Estrategia · GEO
In February 2026, we asked four AI platforms the same question: “What’s the best online gestoría for self-employed workers in Spain?”
The top result on Gemini was Xolo — a company founded in Estonia in 2015, with a real but limited footprint in Spain, and without the track record of the domestic firms that have been operating in this market for years. It ranked above every Spanish competitor. Above firms with thousands of active clients and strong review scores.
This wasn’t a glitch. It was a signal.
A gestoría is a type of regulated administrative firm that exists only in Spain. It manages the tax and bureaucratic obligations of self-employed workers (autónomos) and small businesses: quarterly VAT returns, income tax filings, Social Security contributions, and dealings with Hacienda, Spain’s tax authority. Think of it as the intersection of a bookkeeper, a tax agent, and a compliance specialist — bundled into a monthly subscription.
Spain has 3.4 million registered autónomos — a record high as of May 2025. The majority are sole traders in services, navigating a complex tax system for the first time. This is a high-intent, high-volume search market: people looking for specific help, with genuine urgency, willing to pay a recurring fee to get it right.
That combination — fragmented supply, high search intent, complex terminology, and dozens of competing providers — makes the gestoría sector one of the clearest possible case studies for how GEO works in practice.
Four AI platforms, one question, four different answers
We ran the experiment across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, using clean sessions with no search history — replicating exactly the experience of a first-time user with no prior exposure to any of the brands.
| Platform | 1st | 2nd | 3rd |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini | Xolo | Taxfix/TaxScouts | Declarando |
| ChatGPT | Declarando | Xolo | Taxfix/TaxScouts |
| Perplexity | Taxfix/TaxScouts | Declarando | OnlyTax |
| Claude | Declarando | Quipu | Taxfix/TaxScouts |
Experiment conducted February 2026. Clean sessions, no search history. Query: “What’s the best online gestoría for self-employed workers in Spain?”
Two names appear across all four platforms: Declarando and Taxfix/TaxScouts. Xolo appears in three. These are the AI visibility leaders in this sector — the companies that exist, reliably, in the answer a potential customer receives before they have visited a single website.
What doesn’t appear on any platform is equally significant: Abaq, Cuéntica, Contasimple, Finutive, Mi Gestoría Online. Established firms. Real clients. Functioning products. Zero appearances — across four platforms, across multiple query variations.
Absence isn’t about quality. It’s about content architecture.
The natural assumption is that visibility correlates with size, budget, or brand recognition. The Xolo result breaks that assumption immediately.
Xolo has a limited presence in the Spanish market. What it has is content built precisely the way language models prefer to cite: concrete questions, direct answers, explicit comparisons. Its blog answers exactly what an autónomo types into ChatGPT before their first quarterly tax deadline.
Declarando and Taxfix/TaxScouts lead for the same reason — not because they outspend their competitors on advertising, but because they maintain active content that answers the specific questions AI platforms use to construct their responses: what expenses can a self-employed worker deduct, when does the quarterly VAT return need to be filed, who qualifies for the flat-rate Social Security discount for new registrants.
Language models build their answers from indexed public content. If that content doesn’t exist — or exists but isn’t structured to answer concrete questions — the model has nothing to cite. A well-ranked Google result does not automatically translate into AI visibility. They are different channels with different architectures.
The pattern that repeats across sectors
The gestoría market is a clean example of a dynamic that appears in any sector with these characteristics: multiple providers offering broadly similar services, high-intent searches driven by a specific life event or business decision, and complex terminology that creates genuine informational demand.
Professional services. Specialist software. Financial products. Legal services. In each of these categories, the firms that appear in AI recommendations are not necessarily the strongest operators. They are the ones that have built content AI can read, parse, and surface.
The invisible firms are not failing. Some have better products than the leaders on these lists. What they’re missing is content structured to answer the specific questions a user is about to ask — not just pages that describe what the company does.
This is the discipline of GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation. The practice of building content so that AI platforms can find it, understand it, and choose to surface it when a relevant question is asked.
The test any business can run today
Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity in a clean session — no history, no logged-in account — and type the question your best potential customer would ask before they know you exist.
Not your company name. The question.
If your firm doesn’t appear in the answer, that’s not a verdict on your product. It’s a diagnosis of your content architecture.