The Shortlist/Germany · SEO & AI
The 5 best SEO and AI Search agencies in Germany
Published Sep 2, 2026
Google still sends most of your organic traffic, and it is now pushing AI Overviews and AI Mode into the results. At the same time your buyers are asking ChatGPT and Gemini directly. That is two jobs, and most German companies do not want two agencies and two contracts arguing over the same pages.
Five German agencies that credibly do both.
At a glance
The shortlist, ranked
| # | Agency | Best for | Base | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Radyant | German B2B companies and enterprises that want both tracks in one team and conversions as the metric | DACH, delivering across Europe | From €7,000/mo |
| 2 | Peak Ace | Large German brands with hundreds of thousands of URLs across several languages | Berlin, delivering across Europe | Not published |
| 3 | Suchhelden | German consumer, retail and e-commerce brands that need scale and many locations covered | Osnabrück, with offices in Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Munich | Flexible. Project, monthly retainer, or performance-based. No figure published |
| 4 | seowerk | German mid-market and enterprise brands that want SEO plus the authority work AI answers reward | Augsburg, serving Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein | Not published. Described as comparable to professional SEO consulting |
| 5 | DREIKON | German Mittelstand companies that want search inside one full-service relationship | Münster, Germany | Not published |
Methodology
How this was put together
We started with German agencies that run classic SEO at scale and also sell AI Search or GEO as a named service. Both halves had to be real. A GEO boutique with no technical SEO depth is not an answer to this brief, and neither is an SEO agency with an AI paragraph.
We weighted the things that matter when one partner owns both: technical depth on large sites, multilingual and content operations, how they handle legacy content, headcount to run parallel workstreams, and what unit they report in.
Everything comes from public sources. Where an agency publishes nothing on a point, we say so. The order is our judgement about fit for this brief, and each entry says where the agency is the stronger pick and where it is not.
The agencies
Every entry in detail
#1
Radyant
- Best for
- German B2B companies and enterprises that want both tracks in one team and conversions as the metric
- Base
- DACH, delivering across Europe
- Entry price
- From €7,000/mo
- Terms
- 12-month commitment with an opt-out after 6 months. Fixed-scope projects from €10,000
Radyant runs SEO and AI Search as one practice rather than two service lines, which is the whole point of this brief. Both tracks are staffed by the same senior team, so the SEO plan and the citation plan are the same plan. It is the only agency here that publishes client results stated in citations and conversions rather than visibility, and the only one publishing its own research into how the answer engines choose sources. Pricing and contract terms are on the site.
Where it is stronger
- One senior team for both tracks, so the two do not compete for the same pages or contradict each other
- The only entry publishing outcomes in citations and conversions rather than visibility and traffic
- Programmatic SEO in-house, with a published result, which matters when the site has thousands of pages to build
- Pricing and contract terms published, including the six-month opt-out
Where it is not
- The €7,000/mo entry price rules it out for the Mittelstand end of the market
- For a very large multilingual estate, Suchhelden and Peak Ace bring more headcount
- B2B and lead-generation weighted. A large consumer e-commerce shop is better served below
- No paid media, so a fully consolidated search budget still needs a second partner
Services
- SEO strategy, technical SEO and programmatic SEO
- AI Search optimisation across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google AI Mode
- Digital PR
- Content production
- Conversion rate optimisation and attribution setup
Published proof
- Planeco Building: AI Search citation rate doubled from 55% to over 110%, plus 5× lead growth from 45 to 225 leads a month
- Planeco Building: a 247-page programmatic cluster that brought 60+ leads inside six months
- Heyflow: 3× MRR pipeline in six months, and first place in AI Search visibility for its category
- ToolSense: 10× leads from SEO over two years
- Enter: more than 500 organic leads a month
- Clients shown publicly: Allianz Suisse, PostFinance, Docplanner, osapiens, Heyflow, Enter, Hilo and deeploi
#2
Peak Ace
- Best for
- Large German brands with hundreds of thousands of URLs across several languages
- Base
- Berlin, delivering across Europe
- Entry price
- Not published
For this brief specifically, Peak Ace ranks higher than it would on a GEO-only list. Technical SEO at scale is their core competence, and on an estate with a huge URL count in nine languages that competence is the constraint on everything else, including AI visibility. Pages a model cannot reach do not get quoted. AI Search sits in their service list rather than at the centre, so you get the SEO half decisively and the AI half competently.
Where it is stronger
- The strongest technical SEO capability here for very large, complex sites
- Real multilingual content operations rather than translation management
- Paid media in the same house, so a consolidated search budget is possible
- Process maturity, and an established name that clears procurement easily
Where it is not
- AI Search is a service line rather than the core practice
- No published pricing or contract terms
- Published cases lean on traffic and visibility rather than conversions
- Large-agency structure means less senior time per euro than the specialists here
Services
- Technical and international SEO at scale
- Content and multilingual content operations
- AI Search and generative search optimisation
- Paid media
- Analytics and tracking
Published proof
- Long-established Berlin agency with a large enterprise and e-commerce client base
- Well-documented technical SEO capability across large multilingual sites
- Regular conference and industry publishing presence in the DACH market
#3
Suchhelden
- Best for
- German consumer, retail and e-commerce brands that need scale and many locations covered
- Base
- Osnabrück, with offices in Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Munich
- Entry price
- Flexible. Project, monthly retainer, or performance-based. No figure published
The biggest option here, with over 140 people across six German offices, and a genuine claim on both halves of this brief. Classic SEO is the foundation and GEO is a named service with their own prompt-analysis tool. The references are heavyweight: Volkswagen, eBay, Dekra, Deichmann. The weighting is consumer and e-commerce rather than B2B software, and the performance-based pricing option is worth asking about because almost nobody offers it.
Where it is stronger
- The most headcount and office coverage in Germany, which matters for a multi-workstream brief
- A performance-based pricing option that shifts risk towards the agency
- Strong local and multi-location SEO for retail and franchise models
- Shopify and e-commerce depth that nobody else here matches
Where it is not
- Consumer and e-commerce weighted. Little published B2B software or enterprise services work
- Results are published as visibility and traffic percentages rather than conversions
- No published rate card
- Less senior time per euro than the specialists here
Services
- Technical SEO, onpage and offpage
- GEO and generative engine optimisation with a proprietary prompt-analysis tool
- Content SEO and content marketing
- Local and international SEO
- Google Ads and social media
- Shopify optimisation
Published proof
- Named clients including Volkswagen, eBay, Dekra, Cornelsen, Deichmann and Schwäbisch Hall
- Over 140 staff across six German offices, and a stated 1,000+ clients
- Ranked first on the iBusiness visibility score for German SEO agencies
- Google Premier Partner, and 5/5 across 140+ Google reviews
- Published cases citing visibility up 678% and traffic up 238%
#4
seowerk
- Best for
- German mid-market and enterprise brands that want SEO plus the authority work AI answers reward
- Base
- Augsburg, serving Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein
- Entry price
- Not published. Described as comparable to professional SEO consulting
Twenty years of SEO with a GEO practice built on top since 2023, which is exactly the shape this brief asks for. Their framing of GEO as SEO plus branding is the clearest articulation of the two-track idea we found in the German market, and the services match it: schema and chunking on one side, PR, Reddit and Wikipedia on the other. Around 30 people, with Audi, Schön Klinik and TUM on the client list.
Where it is stronger
- The clearest articulation of how the SEO and AI halves connect, backed by matching services
- Reddit and Wikipedia work in-house, which very few German agencies offer
- Enterprise and healthcare references, plus unusually long client tenure
- Small enough that senior people stay on the account
Where it is not
- No published pricing of any kind
- No published client outcome in citations, visibility or conversions. The evidence is the client list
- DACH only
- A broad service list beyond search, which makes the depth harder to locate
Services
- SEO and content marketing
- AI readiness analysis, sentiment analysis and content gap work
- Schema optimisation, content chunking and crawler optimisation for AI systems
- Authority building through PR, Reddit and Wikipedia
- Paid advertising, social media, web design and UX
Published proof
- Named clients including Audi, Schön Klinik, Johannesbad, TUM, Augsburger Allgemeine and Deuter
- Around 30 staff, with a stated 700+ projects and 200+ clients
- 20 years of SEO, and GEO as a named practice since 2023
- States client relationships running since 2014
#5
DREIKON
- Best for
- German Mittelstand companies that want search inside one full-service relationship
- Base
- Münster, Germany
- Entry price
- Not published
A full-service agency rather than a search specialist, and on this list that is the point. Plenty of Mittelstand companies want one partner for SEO, ads, brand and web, with AI visibility handled inside that rather than as a separate contract. DREIKON is built for exactly that, with Remmers, Dunlop, Stiebel Eltron and Stadtwerke Münster on the client list. If you want the deepest AI Search work available, look higher up.
Where it is stronger
- One relationship covering search, paid, brand and web, which suits a small marketing team
- Solid Mittelstand and industrial references
- Involvement in the German SEO standards work, which is a real signal of seriousness
Where it is not
- The thinnest AI Search practice on this list. GEO is a service line, not a method
- No published pricing
- No published client outcome figures
- Full-service breadth means search competes internally with five other disciplines
Services
- SEO and GEO
- Google Ads and paid search
- Content marketing and video production
- E-commerce
- Web design and development
- Brand and corporate design, local marketing and listings
Published proof
- Named clients including Remmers, Dunlop, Stiebel Eltron, Rapunzel Naturkost and Stadtwerke Münster
- Top 100 SEO certification for 2026 and Google Premium Partner for 2025
- Participates in the DIN SPEC 33461 working group on SEO quality standards
Why one partner for both usually beats two
Because the two tracks fight over the same pages. An SEO plan wants a page structured for a keyword and a search intent. A GEO plan wants the same page structured so a model can lift a clean, quotable statement out of it. Those goals mostly agree, and where they disagree somebody has to decide. With two agencies, that decision gets made twice and neither version ships.
The second reason is reporting. Split the work and you get two dashboards that cannot be added up. One shows rankings and sessions, the other shows citations and share of voice, and nobody can tell you what either did to conversions. One partner can at least be held to a single number.
The case for splitting is real in one situation: a very large estate where the technical SEO work alone is a full-time job for a big team. Then a technical SEO partner plus a GEO specialist can work, as long as one internal person owns the page-level decisions and both agencies know who that is.
What to ask about legacy content
Every German company that has done SEO for a decade has hundreds of pages written for an older version of search: thin keyword pages, near-duplicates, and posts that answer a question nobody asks in that wording any more. This is the largest single lever on the SEO side and it is invisible in most pitches, because it is unglamorous work.
Ask each agency what they would do with it. The good answer is a plan to audit, merge, rewrite or retire it, with an estimate of how many pages fall into each bucket. The bad answer is a content calendar for new pages that leaves the old ones sitting there.
It matters doubly for AI answers. A model deciding how to describe you reads what it can find, and a hundred half-stale pages saying slightly different things about your product teach it that you are hard to summarise. Cleaning that up often moves more than a quarter of new content would.
Who we left off, and why
We left out pure GEO boutiques with no technical SEO depth. Several are good and one of them belongs on a GEO-only list, but they cannot answer a brief that includes keeping your Google rankings.
We left out large SEO agencies whose AI Search offer is a paragraph. This list needed both halves to be real, and that filter removed more agencies than it kept.
We left out AI visibility monitoring tools. They measure the problem competently and they do not fix it. If you are buying one anyway, buy it before the agency, so you have a baseline that predates the work.
FAQ
Questions buyers actually ask
- Should we hire one agency for SEO and AI Search, or two?
- One, in most cases. The two disciplines share a technical foundation and they compete for the same pages, so splitting them means the same decision gets made twice and the reporting cannot be added up. Two partners make sense when the estate is large enough that technical SEO is a full-time job for a whole team. Even then, one person inside your company has to own page-level decisions.
- Do our existing SEO rankings still matter if buyers use ChatGPT?
- Yes, for two reasons. Google still sends most organic traffic for most German B2B categories, and AI Overviews and AI Mode sit on top of the same index, so pages that rank are pages a model can reach. What changes is that ranking alone stops being the goal. A page can rank third and still never be quoted, if it is written to satisfy a keyword rather than to answer a question in a liftable way.
- What does a combined SEO and AI Search engagement cost in Germany?
- Only one of the five publishes a figure, at €7,000/mo with fixed-scope projects from about €10,000. One offers performance-based pricing, which is worth asking about. For a serious combined programme, expect a mid four-figure monthly budget at the low end, and five figures where there is content production in volume, a large legacy estate to clean up, or several languages involved.
- We only care about AI answers, not Google. Is this the right list?
- Probably not. If Google rankings are already handled or genuinely do not matter to you, you want a specialist rather than a partner who does both, and the agencies here are picked for breadth. The trade-off is real: breadth buys you one contract and one set of decisions about your pages, and depth buys you more of the specific work that gets you named in an answer.
- Can our existing SEO agency just add AI Search?
- Sometimes, and the test is simple. Ask them to show a client whose citations or AI visibility moved, and by how much. If they have that, extending is cheaper than a new procurement cycle and usually the right call. If their AI Search offer appeared in the last year with nothing behind it, you would be paying for their learning curve. Ask what they would deliver in month one and listen for nouns rather than adjectives.
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