Capability
Being named in the answer, not just ranked beneath it.
Prospective clients now ask ChatGPT and Google for a recommendation, and a few companies get named. Our 90-day sprint works the specific levers that decide whether yours is one of them — for the clients you actually want. Here is what determines that, what we can measure, and what nobody can promise.
01The journey changed
Five surfaces now stand between a question and a phone call.
A decade of B2B marketing assumed the buyer would see a list. Increasingly they see a paragraph, and the companies inside that paragraph are the only ones in the running.
01
Google's AI answer
Google now writes an answer at the top of the page for most business questions. Your listing is still below it. Fewer people scroll that far.
02
Google AI Mode
A chat version of Google, built into search. The follow-up questions happen inside Google now, so the only companies in the conversation are the ones Google pulls from.
03
ChatGPT and Gemini
Buyers ask them, in plain words, which provider to call. They answer with two or three names — or a directory. If you are not one of the names, you are not on the shortlist.
04
Google Maps
Still where people with an urgent problem go, and still the most common source these tools use when someone asks for a provider near a town.
05
The regular blue links
Not dead. This is where the AI answers get their information, which is why the site still has to be strong — it just is not the finish line anymore.
02Before and after
The same buyer, two different paths.
How buyers used to find you
- 1
Someone searches for your service and their town
- 2
They see a map and a list of company websites
- 3
They open three or four of them
- 4
They call the company whose page answered their question
Rank on that page and the phone rang. That is what your SEO investment was buying.
How they find you now
- 1
They ask Google or ChatGPT the question in plain words
- 2
They get one written answer at the top of the page
- 3
The answer names two or three companies, or a directory
- 4
They look up one of those companies by name and reach out
The list you rank on now sits below the answer, and often goes unread. Being named in the answer is the new shortlist — and it is what the 90-day sprint is built to earn.
03How the answer is assembled
Generated answers are built from sources, not from opinion.
When someone asks an assistant for help finding a managed IT provider in Middlesex County, the system typically retrieves a small set of sources, reads them, and composes an answer that cites a few. The retrieval step is the part that decides whether a company exists in that conversation.
What gets retrieved skews heavily toward pages that already rank, entities described consistently across the web, and third-party sources that aggregate providers. Directories therefore do well — which is exactly the dynamic companies have been fighting in organic search for fifteen years.
The composition step rewards clarity. A page that states plainly what the company handles, where, and for whom is easy to quote. A page that opens with three paragraphs of throat-clearing is not.
None of this is mystical, and none of it is guaranteed. It is a retrieval problem with familiar inputs and unfamiliar output variance.
04What we work on
Six levers a company can actually influence.
Every one of these also improves conventional search performance. That is deliberate: we do not recommend work whose only justification is a surface nobody can measure precisely.
Entity clarity
One consistent description of the company, its subject-matter experts, offices and service lines across the site, directories and structured data.
Extractable answers
Pages that answer the actual question in plain language near the top, rather than burying it under an introduction.
Citation footprint
Presence on the third-party sources — directories, associations, legitimate publications — these systems disproportionately draw from.
Attributed expertise
Content credited to named subject-matter experts with verifiable credentials, so a model has something specific to attach authority to.
Technical accessibility
Crawlable, renderable pages and structured data, so nothing depends on a system executing your JavaScript correctly.
Local grounding
Consistent New Jersey geography signals, since most prompts a company cares about are implicitly local.
05Measurement
What an AI visibility report actually contains.
We define a prompt set with the company — the questions a prospective client would plausibly put to an assistant, written by service line and by county — and sample it on a fixed schedule across the assistants your clients plausibly use. For each prompt we record whether the company is named, who was named instead, and which source produced the citation.
Alongside it we track which of your commercial queries now return an AI Overview or resolve inside AI Mode, and whether your pages are cited within them. That is the number most companies are feeling and cannot currently see.
What we can measure
- Whether a defined prompt set names your company
- Which sources produced each citation
- Which of your commercial queries now return a generated answer
- Movement in mentions over time, sampled on a schedule
What we cannot
- Whether any individual client used an assistant
- The exact share of leads originating in AI answers
- A precise click loss attributable to that answer
- A guaranteed position or citation in any given answer
06Honest limits
What we will not tell you about AI search.
- That there is a known ranking algorithm for generated answers. There is not a published one.
- That a specific volume of your leads currently originates from an assistant. Attribution here is incomplete across every analytics platform.
- That a new content format or markup type guarantees citation.
- That traditional SEO no longer matters. The evidence points firmly the other way.
07Questions
Common questions about AI visibility.
Next step
Get recommended by AI for the clients you actually want.
In 90 days we identify the searches and questions your buyers ask, get your company named across Google and AI search, and fix the buyer journey that turns that visibility into qualified leads.