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The best AI marketing agency for you depends on which problem AI is supposed to solve. Buyers who can't find you in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews should start with an AI search (AEO/GEO) specialist. Where paid media carries growth, look for an agency that uses AI to run and measure campaigns, not just write ad copy. And for B2B companies that need both, the useful question is whether one team can run them off the same CRM data.
Almost every agency in the UK now calls itself AI-powered. Very few can show you what the AI actually does on a live account, who checks its output, or what it changed in pipeline. This guide groups the agencies that can, by the job you're hiring for, so you can skip straight to the section that matches your brief.
Disclosure: Lever Digital publishes this guide and appears in it. We haven't ranked the list, and we haven't put ourselves first. We've placed Lever in the one category where we think we're a strong fit (paid search and AI search run together for B2B), applied the same evidence standard to ourselves as to everyone else, and said plainly where other agencies are the better choice. No agency paid to be included.
We started with the UK agencies named most often across 2026 roundups of AI, GEO and AEO agencies, added the B2B specialists we compete with, and kept the 12 that cleared all five tests below. Every check used public evidence: each agency's own site and case studies, award shortlists, independent review platforms such as Clutch, and trade press. We haven't been a client of any of them, so we can't vouch for day-to-day service, and you should take references before signing.
Within each category, agencies appear in alphabetical order. Being listed second or third isn't a judgement. Details were checked in October 2026 and agency offers change quickly, so confirm anything important on the first call.
Choose from this group if your problem is that AI assistants don't mention you, or describe you wrongly. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) both mean the same practical job: getting your brand cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers. A good specialist will show you which prompts they track for your category, how often you appear against competitors, and what they changed when the numbers moved.
Best for: UK brands that want search planned and measured as one channel across Google, social search and AI assistants.
Found is a London performance agency, founded in 2009, that sells what it calls Everysearch: one strategy for Google, TikTok, Amazon, AI platforms and social feeds. Its main AI asset is Luminr, a visibility platform it reports investing £1 million in, which maps where a brand appears across the searchable web, including AI assistants. Found is a Google Premier Partner and part of the Tomorrow agency group.
Watch out for: its published client work leans consumer and financial services (AllClear, 1st Central, Vita Student), so B2B software buyers should ask for sector-specific examples.
Best for: consumer brands that want to lead their category wherever people search, including AI discovery.
Rise at Seven is a search-first creative and content agency headquartered in Manchester, with teams in London and New York. It has repositioned around being found across Google, TikTok, YouTube, Amazon and AI platforms, and its client list includes Red Bull, SIXT, Capital One and JD Sports.
Watch out for: the model is brand and consumer-led. Early-stage B2B companies chasing pipeline will usually get more from a B2B specialist.
Best for: Series A+ SaaS and tech companies that want organic and AI search tied to signups, pipeline and MRR.
Skale is a London agency, founded in 2019, that works only with SaaS and tech brands and now describes itself as AI-search-first. It works across Google, Reddit, YouTube and AI engines such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Its clearest AI search proof point is Jitter, a motion design SaaS, which it reports moved from 22% to 55% AI brand coverage in four months against Adobe and Canva.
Watch out for: Skale is organic only. If paid search is a big part of your acquisition, you'll need a separate PPC partner and a plan for sharing data between the two.
Best for: brands that want traditional SEO and AI search visibility run together by a dedicated search agency.
The SEO Works was founded in Sheffield in 2009 and has offices in Leeds, London, Manchester, Birmingham and Philadelphia. Its AI search work targets citations in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini through structured data, entity analysis and prompt-based brand testing, supported by in-house tools for entity tracking and visibility testing. Its awards include Best SEO Agency at the Global Search Awards.
Watch out for: it's search-led. If you haven't yet worked out which channels will carry your growth, start with a broader growth partner.
Choose from this group if paid media is your main acquisition lever and you want AI improving planning, bidding and creative at scale. Google and Meta already automate most bidding. What separates these agencies is what they build on top: forecasting, testing libraries and data pipelines the ad platforms don't give you.
Best for: brands with large, multi-channel media budgets where forecasting and testing discipline matter.
Brainlabs was founded in London in 2012 by former Googler Daniel Gilbert and has grown past 1,000 people through acquisitions including Distilled and Exverus Media. Its Cortex platform uses customer data to forecast trends and generate AI-assisted briefs for media decisions. It also logs its experiments in a shared repository, so new client strategies draw on past test results.
Watch out for: it's built for significant spend. Smaller accounts are unlikely to get its best people.
Best for: enterprise brands running performance media across many markets.
Croud was founded in London in 2011 and operates in more than 100 countries, backed by a network of on-demand specialists it calls Croudies. Its AI stack includes CroudOS, an operating system for campaign work, and Agentic Croudies, AI agents launched in December 2025 to automate data-heavy tasks. A separate tool, BrandAI, tracks brand visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Watch out for: the model suits global brands. Mid-sized UK businesses may find the structure heavier than they need.
Best for: mid-sized UK brands in retail, ecommerce, fashion and travel that want AI across paid, creative and CRO.
PUSH is a London agency with nearly 20 years in performance marketing. Its DIAL 360 platform handles campaign analysis, creative optimisation and audience intelligence. In 2026 it was named Innovative Agency of the Year at the UK Agency Awards, and it reports lifting lead-to-sale conversion from 1.2% to 14% for Which Health Insurer using AI-generated UGC on Meta. It's a Google Premier Partner and Microsoft Elite Partner.
Watch out for: most of its case studies are consumer brands. B2B companies with long sales cycles should ask how it handles offline conversions and CRM data.
Choose from this group if you want one team using the same data to win paid clicks and AI citations. Your paid search query reports show the exact language buyers use when they're ready to act. That's the best brief there is for the content AI engines quote. Run the two separately and you pay twice to learn the same thing, with neither team able to see whether an AI mention later turned into a branded search or a deal.
Best for: mid-market and larger brands that want SEO, GEO, paid media and digital PR under one roof.
Impression was founded in Nottingham in 2012 and has offices in Manchester and London, with a US expansion under way in 2026. It works on brand visibility across traditional and AI search alongside paid search and digital PR, with research-led experimentation built into engagements. It's a certified B Corp and was named Large Paid Media Agency of the Year at the European Paid Media Awards for the fourth year running in 2025.
Watch out for: its client list (Stella McCartney, DHL, Clarins) is mostly consumer and enterprise brand work. It's a full-service agency, so scope and fees reflect that.
Best for: B2B SaaS and fintech companies spending £5k or more a month on paid search that want the same team improving PPC efficiency and AI search visibility, measured against CAC and pipeline.
Lever is a search-first B2B digital marketing agency. Google and Microsoft Ads are the core of its work, with LinkedIn and Meta added where an audience justifies it. AI shows up in three places. Proprietary agentic diagnostic programmes audit ad accounts for structural waste that standard checks miss. CRM data is fed back through offline conversion import, so Google's AI bidding (Smart Bidding, Performance Max, AI Max) optimises towards qualified pipeline rather than form fills. And paid search query data feeds the intent clusters behind its AEO/GEO content, with share of voice, citation rate, sentiment and AI-referred conversions tracked monthly across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot.
Its best-known result is Uplisting, which grew from $100,000 to $3,000,000 ARR while working with Lever, and it turned Sprintlaw's loss-making Google Ads account into the firm's leading new business channel. Lever manages accounts across EMEA, North America and APAC and was a 2026 UK Paid Media Awards finalist.
Watch out for: Lever's AI search practice is newer than its paid media work. Both published case studies above are paid search results, and it has yet to publish an AI visibility case study with a share-of-voice trend, so ask to see live client reporting. It also needs product-market fit and meaningful media spend, so pre-PMF startups are better served elsewhere. It isn't a brand, creative or consumer social agency, and D2C ecommerce brands will find more specialist options in the paid media section above.
Lever or Gripped? Both are B2B. Pick Gripped if you want broad demand generation with ABM and LinkedIn at the centre. Pick Lever if search (paid and AI) is your main pipeline source, you run several markets, or you need every pound tied to CAC through your CRM.
Choose from this group if leads are arriving but your CRM, scoring or account targeting can't keep up. No amount of AI in your ad accounts fixes a pipeline that leaks after the form fill. These agencies work on the systems behind it.
Best for: enterprise B2B technology and professional services firms running account-based programmes with long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles.
Gilroy is a Basingstoke B2B agency with more than 50 years in the sector, ranked among the top 10 ABM agencies by B2B Marketing. Its AI-driven ABM is built with 6sense, using intent data and predictive analytics to find accounts that are in market before they make contact. It won Silver for Best Use of Creative at the 2025 B2B Marketing Awards for its campaign with Thales.
Watch out for: it's built for enterprise budgets and account lists. Scale-ups selling self-serve products will get less from it.
Best for: HubSpot users whose bottleneck is CRM data, lifecycle stages and sales–marketing alignment.
Six & Flow is a HubSpot Elite Partner headquartered in Manchester, with an office in London and teams in Ireland, Canada and the Netherlands. It designs go-to-market systems covering CRM and data architecture, RevOps and AI enablement, and uses its own FLAIR framework for responsible AI adoption. It's ISO 27001 certified.
Watch out for: it's HubSpot-centric and doesn't buy media. Pair it with a paid media or search partner if acquisition is also a problem.
Ask to see the AI working on a live account, then ask who checks it. An agency that can't do both on the first call is probably relabelling existing services. These questions sort the rest quickly.
For AI search (AEO/GEO):
For AI in paid media:
For any AI agency:
What is an AI marketing agency? An AI marketing agency uses AI systems to plan, run and measure marketing, with senior people reviewing what those systems produce. In 2026 the term covers two quite different services: optimising for AI search (getting cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews) and using AI to run channels such as paid search more efficiently. Check which one an agency means before you compare prices.
What's the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO? SEO earns rankings and clicks in traditional search results. AEO and GEO aim to get your brand cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers, and in practice the two terms are used interchangeably. They share the same foundations (crawlable pages, clear structure, authoritative content), but AI search also depends heavily on what third-party sources say about you.
How much does an AI marketing agency cost in the UK? Published UK estimates put specialist retainers at roughly £3,000 to £10,000 a month, with enterprise media and full-service programmes costing considerably more. For paid media, agency fees sit on top of your ad spend. AI hasn't made good agencies cheaper, but it should mean more gets tested for the same fee.
Do I need separate agencies for AI search and PPC? Not necessarily. Specialists make sense if you only need one of the two. If you run both, a single team can use paid search query data to decide what content to build for AI engines, and report both against the same CRM pipeline. With two agencies, agree up front how they'll share data.
How long does AEO or GEO take to show results? Citation changes can show within weeks of fixing technical issues and publishing well-structured content. Pipeline impact takes longer, typically several months, because AI answers influence buyers who often convert later through a branded search or a direct visit.
Which AI marketing agency is best for B2B SaaS? It depends on where your pipeline comes from. Skale suits SaaS companies that want organic and AI search without paid media. Gripped suits those that want broad demand generation including ABM and LinkedIn. Lever Digital suits B2B SaaS and fintech companies whose pipeline runs mainly through paid search and who want AI search built from the same data.
If that last description sounds like you, get a free proposal. We'll show you where you stand in paid search and in AI answers today, and if another agency on this list is a better fit for your brief, we'll say so.
Lever Digital is proud to be a 2026 UK Paid Media Awards finalist, recognised for outstanding performance-led paid media campaigns across B2B and SaaS.
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