The firm had invested consistently in SEO and content marketing for five years. Their website ranked well for category terms. Organic traffic was strong. But when their managing director asked ChatGPT to recommend operations consulting firms for a mid-market manufacturing company (their exact ICP), their name didn't appear.
Insight GEO's initial audit confirmed the problem at scale. Across 22 buyer-intent prompts run through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, the firm appeared in 4. Their nearest competitor appeared in 17. A second competitor appeared in 11. From an AI buyer research perspective, the firm essentially didn't exist.
This mattered because 40%+ of their target buyers, senior operations and supply chain leaders at mid-market companies, were using AI tools for initial vendor research before ever contacting a firm directly.
Insight GEO ran a full AI visibility audit: 22 buyer prompts across all four major LLMs, scored by topic, mapped against competitors, and ranked by improvement opportunity and projected time-to-fix.
The audit identified three root causes of low AI visibility: thin topic coverage on specific practice area pages (AI couldn't find authoritative content to cite), lack of structured FAQ content that LLMs prefer to pull from, and no external citation authority: the firm's expertise wasn't referenced by third-party sources that AI models trust.
Insight Media Labs implemented the ranked recommendations over 90 days: expanded practice area content with specific, citable claims; added structured FAQ sections to key pages; and secured editorial placement in two industry publications that LLMs regularly cite as authoritative sources for operations and supply chain content.
At 90 days, Insight GEO's monitoring showed the firm appearing in 14 of 22 buyer prompts — a 250% increase in AI mention rate. Share of voice against category competitors climbed from 8% to 34%. Their GEO Grade moved from C+ to A-.
The firm has since made AI visibility a standing monthly metric on their marketing dashboard alongside organic traffic and lead volume. Their managing director credited the program with three inbound inquiries in Q2 where the prospect referenced "finding them through AI research" as part of their outreach.
"We had no idea this was something we should be measuring. We thought our SEO was strong, and it was — but AI is a completely different system. Insight GEO showed us the gap and then closed it."