Which Agencies in Portugal Help Brands Appear in ChatGPT Answers?

We asked five AI engines the same question a Portuguese business owner asks before hiring anyone: which agencies in Portugal help brands appear in ChatGPT answers. We ran six buying questions, twice each, on 4 September 2026, and collected 59 answers.

Five agencies come back often enough, and across enough engines, to be treated as the current answer. Our own company sits below them, and the most useful thing in this study is why.

The short answer

These five were named by four of the five engines we tested. No agency in Portugal was named by all five.

Seventeen more names appear on two or three engines: AreYouMention, UniK SEO, PortugalSEO, Fullsix Portugal, Studio.351, Shiftworks, Jelly, Index Lab, Marco Gouveia, Digiton, Tráfego Digital, Infinidata, Netsearch, Marketing Gabriel, Arena Media, BE VISIBLE and Codedesign. Six more appear on a single engine.

The engine that browses and the engine that remembers give different answers

Look again at the Engines column above. The same four engines name all five leaders, and one engine is missing from every row.

Plain ChatGPT, answering from memory with no browsing, names none of the five. It reaches instead for Bloomidea, SEO Labs, Wise Pirates, WYgroup and Fullsix Portugal, which are older and broader digital agencies.

We saw the same split inside a single engine. We ran Gemini twice, once with Google Search grounding and once from model memory alone. Grounded, Gemini named Index Lab on the audit question. From memory, Gemini never named us once, on any question.

So there are two different markets in these answers. There is the market the models learned during training, which is a few years behind and favours agencies that have been large for a long time. And there is the market the models read on the web at the moment of asking, which favours whoever has published clearly about AI visibility recently. Anyone comparing tools or agencies should know which of the two they are looking at, because a screenshot of ChatGPT with browsing switched off is a picture of the past.

How we tested this

Six questions, in European Portuguese, with the geography set to Portugal. Each question was asked twice on each engine on the same day, which gives 60 cells. One call failed and was excluded, leaving 59 answers.

The six questions were:

1. Que agências em Portugal ajudam as marcas a aparecer nas respostas do ChatGPT?

2. Qual a melhor agência de visibilidade em IA em Portugal?

3. Como faço para a minha empresa aparecer nas respostas do ChatGPT?

4. Quem faz auditorias de visibilidade em IA em Portugal?

5. Como sei se a minha marca está a ser citada pela IA?

6. Quais são as melhores agências de GEO em Portugal?

The engines were ChatGPT and ChatGPT Search (both gpt-5.6-luna), Perplexity (sonar), Gemini (gemini-3.6-flash, run with Google Search grounding and again from memory), and Google AI Overviews, read from a live Portuguese search result. We rank by how many distinct engines name a company first, and by how many answers name it second. An agency that four engines reach independently is more reliably present than one that a single engine repeats.

Two of the six questions name nobody

Questions 3 and 5 are the ones a person types when they have a problem rather than a shortlist. "How do I get my company to appear in ChatGPT answers" and "how do I know if AI is citing my brand" returned a method on every engine. Steps, checklists, and in the second case a set of international monitoring tools such as Otterly.AI and Peec AI. No Portuguese supplier was named in either, on any engine, in any run.

That is a gap worth understanding. The demand exists at the problem stage, and the engines currently answer it with instructions instead of a company. Anyone in this market who becomes the named answer to a problem question, rather than only to a shortlist question, gets a much earlier place in the buying process.

One more detail from question 3: several answers came back in Brazilian Portuguese, using "sua empresa" and "arquivo" and "busca". We saw the same pattern in our August study, where half the identifiable sources behind Portuguese answers came from Brazil. The Portuguese language is well served. Portugal is not.

Where we sit, and why we are publishing it

Index Lab was named in 6 of the 59 answers. All six were on one question, the one about who runs AI visibility audits, where Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews all named us in both runs. On the other five questions we do not appear at all.

Now the part that matters more than our score. Counting the sources the engines cited across all 59 answers, indexlab.ai is the fourth most cited domain in the whole study.

On question one, the exact question this article answers, Perplexity cited indexlab.ai in both runs and named us in neither. Our research is being used to build the list we are not on. On question four the same engines cited us and named us, so we know the citation can convert. It converts on the narrow question we have written most about, and nowhere else yet.

This is the clearest example we have of something we have argued for a while: being cited as a source and being named as an answer are two different outcomes, and the first does not deliver the second. A model has no loyalty to whoever did the work. It quotes the page that is easiest to lift and recommends the companies that are easiest to verify as companies.

We publish this because the study is only worth reading if it reports our own result honestly. A list of Portuguese agencies with us at the top, built by us, would be worth nothing to you and the engines would be right to ignore it.

What the recurring names have in common

The pattern is not agency size. Fullsix and WYgroup are far larger than 3HASH or AISO Hub, and the smaller specialists outrank them on every engine that browses.

Three things show up repeatedly in the pages the engines cited:

• A page that names the service in the words people use. The recurring names have a dedicated service page for AI visibility, GEO or AEO. Those are the pages the engines cited.

• Something concrete to verify. Shiftworks publishes its prices, 890 euros for a GEO audit of 45 controlled measurements and 390 per month for ongoing work, VAT excluded. destaque.ai publishes that it measures across twelve engines and surfaces, and says in plain words that anyone selling a guaranteed place in AI answers is selling something they cannot deliver. Engines quoted both of those facts back to us.

• Presence on pages the company does not own. Directories, comparison posts, press and the AI agency listings sit behind a large share of the citations. Nobody arrives on these lists through their own website alone.

If you are choosing an agency for this

Ask for the query set and the geography before anything else. A visibility number means nothing without the questions behind it, and questions in Portuguese pointed at Portugal give very different answers from the same questions in English.

Then ask for these four:

1. Separate reporting per engine, including whether browsing was on. Engines disagree with each other constantly, and a single blended score hides that.

2. Citations as well as mentions. Ask whether your pages are being used as sources, which is measurable, and whether your brand is being named, which is a different measurement.

3. Repeat runs. AI answers move between runs. One run per question is a sample, and anyone reporting a single run as a result is reporting noise.

4. A refusal to guarantee placement. Nobody can guarantee that ChatGPT will name a brand. An agency that promises it is telling you something useful about itself.

The limits of this study

Six questions and two runs each is a small sample, taken on one day, in one language, pointed at one country. It shows who the engines reach for today in this category, and it does not settle who is best at the work. Agencies that serve Portugal from abroad, or that sell mainly through referral, are underrepresented by design, because this measures what the machines answer rather than what the market knows.

We plan to re-run the same six questions at intervals and publish the movement. In three months the interesting number is how much the ranking moved, and whether the two problem questions start naming anyone at all.