im at the point where i need outside thinking. small b2b saas, around 50 long-form blog posts, decent backlinks (DR around 32), we rank ok in classic google for our money keywords. but we dont show up in chatgpt, perplexity, or claude when people ask about our category. our 3 main competitors all do.
id spent the last 4 months making content i thought was "AI-friendly". structured data, faq schemas, clear question-answer formatting up top, bulletpoint summaries. nothing moved. i ran the same prompt across 4 LLMs every monday for 12 weeks. competitors got cited 60-80% of the time. we got cited zero times in 12 weeks. zero. its honestly kind of embarrassing.
i tried a few hypotheses. first i thought it was authority, so we got 3 guest features and a podcast. no change. then i thought it was about being mentioned in third-party content, so we paid for a couple of comparison-style roundups. one mention started showing up but only in claude, not the others. then i thought maybe our content style is wrong, so i rewrote our top 5 pages in a more direct "answer first" voice. still nothing.
the thing thats killing me is i dont know if its a content issue, a brand mention issue, an authority issue, or just that the LLMs already locked in the top 3 in our category and we'd need to displace someone, which is a way harder problem.
for anyone who has actually moved a brand from "never cited" to "sometimes cited" by AI search, what was the thing that broke it open? was it volume of mentions in third-party content, was it a specific structural change to your pages, was it getting on a wikipedia list, was it adding a key data point or proprietary research no one else had? i need a concrete lever, not generic advice. willing to share more specifics if it helps diagnose