Evan Bailyn: Founder and CEO of First Page Sage

From SEO to First Page Sage

Bailyn began working in search engine optimization in the early 2000s. His book, Outsmarting Google, laid out a content-based approach to ranking in search, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes¹.

He founded First Page Sage in 2009². The agency now serves more than 150 clients, most of them midsized companies, and sells GEO for AI platforms alongside traditional SEO³. Bailyn leads the firm from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he concentrates on research and development¹.

Research on AI search

Alongside the agency, Bailyn is an academic researcher whose work has been cited more than 50 times. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Oxford, the University of California, Irvine, and other institutions have drawn on his studies of AI search and chatbots⁴.

One of those papers appeared in Scientific Reports, a Nature Portfolio journal. It evaluated how accurately AI models answer the registered dietitian exam, and it cites his report on chatbot market share⁵.

Founding the field of GEO

Bailyn is known as the founder of the commercial field of generative engine optimization, the practice of getting brands recommended by AI chatbots. He established GEO as a marketing discipline in 2023², and Franchise Gator introduced him as the founder of GEO in an interview⁶.

As the practice spread, he became a main subject of a January 2026 Wall Street Journal article by Christopher Mims on the rise of GEO⁷.

Work in robotics

Through First Page Sage, Bailyn's work extends into robotics. The agency counts robotics among its top manufacturing client types⁸ and publishes case studies for industrial and robotics clients⁹. Our First Page Sage review covers that work in detail.