signAI is a specialist AI search marketing agency founded by veterans of Google, Perplexity AI, and enterprise SEO — built around a single conviction: in the AI search era, brand authority and technical precision are inseparable.
Maya Klein left Google's Search Quality team with one conviction: the next wave of search wouldn't look like the last one. She'd spent four years reviewing how Google's systems evaluated content quality — and she'd seen the early signals of something much bigger than an algorithm update.
She started SIGNAL with two other ex-Googlers in Toronto, with five clients and a thesis: search authority would become a brand's most durable competitive asset. They were right — just a few years early.
When James Okafor joined from a computational linguistics research role, the team started running structured experiments: how do large language models decide what to include in their answers? What signals make a source "citable"?
They developed what would become the Generative Engine Optimization methodology — a systematic approach to engineering brand presence inside AI-generated answers. At the time, there was no industry language for it.
ChatGPT's explosive growth and Google's AI Overview rollout validated everything the team had been building toward. Every CMO had the same question: "How do we show up in AI answers?" SIGNAL already had the answer.
Inbound demand tripled. The team grew from 8 to 24 people in 18 months. They said no to clients who weren't a fit and doubled down on the specialist positioning that made them different.
Today signAI works with 180+ brands across B2B SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, and healthcare — from Series A startups to enterprise brands navigating a search landscape their existing agencies don't understand.
The team is 42 people, fully distributed across North America and Europe. The conviction stays the same: the brands that own AI search today will be structurally impossible to displace in three years.
Our mission is to make ambitious brands impossible to ignore in the AI search era — by building the kind of deep, genuine authority that algorithms can't fake and competitors can't easily copy.
We believe search authority is a brand asset — one that compounds over time, survives algorithm changes, and pays dividends long after the work is done. We build it for the long term, not for the quarterly report.
We take fewer clients than we could. Every engagement gets senior attention, clear strategy, and work we're proud to put our name on. We'd rather be the best agency for 50 clients than a mediocre one for 500.
You'll always know what we're doing, why we're doing it, and whether it's working. We report on the metrics that matter to your business — not the ones that make us look good. Bad news gets delivered fast.
AI search is evolving faster than any playbook can capture. We invest heavily in research, run our own experiments, and share what we learn. Staying ahead is part of the job, not a perk.
We don't recommend tactics that produce short-term spikes at the cost of long-term trust. Every recommendation is evaluated against a simple question: will this still be working in three years?
Across B2B SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, healthcare, and professional services.
Fully distributed across North America and Europe. Every client works with senior strategists.
Median organic traffic growth across all active client engagements over a 12-month period.
Our clients stay. The average engagement length is 26 months — because results keep compounding.
We track citation performance across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, and more.
Cumulative ad spend managed across Google Ads and Bing, with average CPA reductions of 89%.
We were building AI search methodology before the term GEO existed — a 5-year head start.
Our typical client relationship lasts over two years — because search authority builds over time.
Remote-first, async-first, and deeply specialist. We hire for depth over breadth and invest in people who want to become the best in the world at what they do.
We've been fully distributed since founding. Our team spans 11 cities across 6 time zones. We don't have an office because our best people don't need one — they need autonomy and clear expectations.
Deep work produces better results than back-to-back meetings. We communicate through well-written documents, protect focus hours, and run meetings only to decide — never just to update.
Every client account is led by a strategist with 7+ years of experience. We don't use junior staff as the primary delivery layer. Clients deserve expert attention from day one.
We run internal experiments, publish findings publicly, and dedicate 20% of team capacity to R&D. GEO is evolving rapidly — treating research as a core function keeps us ahead of the methodology.
Our average client relationship lasts 26 months. We don't lock clients into long contracts — we earn their continued business by delivering results that make leaving feel irrational.
Clients have live access to all dashboards, all data, all work in progress. We share bad news immediately and good news with context. Transparency isn't a value — it's a practice.