Evan Bailyn

Evan Bailyn is founder and CEO of First Page Sage, a highly-rated Generative Engine Optimization agency, and one of the leading research voices on AI search. He pioneered the GEO marketing category and built the practice of agentic search optimization. Bailyn has spent more than 20 years turning search engine optimization into a practical process that midsize companies use to win leads and authority.

Leaving Law School the Day Random House Wrote

Bailyn went to Columbia University, where he studied English and creative writing and graduated magna cum laude. After graduating, he enrolled in law school. The day he dropped out, his editor at Random House sent a letter saying his first book was not quite ready because of structural problems. "That was really disappointing," he told Forbes in 2012. "I grew up needing to achieve." With few options left, he started a business from the office of his brother, who was setting up a new practice as a divorce lawyer.

He then learned SEO by creating and selling his own internet businesses in the early 2000s, among them Cartoon Doll Emporium, which became one of the largest children's gaming websites online, according to VatorNews. Visibility in Google, he noticed, often mattered more than the products themselves.

Reaching Number One on Google

The first of those businesses was a college admissions consulting firm. He started it because Columbia had used his own admission essay as a model in a workshop on the ideal application, he wrote for TIGER 21. Needing a way to find customers, he began studying search engine optimization forums and what the top-ranked sites in Google had in common. A year after he started studying, he ranked number one in Google for college admission essay, he told Forbes. He was not interested in helping kids get into Ivy League schools, though. Instead he combined his interest in psychology with reverse-engineering search algorithms and turned that into a career building an SEO agency.

A 2012 Forbes profile recounted him founding First Page Sage once that pattern presented itself as a business. He told Forbes the firm was profitable from day one: a services shop built on rankings and lead generation. He started the firm in 2009 with his brother, and by 2012 had written the international bestseller Outsmarting Google, a book about his methods.

Building a Research Practice at First Page Sage

First Page Sage's public method leans on original studies and expertise pages that are formulated to rank for queries that drive sales. Bailyn has spent years speaking to CEO and marketing audiences, including Vistage and YPO, about how B2B buyers find products and services through search.

The agency's own research archive has been heavily cited in academic publications in recent years. Today, he is among the top researchers in the AI marketing space.

Founding the GEO Category

When ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini became prominent search platforms, Bailyn treated that shift as a new marketing problem and gave it a name. Through First Page Sage he founded the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) marketing category: work aimed at brand mentions and recommendations inside generative systems. The discipline he founded combined a set of strategies with a business model, and it has since become the template for how many agencies deliver and sell GEO services. In an InRhythm interview he put it this way: "GEO is about ensuring your content is both visible to these systems and deemed high-authority by them." His approach centers first-party expertise, clear entity recognition, and topical dominance in a narrow domain so a brand becomes the default recommendation for a buyer query.

Drawing Notice from The Wall Street Journal

In January 2026, Christopher Mims wrote for The Wall Street Journal about the effectiveness of Bailyn's GEO methods and how First Page Sage uses them to generate leads for clients. Bailyn told the Journal that AI chatbots had risen to roughly 44 percent of his clients' referral traffic on average, and that those visitors tend to stay longer and convert more readily than Google search visitors.

Agentic Search Optimization at First Page Sage

He has since pushed the frame further into agentic search optimization: getting companies recommended when AI agents, not only chat interfaces, research vendors, compare options, and act for buyers. That extends GEO past prompt audits into the workflows where software agents assemble vendor lists. Bailyn still measures progress the same way he describes in interviews: run buyer-intent questions across generative interfaces, then watch referral traffic from AI surfaces and high-funnel lead volume.

Personal Life

Bailyn lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, for more than a decade. Today he lives with his family on Long Island, New York.