A growing share of this fintech’s buyers were researching inside AI assistants — asking ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews to compare providers and shortlist options. The brand ranked perfectly well in classic search, but in those AI answers it simply wasn’t there. Competitors were being named as the source; it wasn’t.
Make the invisible measurable
The first problem was that no one could see the gap. AI answers feel unknowable, so the instinct is either to panic or to ignore them. We did neither: using Profound and Otterly.ai we tracked, prompt by prompt, which questions surfaced competitors, what those answers said, and — crucially — which sources they cited. That turned a vague anxiety into a concrete, trackable share-of-voice number we could actually move.
GEO is still SEO
The temptation with GEO is to chase a shortcut. There isn’t one. As the major providers keep saying, getting cited by an answer engine is earned the same way search visibility always has been: content a model can reach, parse and trust. So we closed the gap with fundamentals — clear, genuinely authoritative content answering the questions buyers were actually asking, clean semantic structure, and structured data so machines could understand exactly what each page was.
Because those are the same signals that drive classic rankings, the SEO and content work lifted both at once: AI citation share climbed, and organic sessions rose alongside it rather than at its expense.
The figures are illustrative of a representative engagement, and the client is not named. What generalises is the approach — make AI visibility measurable first, then earn it with the same fundamentals that have always earned search visibility, and track citation share as an ongoing metric, not a screenshot.
If competitors are being cited in AI answers where your brand isn’t, that gap is measurable and closable. Let’s start.