Key takeaways
- We ran our live AI visibility audit tool against staffing and executive search firms and could scan 19. Average visibility was 47.4% across 95 live, grounded buyer queries, and the median firm scored 60%. Nine firms were named in two of five queries or fewer.
- Three firms were named in none of their queries, and in all three the tool had read the homepage as a technology consulting or job-search business. Excluding them, the other 16 averaged 56.3%.
- Household generalists did not do best. Randstad and Adecco scored 40% each and Hays scored 20%, while Motion Recruitment (tech) and Cielo (recruitment process outsourcing) scored 80%. In a sample this small, that is a pattern worth noting, not proof.
- Employers who describe a hiring problem without naming a category named a firm only 31.6% of the time. Comparison questions did best at 63.2%.
- AI leaned on third parties. A firm's own site was 1.3% of 752 citations. About one in four cited URLs were ranked-list articles by our rough measure, and several of the most-cited publishers are themselves in the hiring or staffing business.
- This is mostly large global and national brands that we chose. It likely flatters small agencies, and one entry on our list was not a valid domain.
Why we audited recruiters
A staffing or search firm sells placements, and the buyer, an HR leader, hiring manager or founder, is in a hurry and often has no loyalty to any one agency. If that buyer types a vacancy into an AI assistant, we wanted to see which firms it names.
Recruiters also have a feature most professional services lack: two audiences. Candidates ask AI where to find work, and employers ask AI who to hire. This audit is about the second group, the ones who pay. So the question is simple. When an employer describes a hiring need without naming a firm, which agencies get named, and is being a household name enough?
47.4%
average AI visibility across 19 established staffing and executive search firms, measured by live grounded search on 95 buyer queries
Deligatr Recruiting Agency AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
How the audit works
The tool reads each firm's homepage, classifies it in the words a buyer would use, writes five buyer-intent queries (one local-style, two category, one problem-first, one comparison) and runs each as a live, grounded AI search with the firm's own name left out. It is one run, five queries per firm, on one day. AI answers change between runs, so read every score as a snapshot. The full method is in our audit documentation, and all twelve industry audits are on our AI visibility research page.
A firm is either in the answer or it is not.
The distribution: wide, and no perfect score
Firms by AI visibility score
19 established staffing and search firms, each tested on 5 live grounded buyer queries. Number of firms at each score.
Deligatr Recruiting Agency AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
Four firms reached 80%: Cielo, Korn Ferry, Motion Recruitment and Robert Half. Nobody reached 100%. At the other end, Hays was named once, and three firms were not named at all.
That is higher than our law firm, IT services and financial advisor audits, which each averaged between 23.6% and 23.8%. The likely reason is the sample: these are very large, very well-known brands, and AI knows them. What stands out is how often even they were missed.
Big names, uneven results
Randstad and Adecco, two of the best-known staffing brands in the world, each scored 40%. Hays scored 20%. Michael Page scored 40%. Meanwhile Motion Recruitment, which describes itself as a tech recruiter, and Cielo, a recruitment process outsourcing provider, each scored 80%.
We would not push this too far. It is 19 firms and one run. But the pattern fits what we see in other industries: AI places a firm against a specific question, and a firm that is clearly about one thing is easier to place than a firm that is about everything. Adecco, for example, was named for "top staffing companies compared" and "best recruitment agencies for hiring," and not for local, problem-first or a how-to-find-a-job query.
What kind of question loses the most
How often a firm was named, by query type
Share of queries in which the firm was named. 19 firms, 95 queries (38 category, 19 each of the others).
Deligatr Recruiting Agency AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
Problem-first questions were the weakest: "we need to fill accounting roles urgently" or "how to find temporary contract workers for my business" named a firm 31.6% of the time, 6 of 19. Only Robert Half, Beacon Hill, Cielo, Kelly Services, Michael Page and Hays appeared on one. This is the moment an employer is most ready to hire, and the firm that is named there gets the brief.
Comparison questions did best at 63.2%, partly because several of the firms in this sample are ones a "top firms compared" question would name by default.
Who got named instead, and where the answers came from
When a firm was not named, AI named someone else, usually a very large brand. Robert Half appeared as a named alternative in 23 of 95 answers, Korn Ferry in 18, Randstad in 12, ManpowerGroup in 10 and Adecco in 9. Insight Global was named in 8, TEKsystems in 7. Two names on that list are worth a note: ManpowerGroup was not in our sample, and Russell Reynolds Associates, named in 8 answers, was one of the two sites our crawler could not read. A firm does not need a scannable homepage to be named, but we cannot say what AI read instead.
The sources behind the answers were varied. Across 752 citations on 390 domains, Wikipedia was the biggest at 34 (4.5%), including its executive search and list-of-firms pages. People Managing People (28), Yelp (28), Near (22), Indeed (13), Instawork (12), Alpha Apex Group (12) and KORE1 (9) followed. The Yelp citations are the most specific: all 28 came from local-style queries, so for "near me" questions a review and listing profile does a lot of the work. Indeed was split between employer how-to-hire guides and candidate career advice.
1.3%
of all citations pointed to the firm's own website (10 of 752), measured by exact domain match
Deligatr Recruiting Agency AI Visibility Audit, October 3, 2026
Two further things stand out. First, 181 of 752 cited URLs (24.1%) had "best" or "top" in the address. That is a rough proxy for ranked-list articles, not an exact count, but it shows how much of the shortlist is built from lists. Several of the most-cited list publishers, including Near, Alpha Apex Group, KORE1, GoGloby and Talent MSH, are themselves in the hiring or staffing business. Employers asking AI who to hire are often reading a competitor's ranking.
Second, depth earned citations for firms that wrote it. Cowen Partners, a smaller search firm, was cited 7 times from its own site, including a page on how to find a world-class CEO. That is one example, not a rule, but it is what an answer-first page looks like.
The sample, and the entries that did not behave
Mostly large global and national brands. We chose well-known staffing and search firms, which likely flatters the average because small agencies are not in it.
Three sites were read as something else. Everforth Apex (apexsystems.com) and TEKsystems were classified as technology consulting and IT services businesses, and Jobot as an AI-powered job search platform. Their buyer queries were about enterprise IT consulting and job search, and none named the firm. Several other firms had one or more queries that drifted outside staffing: Korn Ferry, Insight Global, Heidrick & Struggles and Spencer Stuart each had a consulting or leadership-coaching query, and Adecco, Express Employment Professionals and Motion Recruitment each had a candidate-side query such as how to find a job. We left all of it in the table.
Excluding the three zeros, the remaining 16 firms averaged 56.3%. We report 47.4% as the headline because it is what the tool measured. But the reading problem is a finding of its own: if a homepage presents a firm as a consulting practice, an assistant will treat it as one.
Two sites could not be scanned. Kforce and Russell Reynolds returned too little for the tool to run an accurate audit.
How this compares with our earlier audit
In our earlier 29-company audit, recruiting and staffing was a group of two, Aerotek and Beacon Hill, averaging 40%. That was too small to say anything. This is a proper sample, 19 firms.
The two repeats are useful. Aerotek scored 40% both times. Beacon Hill scored 40% before and 60% now, and the mix of query types it was named on changed, so the questions were not identical between runs. The averages (40% on two firms, 47.4% on 19) are not comparable as a trend. What we can say is that a firm's score moves with the questions asked, which is why one reading tells you little.
What to do with this, if you run an agency
- Say what you are for in one plain sentence. "Contract and permanent IT staffing for mid-size US companies" is easy to place. "A leading global talent solutions partner" is not, and it can be read as consulting.
- Publish how you work and what you charge. Contingent or retained, temp markup or fee percentage, what happens if a hire leaves. Say what is true for you. If your site stays silent, a list article answers for you.
- Write for the vacancy, not the brand. Pages that answer "we need twelve warehouse workers in Ohio by month end" or "how do I hire a CFO" are what problem-first queries reach.
- Check the lists and profiles that name your competitors. Wikipedia, review profiles, directories and the ranked-list articles that appear for your niche. Make sure you are present and accurate. Do not fake reviews.
- Treat candidate-side reputation as part of trust. We have not measured how much weight AI gives employer-facing or candidate-facing reviews of an agency, but employers read them.
- Check whether your site can be read. Test what your security layer shows a plain automated visitor.
- Re-test regularly. AI answers change, and the Beacon Hill result shows a single run is a snapshot.
If you want the inbound work done as a program, see our AEO, GEO and SEO service for recruiting and staffing agencies. Winning employer clients also depends on reaching the people who hire directly, and we have a recruiting agency case study on how one specialist firm approached outbound. Email to hiring managers has its own rules, covered in our cold email compliance guide.
Book a free consultation and we will run your own constructed questions against live assistants and show you who is named instead of your agency. Inbound is $2,500 a month on monthly billing.
Book a consultationEvery firm we audited
Firm | Visibility | Appeared on | Top rival named instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cielo | 80% | Local, Category, Problem, Comparison | Korn Ferry |
| Korn Ferry | 80% | Local, Category x2, Comparison | Boston Consulting Group |
| Motion Recruitment | 80% | Local, Category x2, Comparison | TEKsystems |
| Robert Half | 80% | Category x2, Problem, Comparison | Insight Global |
| Beacon Hill | 60% | Local, Problem, Comparison | Robert Half |
| Express Employment Professionals | 60% | Local, Category, Comparison | PeopleReady |
| Heidrick & Struggles | 60% | Local, Category x2 | Korn Ferry |
| Kelly Services | 60% | Category x2, Problem | Randstad |
| Robert Walters | 60% | Category x2, Comparison | Michael Page |
| Spencer Stuart | 60% | Local, Category x2 | Korn Ferry |
| Adecco | 40% | Category, Comparison | Randstad |
| Aerotek | 40% | Local, Comparison | PeopleReady |
| Insight Global | 40% | Category, Comparison | Robert Half |
| Michael Page | 40% | Problem, Comparison | Korn Ferry |
| Randstad | 40% | Category, Comparison | Adecco |
| Hays | 20% | Problem | Robert Half |
| Everforth Apex | 0% | None | Accenture |
| Jobot | 0% | None | Jobright |
| TEKsystems | 0% | None | Accenture |
Not scanned (too little readable content): Kforce, Russell Reynolds. Everforth Apex, Jobot and TEKsystems were scanned but read as off-category (see above).
Check your own number
Every firm above was run through the same tool below. It takes about ninety seconds, and your agency's name is never in the query.
Do AI assistants recommend you?
Five buyer-style queries for your category, run through live AI search, show who gets named instead of you. Takes about ninety seconds.
Free. The full report arrives by email so the tab can close.
Methodology and honest limitations
What we did. On October 3, 2026 we ran the live audit tool that powers our free checker against a list of 22 entries. One was not a valid domain, leaving 21. Nineteen could be scanned and two could not. It was one run, five queries per firm, visibility measurement only, and the step-by-step method is in our audit documentation. A firm that disputes its result can ask us to re-run it.
The sample. We chose real, identifiable staffing and executive search firms, mostly large global and national brands. It is not a random sample and not a census. It likely flatters the average, because small and specialist agencies are not in it. A firm's score also depends on how our classifier read its homepage, and three scores here reflect off-category readings.
Own-domain share. We counted a citation as the firm's own when the cited domain exactly matched the firm's domain. That gave 10 of 752. The sources table counts every cited domain regardless of owner.
What it does not cover. Only the homepage was read, so a firm with a thin homepage and strong inner pages may be undercounted. Five queries per firm is a small sample of real buyer language, and some queries drifted toward consulting or candidate-side questions. Results come from one run on one day, and AI answers change over time. We did not test whether any firm pays for list or directory placement. The "best" or "top" count is a URL heuristic, not a content classification.
On advertising and email rules. Nothing here is legal advice. Rules on advertising, equal opportunity, email and candidate data differ by country and state.
FAQ
How visible are established staffing and executive search firms in AI answers?
Moderately, with a wide spread. Across the 19 firms we could scan, average visibility was 47.4% over 95 buyer queries and the median was 60%. Nine firms were named in two of five queries or fewer, three were not named at all, and none scored 100%.
Does this say anything about small recruiting agencies?
No. The sample is mostly large global and national staffing and executive search brands that we chose, not a random sample. Small and boutique agencies were not tested, and they are likely to fare worse on generic queries than this group did.
Why did three firms score zero?
In each case our tool read the homepage as something other than a staffing firm. Two were classified as technology consulting businesses and one as an AI-powered job search platform, so the buyer questions it wrote were about consulting and job search, and the firm was not named in any of them. It is a real finding about how a site can read, but it is also a limit of the audit.
Who did AI name instead?
The household names. Robert Half was named as an alternative in 23 of 95 answers, Korn Ferry in 18, Randstad in 12, ManpowerGroup in 10 and Adecco in 9.
Where does AI get its answers about recruiters?
Mostly from third parties. Across 752 citations on 390 domains, Wikipedia was the single biggest source at 34, followed by People Managing People, Yelp, Near, Indeed and Instawork. A firm's own website was only 1.3% of what was cited, and about one in four cited URLs had "best" or "top" in the address, a rough proxy for ranked-list articles.
Can a recruiting agency pay for a better result?
We would not count on it. Several ranked-list publishers in the citations sell leads or placement, and we cannot see how AI weighs that. A clear specialization, honest pages on how you work and what you charge, accurate profiles and genuine third-party mentions are the safer route.
Why could two sites not be scanned?
Our crawler could not read enough from Kforce and Russell Reynolds to run an accurate audit. We cannot tell from outside whether the same barrier stops the crawlers AI assistants use. Russell Reynolds was still named as an alternative in 8 of the 95 answers about other firms.
