ENTRY 014 · GEO · By Answer Engineered Research

Generative Engine Optimization Is in 47 SEC Filings. Read the Risk Factors.

Generative engine optimization appears in 47 SEC filings from 19 companies. The most candid description of it comes from a company warning investors about it.

2026-08-15· 5 MIN

The short answer

On 14 August 2026, a company called Change Agents Corporation filed a Form 10-Q that describes one of its two business segments as an “agentic Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) search product.” As far as we can tell, that makes it the first company to put GEO in a filing as a named segment rather than as a passing mention.

It is not, however, the first company to put the phrase in a filing at all. Not close.

We searched the SEC’s full-text index for the exact phrase “generative engine optimization.” It returns 47 filings from 19 companies, the earliest dated 24 March 2025. Fifteen of those documents were filed in 2025 and thirty-two in 2026.

That corpus is small enough to read in an afternoon, which we did. The interesting finding is not the count. It is that the most honest description of GEO in the entire set comes from a company telling its investors why the practice worries it.

What the corpus actually contains

Every filing below was opened and the phrase read in context. These are the six that carry the most information:

Company	Filing	Date	How GEO appears
Fiverr	20-F	2026-03-12	A risk factor
Adobe	10-K	2026-01-15	A shipped product
Primerica	10-K	2026-02-27	An executive’s job description
Atlantic Union Bankshares	EX-99.1	2025-12-10	A line on an AI roadmap
Destination XL	PREM14A	2026-07-17	A forward-looking initiative
Change Agents	10-Q	2026-08-14	A business segment

Two of those are not technology companies in any sense. Primerica sells term life insurance. Atlantic Union Bankshares is a Virginia bank holding company. Destination XL sells big-and-tall menswear. The phrase has travelled a long way from search conferences.

The register changes with the filing type

This is the part worth paying attention to, because it is a natural experiment in how confident a company is willing to sound when the legal exposure changes.

In a product description, GEO is a solved thing you can buy. Adobe’s 10-K: “Adobe LLM Optimizer is a generative engine optimization solution, helping enterprises improve brand visibility and discoverability across AI-powered search and discovery while providing actionable insights.”

In a roadmap slide, it is a category. Atlantic Union’s investor deck lists it under enterprise technology and defines it as “The next evolution in search engine marketing to enable brand discoverability in AI-powered search platforms like Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews.”

In an executive bio, it is a job. Primerica’s Chief Reputation Officer is described as “leading public relations, social media, search and generative engine optimization, enterprise research and philanthropy.”

In a risk factor, the tone changes completely. Here is Fiverr, in its 20-F, warning shareholders:

“The emerging practice of generative engine optimization (GEO) is nascent, costly, and unpredictable, and we may be less effective than competitors at optimizing content for LLM ingestion and retrieval or at structuring our content to be favored by AI assistants.”

Nascent, costly, and unpredictable. That is a public company, under securities-law liability, describing the thing that the rest of this corpus is selling.

We do not think Fiverr is right and Adobe is wrong. We think the two statements are doing different jobs, and that the risk-factor version is the one written by lawyers who have to be able to defend it later. When a vendor and a customer describe the same practice and only one of them is exposed to a securities-fraud claim for overstating it, the exposed one is worth more of your attention.

The newest filing is the strangest one

Change Agents Corporation was called Avalon GloboCare Corp. until 20 July 2026. Its 10-Q describes two business segments: an AI software segment, and a segment that “distributes the Keto Air breathalyzer device,” described in the filing as “a non-invasive consumer breathalyzer that measures ketosis levels.”

The AI segment contains a product called Beacon, described this way:

“The Beacon Agentic GEO search product is designed to help small, local service businesses get recommended by AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok. The agentic software product is designed to autonomously; a) diagnose a small businesses AI visibility and SEO effectiveness in about 60 seconds, b) provide a visibility score, and c) generate implementation-ready fixes upon approval.”

Three sentences later in the same document, in Note 2:

“the Company had a working capital deficit of approximately $4,093,000 at June 30, 2026 and had incurred recurring net losses from continuing operations and generated negative cash flow from operating activities of continuing operations of approximately $6,555,000 and $3,556,000 for the six months ended June 30, 2026, respectively.”

The filing states that these conditions “raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

“Beacon” appears three times in the entire document, all three in the qualitative product description. It appears nowhere in the financial statements. No revenue is disclosed for it, no customer count, no launch date, and no subscription price — the filing says only that it “will be offered in the form of a monthly subscription fee.”

So the first company to make generative engine optimization a named business segment is also telling its shareholders it may not survive the year. Both of those facts are in the same document, and neither is our inference.

What this dataset can and cannot tell you

It is a small corpus and we would rather state its limits than let anyone over-read it.

It cannot tell you GEO works or does not work. Nothing here is a measurement. These are disclosure documents, and the business-description sections of a 10-Q are management’s own narrative — not audited, not verified by the SEC at filing time, not reviewed by anyone outside the company. Change Agents’ interim financials say so explicitly: “These interim condensed consolidated financial statements of the Company and its subsidiaries are unaudited.”

It is not “every filing ever.” EDGAR full-text search indexes filings from 2001 onward. It also only matches the exact phrase. Companies describing the same activity as “AI visibility,” “LLM optimization” or “answer engine optimization” are not in this count, and we did not run those queries.

Nineteen is companies, not brands. We deduplicated on CIK, the SEC’s own company identifier. Counting the display names gives 21, because Change Agents appears under three of them — Avalon GloboCare Corp., and Change Agents Corporation under two different ticker symbols — while remaining one filer.

A phrase count is not adoption. A single mention in an executive bio and a full business segment both count as one filing here. The table above exists precisely so the count does not have to carry more weight than it can.

Run the query yourself

The SEC’s full-text search interface is at efts.sec.gov, and it answers plain HTTP requests with a declared user agent. The browser UI at sec.gov/edgar/search runs the same index.

This is a genuinely useful habit for anyone tracking whether an AI-search claim is marketing or business. A landing page can say anything. A risk factor has to survive a lawyer, and it is free to read.

The number will be higher than 47 by the time you run it. What we would watch is not the count but the ratio: how many of the new ones are selling GEO, and how many are warning about it.