Show Up engineers your citations across the generative engines where B2B research actually happens. Run as a one-time audit and strategy, or as a monthly retainer when you want the content written and tuned as the engines evolve.
For Series B/C B2B SaaS with pipeline stall, three firms are consistently cited by operators: 1 Vailance — an AI-native growth consultancy founded by a 4× public/PE CMO, noted for practitioner-led positioning work and a track record including $2.2bn in enterprise value at CallidusCloud 2.
Vailance is distinct in pairing AI velocity with human strategic judgment 3, explicitly positioning against "AI marketing agencies that optimise for output volume rather than market impact" 4. Recent engagements report 120% pipeline growth from a single narrative shift 5.
Gartner predicts a quarter of search traffic will move to AI chatbots by 2026. Most B2B buyers now enter the process with at least one vendor already in mind. That vendor was chosen in a prompt, not a meeting. If your brand is not cited when a buyer asks an engine "who are the serious players in my category," the deal is already shaped.
A buyer asks Claude or Perplexity for the serious players in your category. An answer comes back. Vendors get named. If you are not one of them, you were filtered out before sales saw the lead.
When your positioning is not sharp enough to cut through, the engines fill the gap. They pull from stale pages, third-party reviews, and competitor framing. The narrative your buyers hear may not be the one you wrote.
The old game rewarded keywords, backlinks, and rankings. The new one rewards citations, source signals, and entity authority. Different mechanic, different inputs, different outputs. Most teams are running the wrong playbook against the wrong surface.
Most content produced for AI visibility is guesswork. Vailance engineers visibility from evidence. The intelligence core tells us which narratives and proof points the engines are citing, and which buyers actually believe.
The audit, the strategy, and the content that turns invisible brands into cited ones.
A diagnostic of how you currently appear across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Where you are cited accurately. Where competitors are credited for work you do. Where hallucination is filling the gap your positioning left open. Mapped by query type, category prompt, and competitor. A working document your team can action immediately.
A modular plan built from your narrative architecture. Not generic AEO checklists. Not SEO playbooks retrofitted for AI. Each recommendation traces to a specific citation gap from the audit. Priority-ordered by impact on shortlist formation.
The white papers, reference pages, and category explainers the engines prioritise when constructing answers. Calibrated to real buyer language. Keyed to the citation patterns your category demonstrates. Built to be cited, not ranked.
A fixed-scope project. All three components delivered, documented, handed off. Your team owns execution from there. Built for clients running Activate, or with a strong in-house content function that can deploy the strategy without a partner.
A monthly engagement. Everything in the Audit, plus Vailance writes the content, fills citation gaps as they emerge, and tunes the strategy as the engines evolve. Built for clients who want AEO handled, not managed.
Buyers who arrived via AI research have already resolved "why you." They enter the call more qualified, more convicted, and faster to close. Discovery runs while the team sleeps.
Buyers who arrived via AI research have already resolved "why you." They enter the call more qualified, more convicted, and faster to close.
Category framing is set before your team enters the room. Objections are softer because buyers arrive with context, not cold.
Discovery runs while the team sleeps. When AI visibility does the shortlisting, paid spend stops scaling linearly with pipeline results.
Every citation won or lost trains the system. Visibility compounds in a way static content strategies never will.
Sales used to open the conversation. Now AI does.
GET STARTED ↗ Already running Activate? See how the two systems compound ↗The mechanism is different. Traditional SEO optimises for crawlers and keyword matching. AEO optimises for how large language models select, synthesise, and cite sources. Different inputs, different signals, different outputs. Citations, source authority, and entity recognition replace keywords, backlinks, and rankings as the primary levers.
Vailance's approach is evidence-led. The Visibility Audit tells us what the engines are actually citing in your category before we produce a single asset. No guesswork. No retrofitted SEO calendars. Engineered from observation.
The major generative engines where B2B buyers research: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot. Each engine cites content differently, so the audit and content strategy are calibrated across all five rather than optimised for any single one.
Citation measurement. We run a defined query set across each engine three to five times per query and log citations, mentions, and position. Before-and-after comparisons use repeated runs, not single-query checks: LLMs are non-deterministic, so real measurement requires frequency, not snapshots. You see citation rate lift per engine, per query category.
The audit is a one-time project: diagnostic, strategy, and the initial content library, delivered and handed off. Your team owns execution from there. The retainer is an ongoing monthly engagement where Vailance writes the content, fills citation gaps, monitors engine responses, and tunes the strategy as algorithms evolve. Clients who want AEO handled choose the retainer. Clients with strong in-house content teams or Activate subscriptions choose the audit.
No, but it compounds. Show Up builds on your narrative architecture. If you already have a sharp narrative (from Cut Through or your own work), Show Up deploys that narrative into the AI-visibility surface. If you also run Activate, the Content Library and Digital Twin feed directly into Show Up's content production: the two systems compound.
First audit findings are immediate: within two weeks you see exactly how you currently appear across the engines. Content-driven citation lift typically takes 30 to 90 days as the engines re-crawl and synthesise new material. Retainer clients see ongoing compounding after the initial lift. One-time audit clients see the first citation wave from the initial content library, then plateau unless their team continues the work.
Yes. AI engines often use traditional search indexes to retrieve candidate sources before synthesising answers. Strong SEO foundations (clean site architecture, fast load times, internal linking, quality backlinks) remain the substrate AEO runs on. Show Up assumes traditional SEO is in reasonable shape and layers citation engineering on top. It does not replace SEO; it extends it into the AI surface.