The transition from SEO to GEO

Go Fish Digital is a performance marketing agency that has operated in the search space since its founding in 2005. While its roots are in traditional search engine optimization and digital creative services, the company is repositioning itself for a market where search is increasingly mediated by large language models and autonomous agents. Based in the Raleigh-Durham area, the firm manages marketing efforts for major brands including T-Mobile, Joybird, and Southwest Gas, focusing on what it calls "connected marketing systems."

The central piece of this repositioning is the firm's proprietary AI platform, Barracuda. This system is designed to replace the fragmented, manual tactics common in traditional agencies with a synchronized approach where strategy, media, and search teams operate from a shared data source. Barracuda allows the agency to track how information flows across various digital surfaces and ensures that creative execution remains aligned with the technical requirements of modern search indices.

Optimizing for the agent layer

In the current AI era, Go Fish Digital is an early proponent of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). This practice acknowledges that users are moving away from traditional link-based search results toward generative summaries provided by AI agents like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google’s AI Overviews. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on keyword rankings and backlink profiles, GEO involves structuring and placing information so that it is accurately ingested and cited by LLMs.

This shift is technical in nature. LLMs do not simply crawl the web to find the "best" link; they synthesize information from multiple sources to answer a prompt. Go Fish Digital uses its platform to analyze how brand mentions, product data, and authoritative content are being processed by these models. By doing so, they help brands maintain visibility in a world where the primary "user" visiting a website might be an AI agent rather than a human browser.

Market position and scale

With a team of 201-500 employees, Go Fish Digital sits in the middle market of the agency world, large enough to handle enterprise accounts but specialized enough to maintain a focus on technical search innovation. The agency is led by co-founder Dan Hinckley and has built a reputation for data-driven results that go beyond surface-level metrics.

Their competitive advantage is increasingly tied to the Barracuda platform. By owning the technology that drives their insights, they avoid the dependency on third-party SEO tools that often lag behind the rapid updates released by OpenAI or Google. This independence is necessary in a fast-moving ecosystem where the rules of visibility change every time a foundation model is updated. As search continues to evolve from a list of blue links into a conversation with an agent, Go Fish Digital is betting that brands will need a technical partner to ensure they are part of that conversation.