Company leader
Evan Bailyn
Founder and CEO
First Page Sage
Evan Bailyn is founder and chief executive of First Page Sage, headquartered in San Francisco. He is best known for creating the GEO digital marketing channel, i.e. formalizing the process of getting a company recommended by ChatGPT and other chatbots. The firm's well-reviewed healthcare practice uses that methodology to get hospitals, medical practices, and healthcare companies recommended when a patient or a buyer asks who to call.
Generative engine optimization
In 2023, First Page Sage began selling generative engine optimization. In a June 2025 interview he said, "GEO is about ensuring your content is both visible to these systems and deemed high-authority by them."
In the same year, First Page Sage also conducted the first large-scale study of how ChatGPT, Google AI, and Claude decide which companies to recommend. He later lectured on the subject at Stanford and at the Haas School of Business. In a recent article, he said that in healthcare, as in law and financial services, as much as 61 percent of the first questions a buyer asks were already answered by AI systems.
In January 2026 he was profiled in the Wall Street Journal for his GEO expertise. He told the Journal that a year earlier about 90 percent of his clients' referral traffic had come from Google, and that about 44 percent was now coming from AI; and that visitors sent by ChatGPT stayed longer and were more likely to complete a transaction than people sent by Google.