u/AdditionalYam6702

asking because i am trying to work out how bad our situation actually is. we are about eighteen months behind where we should be on this. i can see it clearly now. competitors who started building citation authority eighteen months ago are sitting at 25 to 30% citation share. we are at 8% after five months of serious work. the gap is real and it is compounding. every month they are in ai search answers and we are not is another month of customer journeys being shaped without us in the picture. what i cannot quantify is how much that delay has actually cost in revenue terms. i can trace specific lost deals. i cannot trace the people who never found us and never became a lost deal because they never got far enough to be in our pipeline at all. that invisible loss is the one that bothers me most. been trying to close the gap as fast as i can. got to 8% alone.

i am going to be direct because i do not have time to be anything else right now. i need to make a decision about a GEO agency this week. how long did it take to see measurable movement in citation share. what did the reporting look like and did it connect to outcomes you actually cared about as a business. i am specifically asking about finance or fintech brands if possible because the regulated industry context changes things significantly. compliance constraints, the specific publications that matter, the type of content that gets cited in financial queries .

kids notice everything don't they.

I was doing my weekly citation tracking for Astra on a Sunday morning. she wandered in with her cereal and climbed on the sofa next to me and just watched me for a bit.

then she said "daddy why do you look sad at your computer on the weekends too."

I didn't have a good answer.

tried to explain it. said something like "there's this thing where when people ask a robot a question our company doesn't come up in the answer and I'm trying to fix it." she thought about it for a second and said "why doesn't the robot like you."

and I just. sat with that for a minute.

why doesn't the robot like us.

the actual answer is complicated. Astra doesn't have enough mentions in the publications that AI models weight as authoritative. our content isn't structured in a way that gets pulled into generative responses consistently. our competitors have spent longer building the kind of third party credibility that AI treats as a trust signal.

but to a seven year old and honestly to a lot of customers making decisions it just looks like the robot doesn't like you. and that's the perception that costs you business.

we're at 8% citation share. been building it myself for months. it's not enough and I know it.