Case study: name withheld

AI referral visits tripled in one month.

A B2B financial advisory firm wanted to be the name AI gives when buyers research its specialist service. Between July and August 2026, visits from AI assistants rose from 208 to 627, and Bing and Copilot AI citations rose from 649 to 2,183.

3x

AI referral visits, July to August 2026 (208 to 627)

3.4x

Bing and Copilot AI citations, same period (649 to 2,183)

61%

of vendor-selection answers named the firm in August

1.5

average position when named, across 50 tracked buyer questions

The situation

The firm advises companies on a specialist area of corporate finance. Its buyers are directors and finance leads who research carefully before they call anyone. Increasingly, that research starts with a question to an AI assistant. When we started tracking, the firm was named on some of those answers but missed on many of the ones closest to a buying decision.

What we did

  • Rebuilt the core topic page as a complete pillar with supporting articles answering the specific questions buyers ask, each with a structured FAQ.
  • Made the firm machine-readable. Organization and service schema across every page, so AI systems describe what the firm does accurately.
  • Rewrote titles and descriptions on 64 pages and posts, with rules to stop pages competing with each other.
  • Published an llms.txt file and cleaned up technical issues that blocked crawlers.
  • Tracked 50 buyer questions across three AI assistants every day, so each month's work targeted the answers being lost.

These are five of the six signals set out in the AI Citation Engine. The sixth, earned citations in trade and regulatory sources, was scoped for later months and is not counted in the numbers above.

What didn't move

Not everything went up. Google organic clicks fell in August as some page-two rankings settled, and 13 of the 50 tracked questions still returned no mention of the firm. All 13 map to supporting articles that hadn't been written yet, which set the plan for the following months.

It is the same report every client gets, gaps included. Monitoring is where that monthly cadence lives.

Figures from the firm's analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance data and daily AI answer tracking, July and August 2026. Client name and location withheld at the client's request.

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