The marketing team at this B2B SaaS company had noticed a troubling pattern. Buyers who came in through organic search were increasingly arriving having already formed opinions about the category that didn't feature the client's brand. In discovery calls, prospects would mention competitors' names, cite specific features from competitor marketing, and occasionally reference content they'd encountered — none of which was the client's content. The conclusion that the team drew, which turned out to be correct, was that buyers were doing early-stage research through AI tools and encountering competitors there before ever running a Google search.
When they tested this directly — asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the questions their buyers would ask — the results were stark. Their brand appeared in none of the AI-generated answers. Three competitors appeared consistently. The client was invisible in exactly the discovery channel that was increasingly shaping buyer consideration sets before formal evaluation even began.
We ran a comprehensive audit of the client's AI visibility position before developing any recommendations. Over three weeks, we tested 40 queries relevant to the client's category across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — questions ranging from broad category-level queries to specific use-case questions to comparison and evaluation queries.
The client appeared in 0 of 40 tested queries. The three competitors that dominated AI citations appeared in a combined 78 of 120 responses (40 queries across three platforms). The gap was not marginal — it was complete.
The audit also revealed why. The competitors dominating AI citations had invested heavily in three areas where the client was weak. First, entity establishment — their Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, and LinkedIn profiles were complete, consistently described, and well-maintained. The client's profiles were sparse and inconsistent. Second, content structure — competitors' content was structured for direct answers, with clear headings, specific claims, and FAQ sections. The client's content was narrative-heavy and took multiple paragraphs to reach the point. Third, external presence — competitors had significant coverage in industry publications, frequent podcast appearances, and analyst mentions. The client had almost no external mentions from credible sources.
We built a programme structured around the three gaps identified in the audit: entity establishment, content restructuring, and external presence building. All three needed to run simultaneously — improving one without the others would produce limited results because AI citation authority is a compound signal.
Entity establishment work took three weeks. We completed and standardised the client's profiles across every relevant platform — Crunchbase, LinkedIn company page, G2, Capterra, AngelList, and five industry-specific directories. We rewrote every profile to use consistent language that clearly described the client's category, product, and target customer. We added the client's founder and key executives to speaker directories and thought leadership platforms. We updated the client's website About page to be explicit and specific about what the company does in language that an AI engine could confidently reference.
Content restructuring ran across the existing content library over four to six weeks. Every existing page had its structure assessed against citability criteria. High-traffic pages were restructured to lead with direct answers, headings were rewritten to be specific questions, and FAQ schema was added to every page that addressed question-format queries. We also built ten new pieces of content specifically designed for AI citation — comprehensive guides to the most commonly asked questions in the category, structured from the first paragraph to be the most direct and specific answer available anywhere.
Original research was the centrepiece of the external presence building. We surveyed 180 professionals in the client's target category about their biggest challenges, their evaluation criteria for solutions, and their technology adoption patterns. The resulting report was the most specific and credible data source available on the topic. It was pitched to and featured in eight industry publications, generating both backlinks and training data mentions that would eventually appear in AI model outputs.
Alongside the research, we secured founder appearances on five relevant industry podcasts over a six-month period. Each appearance was accompanied by show notes and a summary article on the host's website — additional text-format mentions that contributed to the AI citation footprint.
Three months into the programme, the client appeared in AI answers for the first time. Six months in, they appeared in 40+ distinct AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for relevant category queries. Brand mentions in AI-generated content had increased 3x from baseline. A new traffic category appeared in the analytics: AI referral traffic from Perplexity, which had begun citing the client's content and sending traffic to specific pages.
More significantly, the sales team noticed a change in the quality of discovery conversations. Prospects were arriving more familiar with the client's brand, more often having specifically sought it out rather than found it incidentally, and more frequently with context about specific capabilities that had come from AI-generated answers. The early-stage research problem that had triggered the engagement — prospects arriving already familiar with competitors but not with the client — began to reverse. The channel that buyers were increasingly using for initial research was now one where the client appeared consistently and credibly.
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