Insights / 02 Case notes
From invisible to cited first in 90 days
How a home-services company went from zero AI mentions to the first name in the answer.
When this project started, the company was named zero times across 40 buying questions in its category. Three competitors — smaller, with fewer services — appeared in almost every answer. The audit made the reason obvious: the assistants had nothing to cite.
Week one: the citation trail
We traced every source the assistants used to justify the competitors. Two directories, one local news roundup and the competitors’ own FAQ pages carried almost all the weight. None of them mentioned our client.
Weeks two to eight: give the model facts
Service pages were rebuilt around direct answers — price ranges, service areas, response times — with schema on every page. In parallel, the team corrected the directory listings and earned placement in the sources the assistants already trusted.
Day 90
The company now appears in the first response for its primary service questions. The best signal came from the intake notes: new callers saying they had “asked ChatGPT”.