This AI-Powered Company is on a Mission to Help Franchisees Market Their Brand Across Multiple Locations

When a national or international franchise brand creates a marketing campaign, it doesn’t always help each individual location on a Main Street in any given town rank among other local businesses, answer a one-star review, or these days especially, show up when someone asks an AI assistant for the nearest option.

Marketing at the local level is crucial for franchisees, but can also be challenging. This is the gap SOCi has been filling since the company was founded in San Diego in 2012. Today, SOCi is the go-to local marketing service for franchisees, built on AI-powered agents—called Genius Agents—that are brand trained and execute continuously on local search, social, and reputation work at every location inside the guardrails that corporate sets once.

So far, the formula is working. SOCi has ranked #1 in the marketing products/services category on Entrepreneur’s 2026 list of Top Franchise Suppliers List. It’s the second year in a row that SOCi has claimed the top spot in its category, and it has spent seven straight years in the top three.

To create this year’s list, we conducted our annual survey of franchisors, pulling from 1,000+ responses. More than 180 suppliers are ranked across 13 different categories.

From emerging franchisors to well-established brands, respondents identified which suppliers they work with and then rated their satisfaction with them in areas of quality, cost, and value.

Each supplier received a score based on the survey results and was ranked within its respective category. This year, more than 75 franchise brands reported using SOCi’s services, giving it an average rating of 4.57 out of 5.

“SOCi has been a tremendous partner … helping our franchise owners strengthen their local presence while maintaining brand consistency across our system,” one SOCi client told Entrepreneur. “Their platform, reporting, and strategic support empower our owners to connect more effectively with [customers], while giving our support center the visibility and tools needed to coach, support, and drive stronger local marketing performance across the network.”

Redefining how multi-location enterprises achieve local and AI search visibility

The SOCi team says it has been hard at work and reached a new scale this year: More than 412,000 brand-trained Genius Agents are now deployed in production, up 37% in the most recent quarter alone, executing 27 million+ localized marketing tasks across more than 3 million managed locations and eliminating more than 5 million hours of manual marketing work.

“We also expanded what those agents do without human execution,” explains Afif Khoury,  founder and CEO of SOCi. “The local search, social, and reputation agents drew on three skills last year and draw on 10 today, with five more on track to launch by the end of 2026. That more than triples the range of local marketing work that runs autonomously and puts SOCi on pace to close the year at five times last year’s capability.”

Using SOCi’s AI agents, Rita’s Italian Ice reached a 100% review response rate across 550-plus locations while cutting time spent on reviews by 93%. SOCi says another client, Liberty Tax, moved from 60% to 90% of its 2,200-plus locations appearing in the Google local 3-pack.

“Every quarter, we expand what the agents can execute, because the discovery landscape keeps shifting and no franchisee should have to keep up with it on their own,” Khoury says. “That is the commitment we care most about: a franchise brand should never have to choose between brand consistency and local relevance, or between growth and headcount.”

Click here to learn more about SOCi and to find out if this supplier is right for you.