This firm went from the first five on 2 of 120 questions to 92 of 120, between 21 June 2026 and 22 September 2026. That is the lowest finish of the four runs, and the slowest: 16 days to the first citation, against 9 for the fastest.
Why this category is harder
The slowest to move and the most competitive, because the assistants prefer analyst pages and large consultancies for this category and will reach for those first.
When somebody asks an assistant which firm to use for a large technology programme, the assistant is cautious, and caution sends it to names it can defend: analyst write ups, well known consultancies and established publications. A mid sized firm is not competing for attention there. It is competing against the belief that a safe answer already exists.
The second difficulty is that the buying committee is several people with different questions, and most firms write for only one of them. The user asks whether it does the job. The person paying asks the total cost including implementation. The technical reviewer asks about integrations, data export and limits. The compliance reviewer asks where data lives and what the terms say. Three of those four were unanswered anywhere on this firm's site.
What worked anyway
Narrowing the question. The firm stopped trying to be named for the broad question and started answering narrow ones: a specific platform, a specific kind of migration, a specific industry and size of team. Those have fewer defenders, and they are what a real buyer asks second.
Publishing the parts nobody publishes. How long a piece of work actually takes, what it costs as a range, what usually goes wrong, and when not to hire anybody at all. Assistants quote that, because almost no competitor will write it down.
Making the documentation public. Technical documentation was read and cited more readily than any marketing page, because it is specific and it rarely exaggerates. For a services firm the equivalent is a published method: the actual steps, the actual artefacts, the actual decision points.
Accepting the losses. On the broadest questions the firm is still not in the first five, and chasing those was the least productive work in the whole run.
A worked example of narrowing
The firm's original target was a broad question about choosing a technology partner. It never ranked and was never named, because that question is answered from analyst material.
The replacement was a page answering how long a specific kind of platform migration takes for a team of a given size, with a realistic range, the four things that extend it, and the point at which the work is not worth doing. It was cited within weeks. The broad question is still lost. The narrow one produced enquiries, because the people asking it were already committed to the work.
The lesson we took into the product
A ceiling exists, and the category sets it rather than effort. Anybody promising you first place in AI answers for a competitive enterprise question is promising something they do not control. What can change is which questions you are in the running for at all, and this run moved that from 2 of 120 to 92 of 120.
What this run does not tell you
It does not tell you the ceiling is fixed at 92 of 120. It tells you that is where this firm reached in this period with this many pages. It also does not separate what the pages did from what the assistants did, and in this category the assistants changed noticeably during the period.
And it says nothing about deal quality. A narrow question produces fewer mentions and, in this firm's experience, better enquiries, but we measured mentions and not revenue.
Common questions about this run
Can I see the 120 questions?
Not yet, and that is a fair thing to hold against the numbers until we publish them. The sets were built and run by hand before this product existed, and they are being prepared for publication. Until they are, treat these figures as a vendor's own account. The scan on this site is free and it will give you your own number, which you do not have to take on trust.
Why should I believe a vendor reporting on its own client?
You should discount it, and so does every assistant we tested. That is why the most useful number in these studies is not a rate at all. It is the first citation: a named page, a named assistant, the question it was cited for, and 14 days between publishing and being quoted. A dated fact with a URL behind it survives scepticism in a way a percentage does not.
How much of this was the pages, and how much was the assistants changing?
We cannot separate the two with this data, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The assistants changed what they do during every one of these periods. What we can say is that the movement showed up first on the questions the new pages were written for, and that the first citation in each run was of a specific new page.
Would this work in my sector?
The method worked in all 4 sectors we tried it in, and the ceiling was different in each. The limit is set by who is already trusted for your category. If your questions resolve to government portals or large analyst firms, expect to do well on the buying questions and to keep losing the purely informational ones.
How long before anything moves?
The first citation of a new page arrived between 9 and 16 days after publishing across these 4 runs. A change in the overall rate takes longer, because a rate over 120 questions only moves when many questions move. Expect weeks for the first signal and months for the rate.
What would you do differently now?
Fix the existing site before publishing anything new. In the run below, an assistant searched a client's own site, found a headline figure that could not be true, and advised a buyer against them. The new pages were accurate and the old site around them was not, and the site is what got checked.
What to do first if you sell complex services
Write down the four questioners on your buying committee and check which of them your website speaks to. In most cases it is one. Then publish, for the narrowest service you genuinely lead on, a page giving a real timeline, a real cost range, what goes wrong, and when not to buy. That single page will do more than a rewrite of your homepage.
How this was counted
The tracked set is 120 questions, and that is the denominator under every number on this page. The questions are the ones a buyer in this sector actually types, and not one of them names the company. That rule is the whole measurement. A question that names the business gets a polite answer about the business, so it tells you about your prompt rather than about your position.
Each question was asked on 5 assistants, because they answer the same question differently on the same day from different sources. "Named" means the company appears anywhere in the answer. "In the first five" means it appears among the first five products the answer lists, which is the number that matters, because an assistant that names three or four options has no sixth place to give you.
Baseline reading: 21 June 2026. Current reading: 22 September 2026. Pages published in between: 190.
The four things we recorded for every question
- Whether the company was named at all, anywhere in the answer, including in a list rather than as a recommendation.
- Whether it was in the first five products named, and in what position.
- Every source the answer cited, by domain, tagged as official, the company's own site, a competitor's own site, a directory or listing, news, or a community thread.
- Whether the assistant actually ran a live search, asked directly and recorded as a count, because an answer given from memory and an answer given from a live search are two different measurements and averaging them produces a number that means nothing.
What this is, and what it is not
These runs were operated by hand, before this product existed, using the same method the product now runs on a schedule. They are our own results on our own clients, so read them as a vendor reporting its own work. The prompt sets are being prepared for publication so that anyone can repeat the run and check us.
They are also not a controlled experiment. Nobody ran a matched group that published nothing, so we cannot separate our work from everything else that happened in those months, including the assistants changing what they do. What the numbers show is that companies which did this work moved, not that nothing else could have moved them.