An AI SEO agency with a China specialty

Eastbound is an AI SEO agency built around a single specialty: getting Western brands cited and recommended on DeepSeek, Qwen and Doubao — the three Mainland-Chinese AI engines that together address roughly 1.4 billion potential users. We advise on Western-engine GEO (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview) when bundled with a China engagement. We do not sell standalone Western-engine optimisation. That scope honesty is deliberate.

Last reviewed 2026-05-10. Pricing is engagement-scoped; ranges shared on the consultation call.

What "AI SEO" actually means in 2026

"AI SEO" is the umbrella shorthand for the discipline more rigorously called GEO (generative engine optimisation) — the work of getting your brand cited and recommended inside the answers AI assistants return, rather than ranked in a list of blue links. The vocabulary has not stabilised: practitioners use AI SEO, GEO, AEO (answer engine optimisation), LLMO (LLM optimisation) and AI visibility somewhat interchangeably, but the academic origin is the 2024 KDD paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal et al. — a Princeton + IIT Delhi study running a 10,000-query benchmark across nine optimisation tactics.

The headline numbers from that paper now drive most serious GEO work: adding authoritative citations to a page lifted citation rate by 115%, direct quotes by 43%, named statistics by 33%. Of the nine tactics tested, only those three produced statistically reliable lifts. Adjacent industry studies (Vercel's 2025 crawler analysis; SearchVIU's 5-system × 8-scenario × 10-query test; SE Ranking's 129,000-domain × 216,524-page citation study) have converged on a similar mechanism — selection (does your page enter the engine's source pool?), absorption (does it shape the answer language?), and user-visible mention.

A serious AI SEO agency in 2026 is one whose work is anchored in this measurement framework, not in checklist-SEO repackaged with AI-flavoured language.

Our core: China-specific GEO

Most agencies and tools in the AI SEO category default to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overview. None of those are how a Mainland-Chinese consumer asks an AI for a product recommendation. The Mainland surface is DeepSeek, Qwen (Alibaba's Tongyi family) and Doubao (ByteDance), with secondary engines including Yuanbao, Kimi and Baidu's ERNIE Bot.

The source ecosystems differ by 70–80% between the two surfaces. In our 540-call panel from May 2026, top-15 source overlap (Jaccard) between any two Chinese engines sat between 0.20 and 0.30, and overlap between Western and Chinese engines was lower still. Different community platforms (Zhihu and Xiaohongshu rather than Reddit and YouTube), different encyclopaedic anchors (Baidu Baike rather than Wikipedia), different vertical media. A GEO playbook built for ChatGPT cannot be ported to DeepSeek without rebuilding the source-substrate model from scratch.

Our work concentrates on this surface. Concretely:

Mainland-CN consumer prompt panels run in Chinese against DeepSeek, Qwen on DashScope international, and Doubao on BytePlus ModelArk international.
Source-attribution analysis at the platform level — per-engine source-graph mapping (Baidu Baike, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, SMZDM, Bilibili, Mainland vertical media), with reliability statistics reported in every readout (top-5 κ, top-15 κ, Pearson r, ICC).
On-site crawlability and indexability for AI-search-bot reachability (granular robots.txt, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, sitemap, IndexNow, Markdown alternates).
Off-site source-graph initiation via regional partners where Mainland publishing accounts are required.

How we work — audit-first, measurement-led

Every Eastbound engagement starts with an audit, not with a retainer pitch. The free audit returns per-engine selection, absorption and brand-mention scores against a stratified zh-CN consumer prompt panel. The paid audit extends across DeepSeek, Qwen and Doubao with a custom prompt panel for your specific category and ICP, source-graph mapping at the platform level, competitor benchmarking, and a prioritised top-fix list with effort estimates and layer-of-impact tags.

Implementation engagements (the GEO Sprint) run twelve weeks: technical hygiene in week 1, multi-week content design at the 1,000–3,000-word reference-page sweet spot in weeks 2–8, and source-graph initiation in weeks 6–12. Ongoing monitoring is a separate quarterly cadence — re-audits with delta tracking, prompt-panel refresh, source-graph maintenance, and intervention-test readouts. We do not run "monthly retainer with vague deliverables" — every engagement has scoped work, measurement dates, and explicit before/after tests for any intervention hypothesis.

Evidence-led, not checklist-led. Every recommendation we make is labelled measured evidence, prior-knowledge hypothesis, or planned intervention test. We do not collapse the three. This costs us a marketing edge — we cannot promise "rank in DeepSeek in 7 days" — and buys us a credibility moat.

What we don't do as a standalone

We get the search "AI SEO agency" from buyers who have no Mainland-CN exposure and want pure Western-engine work. The honest answer is that we are not the right agency for that engagement. Western-engine-only AI SEO is well-served by other specialists, and a single-surface mismatch is a bad reason to hire any consultancy.

For Western-engine-only work — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Microsoft Copilot — we recommend looking at one of three categories:

Specialist measurement platforms like Profound (the best-funded specialist, $96M Series C in February 2026), AthenaHQ, or Otterly.AI for ongoing tracking. See our Profound alternatives comparison for the honest map.
Western GEO specialist agencies for implementation work where a Mainland-CN angle is genuinely irrelevant.
Bundled SEO platforms like Semrush AI Visibility or SE Ranking AI Search Watcher if you already pay one of them for traditional SEO and want a single-vendor solution.

When we do advise on Western-engine GEO, it is bundled with a China engagement — typically because the brand needs a coordinated cross-surface story, or because the same content infrastructure decisions (canonical reference pages, evidence density, schema choices) carry across both. Western-engine advisory is part of a China engagement, not an alternative to one.

Pricing model

Engagement-scoped, not month-by-month retainer. We do not publish per-month pricing because it varies materially with category complexity, source-graph depth, and Mainland publishing scope. Indicative ranges are shared on the consultation call.

The reason for the model: the highest-leverage layer in this work — third-party source-graph presence — compounds over quarters, not days. Aggarwal et al. measured third-party citation as roughly 6.5× more effective than self-citation alone. That is not a "monthly deliverable" — it is a multi-quarter strategic build, and a fixed-fee scoped engagement aligns incentives better than a retainer that has to keep finding work to do.

Who we're a good fit for

US, UK and other Western brands evaluating or expanding into Mainland China in luxury, fashion, beauty, premium consumer, automotive, hospitality, education or B2B SaaS categories.
Brands where the answer to "do Mainland-CN consumers and decision-makers find us when they ask their AI assistant?" actually affects revenue. If the answer is "we don't know", that is the audit-first conversation.
Teams that want diagnosis and execution, not just monitoring. Dashboards tell you what is happening. Consultancies tell you what to do about it.
Buyers who value evidence over hype and read disclaimers carefully. We will routinely tell you that a particular question cannot be answered cleanly with current measurement, rather than fabricate a confident answer.

Who we're not a good fit for

Brands with no Mainland-CN exposure looking for pure Western-engine work. See the standalone section above; better-fit options exist.
Buyers wanting "rank in DeepSeek in 7 days" guarantees. We do not write contracts that promise specific ranking positions on any AI engine. The category is full of overclaim; we trade the marketing edge for the credibility moat.
Teams looking for paid-media management. We do not run paid Baidu SEM, paid social, or paid AI-engine placements. AI SEO is the organic-citation discipline.
Generic SEO content production at scale. We do not write SEO content for the sake of word count. The published evidence is consistent that pages outside the 1,000–3,000-word sweet spot earn fewer citations, not more.

How to engage

Most engagements start with the free audit (linked here). After reviewing the report, US/UK brands typically book a 30-minute consultation to discuss whether the GEO Sprint or an extended audit fits the situation. Alternatively, the China GEO agency page covers the same work from the China-first framing if that is the explicit primary need.

Eastbound's offices are in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Engagements run remote with quarterly in-person reviews if helpful. We do not require Mainland-CN client offices.

Start with the free audit, then talk

The free Eastbound audit runs your URL against a stratified zh-CN consumer prompt panel across DeepSeek, Qwen and Doubao, and reports per-engine selection, absorption and brand-mention scores. After that, a 30-minute consultation is the right next step.

Run AI visibility audit or book a 30-minute consultation.