Founded in April 2021 by Jon Zacharias and Kevin Miller, GR0 is a full-service digital marketing agency focused on giving brands an unfair advantage through creative-driven performance marketing. One of those advantages includes their newest service: providing clients with cutting edge strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
After its launch as an SEO-only agency, GR0 scaled rapidly. Within 18 months GR0 had expanded into paid media, email, and affiliate services, and grew to over 100 full-time employees across the U.S. It won Comparably and Clutch awards for Best Marketing Teams and Fastest Growing Agency, and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Advertising and Marketing, and established itself as a powerful privately held, full-service digital marketing agency.
GR0’s rise wasn’t driven by scale alone — it was driven by timing, product-market fit, and an early, decisive bet on the future of how people discover information.
“We realized very early that we weren’t just building another SEO agency,” says co-founder Jon Zacharias. “We were building the most advanced search visibility product in the market — and that meant understanding what product-market fit really looks like.”
Within 24 months, GR0 was working with some of the world’s most disruptive and culturally relevant brands, including: Ritual, Daily Harvest, Therabody, Venus et Fleur, OLIPOP, Caraway, Funboy, and hundreds more.
The inflection point: Generative engines change everything
In early 2025, GR0 made its most consequential strategic move.
“We realized that large language models were about to become the dominant interface between consumers and the internet,” says co-founder Kevin Miller. “So we reorganized the entire company around that reality.”
As generative platforms like ChatGPT scaled to hundreds of millions of users, GR0 began seeing something unprecedented across its client portfolio: brands were seeing an exponential increase in monthly visitors explicitly from generative engine referrals.
GR0 wasn’t reacting to the shift. It was already positioned for it.
GR0 has built a highly competitive GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) product — and today generates more revenue from this channel than any other agency in its category and is representing Fortune 100 brands.
Jon Zacharias on GEO: Why authority is the new ranking
So what actually determines success in GEO?
According to Zacharias, it starts with authority — not keywords.
“The old model was about ranking for keywords,” he explains. “The new model is about being cited, trusted, and embedded inside the knowledge layer that generative engines learn from.”
That means brands must exist not only on their own sites, but inside the sources LLMs consume: industry publications, expert blogs, reputable media, and community platforms.
GR0’s multi-layered GEO framework includes:
Keyword & Topic Clustering — Building authoritative pillar pages supported by dense topical ecosystems
Content Gap Analysis — Identifying strategic blind spots competitors haven’t claimed
Earned Media Integration — Supporting third-party credibility through PR and publisher relationships
Authority Link Acquisition — Building high-trust citation signals for both search engines and AI models
“The content you publish today isn’t just for Google,” Zacharias says. “It’s training data for tomorrow’s AI systems. Precision, credibility, and authority are non-negotiable.”
Kevin Miller on Reddit: The hidden engine behind AI visibility
If Jon’s focus is authority and citations, Kevin’s focus is where that authority is formed: communities.
And no community matters more than Reddit.
“Generative engines treat Reddit like a primary source,” Miller explains. “If your brand shows up organically inside trusted conversations, you dramatically increase your chance of being surfaced in AI-generated answers.”
GR0’s Reddit strategy includes:
Selecting 3–5 core subreddits per vertical
Publishing authentic Q&A, experience-based posts, and mini case studies
Using vetted contributors to participate genuinely in Reddit conversations
Working with a private network of high-authority Reddit users to seed authentic brand presence
“This isn’t manipulation. It’s participation,” Miller says. “You earn visibility by being useful.”
What GR0 is seeing across the GEO landscape
Across hundreds of brands, GR0 has observed clear macro-patterns shaping the future of discoverability:
Authority beats volume
Content ecosystems outperform isolated pages
Community signals are disproportionately influential
PR, SEO, and community can no longer operate in silos
The frontier is still evolving — and uncertainty remains around data sources, platform controls, and monetization models. But GR0 believes adaptability is the advantage.
“We don’t chase algorithms,” says Zacharias. “We study them, anticipate them, and build systems that can evolve with them.”
An agency built for the next internet
GR0’s story is not just one of growth — it’s one of foresight.
What began as a partnership between two founders has grown into a company shaping how brands are discovered in the age of AI.
As generative engines replace search boxes, and answers replace result pages, GR0 is helping brands move from being optimized… to being remembered.
In a world where algorithms increasingly mediate human discovery, GR0 isn’t just teaching brands how to be found — it’s teaching them how to be trusted.
And that, increasingly, is the only ranking that matters.
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