publishes current news. Correct lastmod values help search engines and AI crawlers prioritise recrawls.
3. Publish measurable case studies. seoCon’s reference pages carry few numbers. Baselines, periods and results, with client consent, give AI engines and buyers something specific to cite.
4. Track the engines separately. seoCon was named in all three engines for only three prompts (“Welche SEO Agentur in Linz ist empfehlenswert?”, “online marketing agentur linz” and “seo agentur linz”). Recurring prompts per engine in AmICited’s AI visibility tracking would show whether the changes move the numbers.
5. Fix the homepage LCP. Real Chrome users wait 5.0 seconds for seoCon’s main homepage content (Chrome UX Report, p75), the slowest of the 15 shortlisted agencies with field data. AmICited’s Performance impact charts below show where seoCon’s pages sit among the pages each engine cites; that is an association, not proof that speed drives citations.

AmICited · Web Vitals · seocon.at

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

AmICited · Performance impact · LCP

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

AmICited · Performance impact · INP

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

AmICited · Performance impact · CLS

Captured 9 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

About the publisher: AmICited.com in Ahrefs

AmICited publishes this benchmark. It is software, not an agency, so it appears in none of the rankings above. In the 300 Austrian AI answers, amicited.com was neither named nor cited, which is expected: every prompt asks for an agency, not a tool.

For readers who want to see the publisher’s own footprint, these are the Ahrefs captures from our Slovak edition, taken on 3 November 2026. We did not take new ones for Austria. The domain was registered on 8 December 2025 ( Verisign RDAP), so it was 336 days old on this study’s snapshot date.

Ahrefs · AmICited.com · AI responses and organic growth

Captured 3 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

Ahrefs · AmICited.com · organic keyword positions

Captured 3 Nov 2026 Visit source ↗

Ahrefs and this benchmark measure different things. Ahrefs counts responses to its own questions, in its own countries and index, so its 786 responses cannot be compared with the 300 Austrian answers measured here. A young domain earning positions and citations is a useful counterexample to “you need years of history”, but it says nothing about leads, revenue or the work an agency would do for you.

Which keywords and prompts did we use?

The 60 short keywords come from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer for Austria, chosen by relevance to agency services and by volume (average monthly searches over 12 months): from “content marketing” (2,800) and “seo agentur wien” (1,600) down to “seo relaunch beratung” (150). The 40 buyer questions are short and in everyday German, and none mentions an agency. Every prompt ran in AmICited with country Austria, one-time schedule, on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode.

The complete competitor registry

All 125 measured hosts: the reference domain, 100 registered competitors and 24 agencies that AI named but the registry missed.

How to assess an agency before signing

Exact prompts behind any AI-visibility claim.

Ask which prompts, country, engines and dates produced "we are recommended by ChatGPT", and whether the result was repeated.

Mentions, citations, visits and leads kept apart.

Being named, being linked and receiving enquiries are four different results. A good report shows each.

A comparable client case with a baseline.

Percentages without a starting value, period and the agency's specific contribution are marketing, not evidence.

The price and what it buys.

Ask for hours, deliverables and reporting behind a monthly retainer, as KOMMA99, promeSeo and webhead show is possible.

The named people who will do the work.

Team size on a website is not capacity on your account.

Their own measurable visibility.

An agency selling GEO should be able to show its own AI visibility for its own market, with the prompts behind it.

If you run an agency yourself, AmICited for agencies covers how to report AI visibility to clients with exact prompts and engine splits, and AI share of voice explains the metric used here.

The takeaway

Austria’s agency market looks different depending on who you ask. Google rewards seoCon, ChatGPT rewards ithelps Digital and otago, and directories such as Sortlist and agenturcheck.at feed the AI answers in between. No single number, whether traffic, DR or AI mentions, picks the right agency for a specific project.

For buyers, the useful move is to ask every shortlisted agency for the same evidence: exact prompts, engines and dates for AI claims, baselines for case studies, and the scope behind the price. For agencies, the data shows where the gaps are, engine by engine. We’ll repeat this benchmark with recurring prompts so the next edition can show trends, not just a snapshot.

Limitations

• One run per prompt and engine. AI answers vary between runs; this is a snapshot, not a stable ranking.
• The prompt set favours SEO, GEO and online-marketing services in German. It does not measure branding, development or PR agencies on their own terms.
• Brand matching merges spellings with an automatic key plus a hand-checked alias list. 197 brand spellings, mostly small agencies outside the registry, could not be resolved and are not credited to anyone.
• Ahrefs traffic and keywords are modelled estimates. Country attribution is not buyer intent.
• Sitemap counts are discovered URLs within a bounded crawl, not indexed pages. lastmod is a declaration.
• Field Core Web Vitals come from the Chrome UX Report through AmICited (p75, origin or homepage level, read on 9 November 2026); sites with too little Chrome traffic have none. Lighthouse results are lab data from one machine.
• Screenshots are actual AmICited interface captures from 9 November 2026, cropped to remove navigation and account details. Interface totals (for example 1,769 citations) use AmICited’s own definitions and can differ from our one-per-answer counts.
• Supplier claims were read on official pages and are not independently verified.
• The shortlist is an editorial selection with an imprint check, not a certification of quality.