About
Built by someone who kept watching the wrong businesses win.
Not on quality. On structure.
The competitor above them had clean schema, consistent listings, reviews somebody actually asked for, and mentions on sites the models trust. From the outside it looks like luck. From the inside it’s engineering.
Found First exists because a business can be the best in its category and still be invisible to the systems that now do the recommending. That is a solvable problem, and almost nobody local is working on it yet.
Who runs it
Found First is led by Jimmy Sewell. The background is full-stack growth marketing — paid media, CRM and marketing automation, e-commerce operations, SEO, and B2B prospecting — which turns out to be the right shape for this problem, because AI visibility isn’t one discipline. It’s technical structure, content, listings, reviews, and earned mentions all pulling in the same direction, and it falls apart if any one of them is treated as somebody else’s job.
Based in Chicago, originally from St. Louis, working Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. The 314 number is a cell that came along for the ride — there’s no St. Louis office and we won’t pretend there is.
Being straight about it
What we claim, and what we don’t.
One caught exaggeration discounts everything else, so this list is the whole of it.
We do claim
- Ranking in search and being named in AI answers are two different jobs, and most agencies are only doing the first.
- We measure AI visibility as a number and report on it monthly.
- We prove the problem with free evidence before selling anything.
- Every price is published.
- You own everything we build, during and after.
We never claim
- A guaranteed ranking or a guaranteed position in an AI answer.
- Any relationship with, or influence over, OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic.
- A specific revenue or lead multiple. We don’t know your close rate.
- To be the first or the only GEO agency. We aren’t, and it’s checkable.
- Client results we don’t yet have.
The honest part
There are no case studies on this site yet.
Found First is new. If you engage us, you’ll be among the first, and you should price that into your decision the same way we have.
That’s exactly why the diagnostic is free and why the first five clients get founding terms. We’d rather prove it on your business than show you a screenshot of someone else’s. When a client agrees to be named, their results will appear here — and not one day before.
How we sound
Like a competent specialist explaining something clearly to a smart person who happens not to know this particular field. Lead with the number, not the adjective. Cite the source. Name the trade-off first, because it’s the fastest way to be believed on everything after it. And never manufacture urgency — the urgency here is real, and adding “act now” makes true things sound false.
Start with evidence
See where you stand before you spend a dollar.
Ten real buying questions for your category and city, run through ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. You get the transcript and the scorecard. Free, and no call required.